Radio Replay - 27th July 2014

 
Could ghosts be 3D psychic recordings? 

 

Are humans the descendants of apes genetically modified by ancient astronauts? 

 

Was the Rendlesham Forest incident really a mind control experiment? 

 

Just some of the topics touched on in this interesting discussion.

The Welsh Roswell: Did A UFO Crash In North Wales In 1974? - Richard's Room 101

What has become known in UFO circles as the “Welsh Roswell” or Berwyn Mountain incident splits the UFO research community into two distinct camps, those who believe that an alien spacecraft crashed on the Mountain range and those who believe the seemingly out-of-this-world events can be explained by a combination of natural phenomena and the popularity of shows such as the X-Files which feed the public’s need to believe in the unexplained. What is not in any doubt is that something happened on the Berwyn Mountain, North Wales on the night of January 20, 1974. The events on the mountain range were witnessed by the whole community. Police Constable Gwilym Owen stated, “there was a great roar and a bang. The Sky lit up over the mountains. The colour was yellowish but other people in the valley described seeing blue light.” 

   

Annie Williams who lives in the nearby town of Llandrillo told investigators about what she witnessed that January night. “I saw this bright light hanging in the sky,” she said. 

   

“It had a long fiery tale which seemed to be motionless for several minuets, going dim and then very brilliant, like a dormant fire which keeps coming to life. It would have been like an electric light bulb in shape, except that it seemed to have rough edges. Then fell somewhere behind my bungalow, and the earth shook.”

 

   

Other witnesses also reported the ground shaking as if something had crashed into the side of the mountain. David Hughes of the local village post office at Ysbyty Ifan reported that “The whole house shook violently and suddenly. It began quite suddenly, lasted for a few seconds, then stopped just as suddenly.” 

    

Hundreds of locals fearing a plane had crashed on the mountain phoned the emergency services, and within an hour police were searching the mountain. Five days after these mysterious events, on January 25, 1974, it was reported in the British press that an RAF mountain rescue team had also been dispatched to the area, but allegedly found nothing. One member of the public who heard an explosion and was convinced something had crashed into the mountain was district nurse Pat Evans. Thinking that a plane had crashed after contacting Colwyn Bay police she made her way up the mountain to offer assistance to the survivors while they waited for the emergency services to arrive. Instead of finding a crashed plane, however, she saw a bright ball of red light on the mountainside.

   

“There were no flames shooting or anything like that. It was very uniform; round in shape … it was a flat round”. As she watched, she observed the light change in colour from red to yellow and then white. Smaller “fairy lights” could be seen nearby. Too far away to reach on foot, the nurse turned back to head home, puzzled by what she had seen. 

    

 After the initial frenzy of media interest, the story gradually died down and was almost forgotten about, until the mid-Nineties when the Roswell UFO crash was approaching its 50th anniversary and the alien autopsy hoax was generating new interest in an old topic.

     

Alien bodies and Wreckage 

In 1996 retired police sergeant Tony Dodd published in UFO Magazine an account of a man who claimed he was in the British Army at the time of the Berwyn Mountain crash. According to this anonymous whistleblower in January 1974 his unit “received orders to proceed with speed towards North Wales.” After arriving at Llangollen, North Wales on the evening of January 20, Dodd’s source noticed a great deal of “ground and air” activity in the area. “We, that is myself and four others, were ordered to go to Llandderfel and were under strict orders not to stop for any civilians.” 

    

Upon arriving in the small Welsh village his team was then ordered to load two large oblong boxes into their vehicles and to take them to the Chemical and Biological Defence Establishment at Porton Down in Wiltshire, England. Warned not to look inside, some hours later they arrived at Porton Down and delivered the mysterious cargo. 

      

It is then alleged that the staff at Porton Down opened the boxes still within sight of Dodd’s informant and others. Inside we are told were the remains of two alien beings “five to six feet tall” which had been put inside “decontamination suits.” The Porton Down staff removed the suits, revealing creatures to be “so thin they looked almost skeletal with a covering skin.”

     

The Army source also told Dodd, “Although I did not see a craft at the scene of the recovery, I was informed that a large craft had crashed and was recovered by other military units.” Even more bizarre was this former Army man’s claims that he was told by others in his unit that they had also delivered extraterrestrial beings to Porton Down, but that these creatures were “still alive.” 

    

While the claims of Dodd’s British Army source have never been proven to have really occurred, it is interesting at least that someone that nobody disputes investigated the UFO phenomenon for the British Government, Nick Pope, wrote a science fiction novel, Operation Thunder Child, in which alien creatures are taken for study at Porton Down. “In any contact with an extraterrestrial civilisation the key strategic objective would be to open lines of communication and facilitate peaceful contact. Secondary objectives would include information exchange, with a particular emphasis on science and technology,” Nick Pope told me in an interview for my Sci-Fi Worlds column in 2009.

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Could There Be An Alien Base Inside The Bermuda Triangle? - Richard's Room 101

The Bermuda Triangle, sometimes known as the “Devil’s Triangle”, is a triangular area of the north-western Atlantic Ocean bounded by Bermuda, Puerto Rico, and a point near Melbourne, Florida, where famously numerous ships and aircraft have mysteriously disappeared throughout the ages. Since records began in 1851, it is estimated that an amazing 8,127 people have been lost in the Bermuda Triangle. However, perhaps the most intriguing and famous disappearance of all, occurred just after WWII on December 5, 1945, when an entire squadron of aircraft vanished without a trace and no clue as to what happened to them. Of course, this was the infamous Flight 19, which, more than any other case, brought the triangle into popular consciousness, sparking all kinds of explanations. The strangest and most interesting is the theory that they were abducted by aliens who have a base somewhere in the triangle, interesting because the alien/UFO theory was popularised by Stephen Spielberg in his 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

    

While there could be a rational explanation for the disappearance of Flight 19, it is worth remembering that Lt. Charles Taylor was exonerated in 1947 by the Board for Correction of Naval Records, at the request of his mother, in regard to “responsibility for loss of lives and naval aircraft” and that the conclusion of the US Navy’s report was changed to “cause unknown”. 

  

The earliest suggestion that Flight 19 was anything other than just an accident, that this author has seen, came in the form of a “Letter to the editor” from one “Edward R. Walker of Colorado” in the August 1946 issue of Amazing Stories magazine. The letter shows that almost immediately after the disappearance of Flight 19, people were already beginning to speculate that the incident was more than just the result of pilot error due to poor weather. In his letter Walker writes:

   

“A couple months ago I read another AP dispatch about SIX NAVY PLANES disappearing ALL AT ONE TIME off the coast of Florida. Hundreds of hours were spent searching for a trace of them but none was found. Wish I had cut this out for you also, but you can verify that yourself. This is one of the strangest happenings that I have ever heard of in my lifetime. Even if they had flown over a carpet on anti-aircraft fire one or two would have gotten through. As I remember the article it wasn’t even storming.”

   

In his response to Walker’s letter the editor, Ray Palmer, who went on to become the editor of Fate magazine, not only agreed that something unexplained had happened to Flight 19 but also all but accused the US Navy of a cover-up:

   

 “About those Navy planes, now you’ve got something! As we remember it, search planes also failed to come back. Not a sign, not a message, just instant disappearance. And no fuss about it since, just official forgetfulness. Your EDITOR would like to KNOW what happened, because it wasn’t anything ordinary.”

   

In his book Berlitz also considered more esoteric and paranormal possibilities to explain the disappearances inside the triangle, including chapters on space and time warps, energy devices left behind from an advanced lost civilization, as well as extraterrestrials and even cryptoterrestrials: 

   

“Lacking a logical and readily acceptable explanation, independent researchers concerned with the disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle have gone even further afield — some to explanations based on exceptions to natural law, others to suggestions of interdimensional changeover through a passageway equivalent to a “hole in the sky” (which aircraft can enter but not leave), others believe the disappearances are engineered by entities from inner or outer space, while still others offer theories offer a theory or combinations of theories that the phenomenon may be essentially caused by still functioning man-made power complexes belonging to a science considerably older than and very different to ours.” 

   

 According to most triangle researchers, Christopher Columbus was probably the first person to document allegedly strange phenomena in the area. On October 11, 1492, the eve of discovering the New World, Columbus reports that he and his crew observed a mysterious light moving strangely up and down in the evening sky, appearing and quickly disappearing several times that night. Columbus wrote in his log:

   

“The land was first seen by a sailor called Rodrigo de Triana, although the Admiral at ten o’clock that evening standing on the quarter-deck saw a light, but so small a body that he could not affirm it to be land; calling to Pero Gutierrez, groom of the King’s wardrobe, he told him he saw a light, and bid him look that way, which he did and saw it; he did the same to Rodrigo Sanchez of Segovia, whom the King and Queen had sent with the squadron as comptroller, but he was unable to see it from his situation. The Admiral again perceived it once or twice, appearing like the light of a wax candle moving up and down, which some thought an indication of land. But the Admiral held it for certain that land was near…”

 

   

Whatever Columbus and his crew saw that historic night is probably impossible to know for sure now. In that limited sense, at least, the odd light is a true UFO in that it will probably always be unidentified. Perhaps more interesting, though, are the bizarre compass readings Columbus also recorded in the triangle.

   

Today, the triangle is supposedly one of only two places in the world, the other being the Dragon’s Sea in the Pacific, in which there is an unusual level of magnetic interference that can adversely affect compass readings. Whether paranormal or not, this magnetic interference is definitely interesting. Many have speculated that UFOs may be using some form of electromagnetic propulsion. Perhaps there could be a link of some kind between the magnetic interference, UFO sightings, and the mysterious disappearances in the triangle? 

   

Doctor Who fans will remember “The Sea Devils” a classic 1972 Jon Pertwee story written by Malcolm Hulke, the plot of which is very reminiscent of the triangle mystery. The story involves the Third Doctor and his companion Joe Grant investigating the mysterious disappearance of ships off the English South Coast and the discovery that an ancient race of amphibious reptiles, operating from a deep underwater base is responsible. 

   

Science fiction is filled with interesting storylines that parallel mysteries like the Bermuda Triangle, but is it possible that there really could be another civilization, of any kind, sharing the planet with us, living beneath the waves in seclusion? 

  

Amazingly, it is true that we actually know more about the surface of the Moon than we do about the bottom of our own oceans. In theory, at least, it is possible that anything could be down there hidden beneath the depths. What's more, making things more interesting, about half of all UFO sightings are said to take place near large bodies of water. 

   

In Invisible Residents: The Reality of Underwater UFOs (1970), renowned zoologist, Ivan T. Sanderson hypothesized that an advanced aquatic non-human civilization may have evolved right here on the Earth. This parallel, aquatic civilization could be twice as old as mankind, Sanderson proposes, and may well have developed space flight long before us. Sanderson even goes as far as suggesting that such a civilization could be behind many of the mysterious disappearances in the triangle as well as UFO sightings. Interestingly, more recently Sanderson’s ideas have been echoed somewhat in Mac Tonnies’ last book before his untimely passing in 2009 The Cryptoterrestrials. The year before his death, I had the privilege of interviewing Tonnies about his cryptoterrestrial hypothesis that we are sharing this world with another indigenous intelligent species: 

   

“I’m fascinated by accounts of apparent UFO occupants and have been rethinking who or what we might be dealing with. I’m of the opinion that the extraterrestrial interpretation is incomplete. Could we be interacting with indigenous humanoids? That’s the question I’m posing in the book I’m writing. Time will tell if it.” 

  

While the ETH or extraterrestrial hypothesis has become synonymous with the UFO phenomenon in popular culture, many serious UFO researchers give the cryptoterrestrial hypothesis equal kudos. In 2009 in an interview for my Sci-Fi Worlds blog, I asked former MoD UFO investigator Nick Pope about Doctor Who’s Sea Devils and what he thought about the possibility that we humans are sharing the planet with another intelligent Earth species: “Well, I hope these monsters are brought back at some stage! I reference the cryptoterrestrial hypothesis a fair bit in my first sci-fi novel, Operation Thunder Child. There are plenty of USO (Unidentified Submerged Object) reports and many UFO sightings where an object is seen over water, so who knows? I’m not hugely attracted to the cryptoterrestrial hypothesis, but I certainly can’t rule it out. And as the saying goes, we arguably know less about the deep ocean than we do about the Moon or Mars.” 

   

Richard Freeman, who is a researcher for the Centre for Fortean Zoology (CFZ), the only full-time scientific organisation dedicated to the study of unknown species of animals, went also agreed that extraterrestrial hypothesis needed to be considered when I interviewed him in 2009: “I have never bought the extraterrestrial hypothesis. The so-called ‘aliens’ are generally too humanoid looking to have evolved on another biosphere. If ‘alien’ encounters are objective events, and that’s a big if, I think the creatures are coming through time or dimensions rather than from outer space. There seems to be a strange analogue with fairy lore as well.” 

   

Another possibility, of course, could be that the planet has somehow been covertly colonised by an extraterrestrial civilization from another solar system. In Unearthly Disclosure (2000), best-selling author Timothy Good disclosed information given to him by “a senior reporter in Washington, DC,” who, in turn, received it from “a senior US Air Force officer”, about the existence of extraterrestrial bases on the Earth. Good writes: “According to the officer, aliens have been coming to Earth for a very long time. Following the Second World War, they began to establish permanent bases here, in Australia, the Caribbean, the Pacific Ocean, the Soviet Union and in the United States.” 

   

If extraterrestrials are really coming to Earth from another solar system, it would probably make sense that they would establish such bases to save them continue making the long voyage back and forth home. Also, the reference to the Caribbean is intriguing because that is where part of the Bermuda Triangle is located. 

   

However, whether from this world or another, where better to build an impenetrable, covert base than beneath the oceans of the world. The Bermuda Triangle, in particular, might also make a good location for such a base because of the volcanic activity there, which could be used to generate geothermal electricity as a power source.

  

The biggest problem with the alien base theory, of course, is like the wreckage of the missing planes and ships, why hasn’t it been found by the many detailed searches inside the triangle? Perhaps instead of a base, the Bermuda Triangle is the location of a “wormhole” to another world. 

   

In his book, another possibility Berlitz considered was that there could be a “vortex” or “portal” somewhere in the triangle which aliens from another planet or dimension are using as a bridge or gateway to Earth. An outrageous theory back in 1974 when The Bermuda Triangle was first published. 

   

Today, however, serious scientists regularly discuss the possibility of other dimensions and “wormholes” in books and on scientific documentaries for TV. In the bestselling book Hyperspace Michio Kaku refers to Flight 19 and the Bermuda Triangle: 

   

“Ever since Flight 19, a group of U.S. military torpedo bombers, vanished in the Caribbean 30 years ago, mystery writers too have used higher dimensions as a convenient solution to the puzzle of the Bermuda Triangle, or Devil’s Triangle. Some have conjectured that airplanes and ships disappearing in the Bermuda Triangle actually entered some sort of passageway to another world.” 

  

The internationally acclaimed physicist also explains in his book how such a “passageway” could work. Comparing space travellers to flatworms living on an apple, Kaku writes: 

   

“It’s obvious to these worms that their world, which they call Appleworld, is flat and two dimensional, like themselves. One worm, however, named Columbus, is obsessed by the notion that Appleworld is somehow finite and curved in something he calls the third demission. He even invents two new words, up and down, to describe motion in this invisible third dimension … By burrowing into the apple, he can carve a tunnel, creating a convenient shortcut to distant lands. These tunnels, which considerably reduce the time and discomfort of a long journey, he calls wormholes. They demonstrate that the shortest path between two points is not necessary a straight line, as he’s been taught, but a wormhole.” 

   

Perhaps the disappearance of Flight 19 and other planes and ships inside the Bermuda Triangle can be explained away by more mundane explanations, such as intense weather conditions and human error, but until we more fully explore the bottom of the world’s oceans we have no way of knowing for sure what could be down there.

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The Betty Hill Star Map - Richard's Room 101

On the night of 19/20 September 1961, on their way home to Portsmouth, New Hampshire from a short break in Canada, something happened to Betty and Barney Hill that began a new controversy in UFO research that continues even today. While modern polls show that as many as four million Americans could believe they might have been abducted by aliens, back in 1966 when the first book detailing the Hill case The Interrupted Journey was first published, the New England couple’s claims of alien contact were almost unheard of. There had been the famous Contactees of the 1950s, men and women who claimed they had been visited by the human-looking occupants of flying saucers with warnings about nuclear war and environmental concerns. But the experiences of the Hills were completely different, reporting beings that were obviously not human, and had no such messages.

   

Instead under hypothesis, the Hills told of how they were kidnapped and experimented on by short humanoid beings aboard a “cigar-shaped” craft that had pursued the couple that September night as they traveled home on Route 3 between Lancaster and Concord. The alien abduction phenomenon was born. 

    

There are two major explanations often given to explain the Hills’ recollections under hypnosis. The first offered by some psychiatrists is that the Hills’ abduction experience was a hallucination brought on by the stress of being an interracial couple during the end of the segregation era in the United States. But this explanation was discounted by Betty Hill, who said the couple’s interracial marriage caused no significant problems with their friends or family. This was echoed by Dr. Simon, who also thought that the Hills’ interracial marriage didn’t influence the couple’s abduction account in any way. 

    

In 1990 Martin Kottmeyer suggested in his article “Entirely Unpredisposed: The Cultural Background of UFO Abduction Reports “ that Barney’s account of his abduction experience under hypnosis might have been influenced by an episode of the popular science fiction anthology series The Outer Limits, entitled “The Bellero Shield”, which was broadcast twelve days before Barney’s first hypnotic session. This episode featured an alien being with large wraparound eyes reminiscent of the eyes of the alien beings described by Barney under hypnosis. In his article, Kottmeyer wrote: 

   

 “Wraparound eyes are an extreme rarity in science fiction films. I know of only one instance. They appeared on the alien of an episode of an old TV series The Outer Limits entitled “The Bellero Shield”. A person familiar with Barney’s sketch in “The Interrupted Journey” and the sketch done in collaboration with the artist David Baker will find a “frisson” of “déjà vu” creeping up his spine when seeing this episode. The resemblance is much abetted by an absence of ears, hair, and nose on both aliens. Could it be by chance? Consider this: Barney first described and drew the wraparound eyes during the hypnosis session dated 22 February 1964. “The Bellero Shield” was first broadcast on 10 February 1964. Only twelve days separate the two instances. If the identification is admitted, the commonness of wraparound eyes in the abduction literature falls to cultural forces.” (Entirely Unpredisposed: The Cultural Background of UFO Abduction Reports, Martin S. Kottmeyer)

     

When asked about The Outer Limits TV series Betty claimed to have “never heard of it”. Kottmeyer also pointed out that the medical tests the Hills described were reminiscent of scenes in the 1953 science fiction film, Invaders from Mars. 

   

Clearly, there are superficial similarities between the ‘Bellero alien’ from The Outer Limits episode and the oval-headed beings described by Barney and Betty, but there are significant differences between the two also. The Hill aliens were dressed in black, shiny uniforms and were “somehow not human”. The ‘Bellero alien’ in contrast was dressed in all white, and while humanoid, was very clearly non-human. 

   

While it is possible that some of what the Hills ‘remembered’ under hypnosis could have been influenced by the science fiction films and TV shows of the 1950s and 60s, the best evidence that Betty and Barney Hill didn’t make up or imagine everything they said under hypnosis, is the star map drawn by Betty Hill. 

    

In 1968, Marjorie Fish of Oak Harbor, Ohio read The Interrupted Journey. Fish was an elementary school teacher and amateur astronomer. Intrigued by the “star map”, Fish wondered if it might be “possible to determine which star system the space travelers came from. Assuming that one of the fifteen stars on the map must represent the Earth’s Sun; Fish constructed a three-dimensional model of nearby Sun-like stars using thread and beads, basing stellar distances on those published in the 1969 Gliese Star Catalogue. Studying thousands of vantage points the only one that seemed to match the Hill map was from the viewpoint of the double star system of Zeta Reticuli. 

      

This was significant because the distance information needed to match three stars, forming the distinctive triangle Hill said she remembered, was not generally available until the 1969 Gliese Catalogue came out. Five years after Betty Hill drew the star map. 

     

Fish sent her analysis to Webb and agreeing with her conclusions, Webb sent the map to Terence Dickinson, editor of the popular magazine Astronomy. Dickinson did not endorse Fish and Webb’s conclusions, but for the first time in the journal’s history, Astronomy invited comments and debate on a UFO report, starting with an opening article in the December 1974 issue. For about a year afterward, the opinions page of Astronomy carried arguments for and against Fish’s star map. Notable was an argument made by Carl Sagan and Steven Soter, arguing that the seeming “star map” was little more than a random alignment of chance points. In contrast, those more favorable to the map, such as Dr. David Saunders, a statistician who had been on the Condon UFO study, argued that the unusual alignment of key Sun-like stars in a plane centered around Zeta Reticuli (first described by Fish) was statistically improbable to have happened by chance from a random group of stars in our immediate neighborhood. 

   

Skeptic Robert Sheaffer, in an accompanying article, said that a map devised by Charles W. Atterberg, about the same time as Fish, was an even better match to Hill’s map and made more sense. The base stars, Epsilon Indi and Epsilon Eridani, plus the others were also closer to the sun than the Hill map. Fish counter-argued that the base stars in the Atterberg map were considered much less likely to harbor life than Zeta Reticuli and the map lacked a consistent grouping of sun-like stars along the lined routes. 

    

Another interpretation of the star map was offered in 1993 by two German crop circle enthusiasts, Joachim Koch and Hans-Jürgen Kyborg, who suggested that the map depicted planets in the solar system, not nearby stars. The objects in the map, they said, closely match the positions of the sun, the six inner planets, and several asteroids around 1960. This would parallel other abduction accounts where witnesses claim to be shown such depictions, though admittedly often elaborate and unmistakably our own solar system.

   

Barney Hill died in 1969 and Betty in 2004 and both stuck to their abduction account until the time of their deaths. While it is possible elements of their story were influenced by the Cold War science fiction films of the 1950s and 60s; the star map, if Fish’s interpretation is correct, couldn’t have been based on prior knowledge.

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Another Crashed UFO in New Mexico? - Richard's Room 101

So entrenched has the 1947 Roswell crash become in the minds of many UFO researchers, that it is often overlooked that the Roswell incident was not actually the first crashed saucer story to enter the public consciousness. That distinction belongs to another alleged UFO incident in the New Mexico desert. This time near Aztec, a small town in the upper western portion of the state, hundreds of miles away from the Roswell crash debris field found by Mac Brazel’s on the Foster Ranch in the summer of 1947. 

  

In his 1950 best-selling book Behind The Flying Saucers gossip columnist Frank Scully alleged that a flying disk had been found on a ranch 12 miles from Aztec, New Mexico, in 1948, the year after the alleged Roswell crash. In Paul Kimball’s 2003 documentary Aztec 1948 UFO Crash UFO researcher Nick Redfern summed up the alleged events at Aztec: “The jest of the Aztec tale is that in 1948 a flying saucer complete with anywhere between 14 to 18 bodies crashed in Aztec, New Mexico and was recovered in high secrecy by the US government.”

   

According to Scully, he was told about the Aztec crash by a man he called “Dr. Gee”, who was supposedly a specialist in magnetic anomalies working for the US government at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where famously the Manhattan Project to develop the Atomic bomb had been centred. Dr. Glee explained to Scully that the alien vehicle used some kind of magnetic propulsion system to levitate and that this was the reason he was brought in by the US government.

  

In his book and talks, Scully claimed that Dr. Gee had been flown out by helicopter to the New Mexico desert in April 1948 to look at the wreckage of a flying saucer that had crashed there. The Doctor also allegedly told Scully that the deceased bodies of the spaceship’s alien crew, who were described as small humanoid beings just over three feet tall, were also found at the crash site. The bodies of these creatures were said to be hairless, with soft downy skin, and two of the crew may have still been alive for a short time after the impact of the crash. Later accounts of the Roswell incident would also involve the recovery of similarly described deceased alien beings. In their 1994 book The Truth about the UFO Crash at Roswell authors, Kevin D. Randle and Donald Schmitt wrote: “Stringfield, from his sources, said that he was able to draw a number of conclusions. According to Stringfield, the beings are humanoid, three and a half to four and a half feet tall … There was no hair on the head … In fact, there isn’t much hair on the bodies.” 

  

As well as the biology of the aliens found at the two crash sites, there are also similarities between the Roswell debris found by Mac Brazel a year earlier and the lightweight but durable metal the Aztec saucer was said to be constructed from. In Behind the Flying Saucers Scully wrote: “It looked like aluminium, but wasn’t of a metal known to this earth.” 

  

Another similarity to Roswell are the pictorial symbols similar to Egyptian hieroglyphics alleged to be on the inside of the Aztec craft. The son of Major Jessie Marcel, who was one of the men sent by Colonel Blanchard to investigate the debris found by Brazel on the Foster Ranch, also reported seeing strange purple writing that resembled hieroglyphics on pieces of the Roswell debris. In his book The Roswell Legacy published in 2007 for the 60th anniversary of the Roswell crash, Jesse Marcel Jr. described what he remembered being shown by his father back in July 1947. 

  

“As I looked at the piece, with the light reflecting on the inner surface, I could see what looked like writing. At first I thought of Egyptian hieroglyphics, but there were no animal outlines or figures. They weren’t mathematical figures either; they were more like geometric symbols-squares, circles, triangles, pyramids, and the like. Approximately one-fourth of an inch tall, they were imprinted on the inner surface of the beam, and only on one side. They were not embossed into the I-beam but seemed more like part of its surface.” 

  

The parallels between the alleged alien creatures and materials described by Aztec and Roswell witnesses are intriguing. In The Roswell Incident, published in 1980, the authors Charles Berlitz and William Moore even speculated that the Aztec crash story was a garbled version of the Roswell crash. 

  

There are some big problems with the credibility of the Aztec crash story, however. Scully’s book was debunked in two articles in True magazine published in 1952 and 1956. Written by San Francisco Chronicle reporter J. P. Cahn, the two articles revealed that Dr. Gee, who he named as Leo GeBauer, and Scully’s other main source Silas Newton, were in fact two slick oil conmen who had hoaxed Scully. 

  

The Aztec incident has been revived somewhat in recent years by a book by Scott Ramsey, a UFO researcher and successful businessman from North Carolina. One anomaly highlighted by Ramsey that should give sceptics pause for thought is a mystery road off of Hart Canyon which leads to what he believes was the crash site, a deforested area surrounded by trees with broken branches as if something had flattened the area. The mysterious dirt road doesn’t appear on any road maps of the area until around 2003, and it is unknown where the road came from or who made it. Ramsey suggests that the road was made by military personnel attempting to extricate the Aztec saucer after it was forced to make an emergency landing at Hart Canyon. This might seem like wild speculation, however, there is some physical proof at the alleged crash site that something happened there in 1948. 

  

Adding to the mystery is a concrete slab sticking up out of the ground at the alleged crash site. Like the road, there are no records or reasons why it should be there in the middle of nowhere. Ramsey believes the slab was made by the military to support one of the legs of a crane used to carry out the crashed saucer. Laboratory tests have also shown that the concrete slab dates to around 1948, the year of the alleged saucer crash.

  

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A Room 101 Interview with Regan Lee

Regan Lee is a prolific writer, penning columns for UFO Magazine and Binnall of America as well as writing and publishing a book on the Oregon Bigfoot legend. Bigfoot and UFOs might sound like an unlikely combination, researchers in both fields sometimes dismiss each other, but there are some parallels.

One of the many categories of alleged alien beings associated with close encounters is known as the "Animal" type. These are large furry humanoid creatures which closely resemble the famous ape-man. More generally, though, like UFOs far from there just being one definitive answer to the Bigfoot mystery there are probably many explanations.

Some Bigfoot sightings might be explained by the traditional hypothesis that there may still be a species of undisclosed primate roaming the forests and mountains of the world, but other sightings might have more exotic explanations, including extraterrestrial visitors and even beings from other dimensions. In my interview with Regan we discussed all of these possibilities.

Richard Thomas: Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions Regan, I want to focus on your Bigfoot research in this interview. I think I first became interested in Bigfoot because of my interest in Doctor Who, the Yeti or Tibetan Bigfoot are in two classic stories from the series, The Abominable Snowmen and the Web of Fear. How did your own interest in Bigfoot begin?

Regan Lee: I've always been interested in anything Fortean or unusual, in mysteries "of the weird..." I don't remember a time when I wasn't curious about all these things. But probably my interest with Bigfoot really took off when I moved to Oregon, and I came across Bigfoot encounters connected with UFO sightings. Stan Johnson's story, an Oregon LTW (long-term witness), and other similar tales in Oregon, had me go from "this is ridiculous! --Bigfoot and UFOs all in one tale -- to "this is really juicy Fortean stuff!" I think I'm open to the stranger aspects of Bigfoot encounters because of my own lifelong experiences with UFOs and the paranormal in general.

  

Richard Thomas: Have you ever had a Bigfoot sighting yourself, or are there any sightings that particularly impressed you?

  

Regan Lee: I haven't had a Bigfoot sighting myself. I did have one odd experience while discussing Stan Johnson's experiences with someone who knew him. Now, Johnson's story involves psychic communications with the Sasquatch, travels in UFOs, spiritual and religious epiphanies, healings... a sort of UFO contactee-Bigfoot combo. I met Johnson at a UFO conference; he was very charismatic. I literally felt "buzzy" as he was talking; he exuded an energy, that was for sure.

  

So there I am, talking about Johnson with this person, when a cone of light comes down from the ceiling and completely surrounds us. I was seeing coloured lights and everything, feeling very "buzzy" as I call these psychic connections of mine. Sound was muffled, as if cotton balls were stuffed in my ears. I thought I was going to vibrate up towards through the ceiling! When our conversation ended, the cone lifted up, back through the ceiling, and everything was back to normal. I've had a couple of other things like that happen -- not directly related to Sasquatch, but connected in a roundabout way.

I told this story to a woman I met at the first OSS (Oregon Sasquatch Symposium) in Eugene. She told me that it was "spirit" that had manifested, responding to being called, in a sense. Or responding to the energy generated while talking about Sasquatch in that context. Come to think of it, it was a lot like a very intense ghostly apparition -- a mist or ectoplasm -- I had once experienced in a haunted house.

Richard Thomas: Probably the most famous Bigfoot sighting was captured on the Paterson film. What do you think of the footage?

  

Regan Lee: I saw that film in the theatre the first time in, I think, the late 60s, maybe early 70s. I think it was the Pickfair theatre in L.A. Well, it's one of those things where I keep going back and forth, but I lean towards it's a real film of a real Sasquatch. I have days when I'm not so sure, but I then I go back the other way and say, "Yeah, it's real." Despite the hundreds of attempts to debunk the film, in my opinion no one has been successful in that. Something about the way the creature moves... not so easy to reject as fake. I also believe Bob Gimlin, who I saw at the OSS and just following him through the years. He's either a very good lair or actor or, he's telling the truth. I think he's telling the truth.

Richard Thomas: My own belief is that like UFOs there is no single explanation for Bigfoot sightings, some might be undiscovered animals and others might have some more esoteric explanations. In Doctor Who the Yeti are robots created by an alien intelligence to conquer the earth. You also write about UFOs, do you think there might be an alien connection or something equally strange with Bigfoot?

Regan Lee: I agree with your take Richard. There is a connection with UFOs, what we call aliens, and all kinds of weirdness and Bigfoot. There are plenty of stories of encounters involving Bigfoot and other strange things that forces us to consider them seriously. When I say "there's a connection" I mean that there are stories out there fro witnesses that we have to consider. What that means, is another story. Unfortunately, there are those in Bigfoot research that stick strictly to the flesh and blood angle and ignore or reject there weirder accounts. I have no idea what it all means. Like UFOs, it's tangled, complicated, and no one has the answer. I do think Bigfoot is a lot more than ust flesh and blood -- it's certainly not a simple "giant ape" -- there's a lot more going on here than that.

  

Richard Thomas: I think Mac Tonnies might have been on to something with his Crypto-terrestrial hypothesis to explain UFO sightings. His idea was that instead of beings from outer space, UFOs were really the work of a parallel civilization right here on the earth, possibly another species of human. Have you seen any evidence that far from being lower on the evolutionary ladder, or, a missing link, Bigfoot might be a parallel species to man and might be a lot more advanced than we think? For instance, do you think stories about Bigfoot being able to go invisible might be proof of them possessing superior technology like a Star Trek cloaking device or something similar?

  

Regan Lee: It is tragic that Mac died so young. He was really on to something with his theory. I still hang to an ET explanation for some of the UFO stuff -- but I have been thinking the past few years that it's much more than that, or, more specifically, not only that. Call them Djinn, or whatever, but entities do exist right alongside of us. I think they are more aware of us all the time than we are of them. Sometimes we get glimpses of them, experience them, much to their amusement. I don't know if they control that or if it's just the way it is. I base this opinion on the research and experiences of others but also, on my own direct experiences with entities.

 

I don't think Bigfoot posses literal technology -- like they have machines underground or off in some hidden forest laboratory. Although, Peter Guttilla, in his book Bigfoot Files, relates some very strange stories of Bigfoot, or Bigfoot type creatures, wearing a sort of tool belt with all kinds of electronic gadgets. Lots of other weird stories like that.

I think that, very possibly, Sasquatch posses abilities that allows them to manipulate energy, that causes us to experience things on some level we interpret as, say, paranormal.

Richard Thomas: In 2010 there were reports that Bigfoot had been shot. What was your reaction to this news and do you think we'll ever have definitive proof of the existence of Bigfoot? (I know a Russian expedition made some claims we'll ever have definitive proof of the existence of Bigfoot?

  

Regan Lee: I didn't believe the story, and I hoped it wasn't true. I am a NO KILL/NO CAPTURE person: very adamant about that. I've offended some in the Bigfoot community by being so... opinionated, I guess, about this, but when it comes to killing another being, I am opinionated. Whatever Bigfoot is, it's clearly highly intelligent, and no doubt as intelligent as us humans. Maybe more so. But the NO KILL stance isn't based solely on intelligence -- as if that's the only criteria. It's a living being, clearly wants to be left alone in the sense it hasn't come out and camped out on the local wildlife management steps-- who are we to go out and kill it, just because we want to? I know all the arguments about doing it for science, and I say: I don't care. It's not justification enough.

 

Okay, I went off on a tangent there. Back to topic. Like UFOs, I don't know if we'll ever get definitive proof that will satisfy everyone within all the infrastructures that Bigfoot exists. Both have remained maddeningly elusive for a very long time. That elusiveness is part of the phenomena. It's supposed to be forever elusive. I'm okay with that but it frustrates others, and some refuse to accept that. It's not hopeless; within that elusiveness answers can be found. It's difficult to explain. It's sort of a state of being.

I just don't think definitive proof will ever be produced because Sasquatch isn't "definitive."

Richard Thomas: For readers who want to begin their own research are there any books you would suggest they read, magazines they should subscribe to, or groups they should join?

  

Regan Lee: I come from a kind of folklore, Fortean perspective, so I'd recommend books that discuss the stranger side of Sasquatch encounters. Researchers like Stan Gordon,Henry Franzoni, Peter Guttilla, Lisa Shiel, Nick Redfern. Lee Harper wrote a book with Ida Kannenberg, My Brother is a Hairy Man. Sali Sheppherd- Wolford's Valley of the Skookum about her experiences with Bigfoot years ago; she's the mother of Bigfoot researcher Autumn Williams. Williams isn't specially about the paranormal or UFOs, she does solid field researcher, but she's open and sympathetic to the kinds of accounts that some others may reject or scoff at. There's Jack Jack Lapserits and Henry Franzoni. I'd also suggest writers like Patrick Harpur, Colin Bennett, George Hansen, who don't write about Bigfoot necessarily, but their views on the paranormal in general and a sort of Gestalt perspective.

  

There are a lot of blogs out there that I like but among the Bigfoot blogs that address the stranger side of things: Nick Redfern has something like, four hundred blogs or so; I like Thom Powell's thomsquatch,Lisa Shiel's blogs , Autumn Willaims at Oregon Bigfoot.com and Melissa Hovey's The Search for Bigfoot, Lon Strickler's Phantoms and Monsters. there are a lot more I can't think of but there are so many dedicated people out there sharing their experiences about Sasquatch and related subjects, it's just amazing.

See if there's a state or local Bigfoot group in your area and join up, depending on their policies. Some are very vocal in their insistence that no discussion of anything paranormal or weird take place. Even if you're not intending to do field research, or believe in a strictly flesh and blood creature, ti's good to take part. I belong to a local Bigfoot research organization that is definitely primary flesh and blood, field research but they're open to other theories; and I joined a few others that aren't local, but good people and again, there's a diversity of members regarding all kinds of experiences. So find the one that fits who you are.

No matter what anyone says about all this; Bigfoot, UFOs, ghosts... no one knows everything and no one has a magic key to unlock the mystery. You are entitled to follow your own truths in all this and make up your own mind. For myself, I change my ideas about things as I continue to both experience events as well as where my studies take me.

Richard Thomas: Thanks Regan, where can readers find your columns and blogs?

  

Regan Lee: I contribute online to UFO Digest, UFO Mystic, Monster Track, Tim Binnall's Binnall of America, Skylaire Alfvegren's League of Western Fortean Intermediates and I run several blogs of my own; Frame 352 is my Bigfoot blog, Mothman Flutterings, Animal Forteana are others. And of course, there's The Orange Orb, Vintage U.F.O. and Saucer Sightings, which deals with UFOs. I've written articles for some of Tim Beckley's books and I write a column for UFO Magazine.

  

Thank you, Richard! You do great work and it's an honour.

READ RICHARD'S ROOM 101 COLUMN FOR BINNALL OF AMERICA

NASA’s Project Blue Beam - Will the US Government Stage UFO Sightings in 2012?

Not since the Millennium Bug panic in the years running up to the year 2000 has a specific date been the subject of so many apocalyptic theories about the end of the world as December 21, 2012. The date believed to be the end of a 5,125-year-long cycle in the Mayan Long Count calendar.

The Maya civilisation used many calendars to measure time and record history. The main two calendars used by most ordinary Maya would have been the 260-day Tzolkin and the 365-day Haab. Because neither of these calendars numbered years, a combination of both the Tzolkin and Haab dates was used to identify the precise date. This method was sufficient because a particular combination of the two dates would not occur again for about 52 years, which was above the general life expectancy of the time.

To specify dates that occurred more than 52 years ago the Maya used another calendar called the Long Count. This calendar identified a date by counting the number of days from the day when the Maya believed that time began, on August 12, 3114 BCE. The Long Count used a 360-day year called a Tun, in which 20 Tuns made up a Katun (72,00 days) and 20 Katuns made up a Baktun (144, 000 Tuns). The 13th Baktun will be completed on December 21, 2012, which is said to be the end of the 5,125-year-long “Great Cycle.” However, sceptics say that this is a misinterpretation and that there is no evidence that the Maya believed the world would end on that day.

Whatever the truth about 2012 it would seem that someone wants us to believe something Earth shattering will happen on December 21 in that year. The doomsday theory has been featured in bestselling books, as well as documentaries, films and popular TV shows.

In the last episode of The X-Files (tantalisingly called The Truth) it is discovered by agents Mulder and Scully that aliens plan on colonising the Earth on December 21, 2012.

When I asked Dean Haglund, who played Langly in The X-Files, about the 2012 revelation in the final episode of the sci-fi cult, he told me he was sceptical about 2012 doomsday scenarios:

Here is an excellent example of a collective fear manifesting itself into popular culture. Since this airing, 2012 has become the hot topic at all the conventions, however, as Paul Dean said in our documentary, when he was talking to a Mayan priest about all of this, he said that ‘western society has it all wrong’ and that since we cannot hold a duality in our minds, a quantum Schrodinger's Cat scenario if you will, then we can only picture the end of something as a finite disaster and not both that and the re-awakening into the light.

Haglund was less sceptical, however, about the possibility that US government agencies could have been feeding information to The X-Files writers.

“I have heard that the popular culture is used as a tool by whatever elite, business, government, Illuminati, etc., to both gauge and control the populace,” The X-Files and Lone Gunmen star told me when I asked him about his comments on The Alex Jones Show back in 2005 about the script writers being approached by members of the CIA, FBI and NASA with ideas for episodes.

But why would US Government insiders want the viewers of The X-Files to associate 2012 with an alien invasion? One popular theory on the internet is NASA’s alleged partly declassified Project Blue Beam, a supposed plan by the US Government to create a “New World Order” by staging a fake UFO invasion using holograms and other advanced technology. A researcher who appeared in the documentary film The New World Order and is a screen writer himself, told me in an interview:

“The alien invasion hoax is also another reason why so many Hollywood science fiction movies involve aliens arriving in vast armadas to destroy us and take over our planet. They were quite prevalent in the 50s and you can find modern-day examples like Independence Day, War of the Worlds and even Mars Attacks. Very few movies about extra-terrestrials actually involve aliens with peaceful intentions. E.T. certainly comes to mind, but even movies where they arrive as our benevolent ‘saviours’ like The Day The Earth Stood Still, is still another permutation of the New World Order hoax, in which case it's about giving up our sovereignty, our ‘petty little differences’ as Reagan put it, and joining a fascist global regime in order to achieve an alleged ‘world peace’. It will be world peace but with a seriously heavy price on our freedoms. Mostly, though, these movies are programming us to believe that once we see vast armadas of classified military vehicles hovering in the sky, that they will in fact be UFOs driven by ‘extra-terrestrials’ who are here to ‘kill us and take over our planet.’ And then the only solution we'll be presented with will be a heavy reliance on a Militarised 'New World Order' to save us. That's where the real agenda lies.”

While many UFO researchers are sceptical about some of the specifics about Project Blue Beam, the basic premise that the US Government might be fostering the belief that UFOs represent aliens from outer space is another matter. The US government definitely has technology a lot more advanced than what they admit to having. In 1993 the “father of stealth” Ben Rich, director of Lockheed's Skunk Works from 1975 to 1991, stated at the University of California School of Engineering in 1993: “We already have the means to travel among the stars, but these technologies are locked up in black projects . . . and it would take an Act of God to ever get them out to benefit humanity.”

Other government insiders have also made comments implying the US Government were behind UFOs or at least hyping the ETH. In his book, The Secret Team, Colonial Fletcher Prouty, who was the real life basis for the Mr X character in Oliver Stone’s film JFK, speculated that with the fall of communism in the early 1990s UFOs and aliens would take the place of the Soviet Union as the new major threat to the United States.
 
"This is the fundamental game of the Secret Team. They have this power because they control secrecy and secret intelligence and because they have the ability to take advantage of the most modern communications system in the world, of global transportation systems, of quantities of weapons of all kinds, and when needed, the full support of a world-wide U.S. military supporting base structure. They can use the finest intelligence system in the world, and most importantly, they have been able to operate under the canopy of an assumed, ever-present enemy called ‘Communism.’ It will be interesting to see what ‘enemy’ develops in the years ahead. It appears that ‘UFO's and Aliens’ are being primed to fulfil that role for the future. To top all of this, there is the fact that the CIA, itself, has assumed the right to generate and direct secret operations."
   
More recently Mark Pilkington in his new book Mirage Men has argued that instead of perpetrating a UFO cover-up the US intelligence agencies have really been promoting ideas like alien abductions, UFO crashes and recoveries, and secret bases all along.

“In the book I'm specifically referring to those people from military and intelligence organisations who have used the UFO lore as a cover for their operations and, in extreme cases, have seeded new material within the UFO culture to further muddy the waters,” Mark Pilkington told me when I interviewed him in 2010. Although Mark didn’t think all UFOs were explainable.

“I'm not sceptical about UFOs themselves – people see them every day – nor am I sceptical of the existence of ET life, I believe it's out there, and I can accept that it will come here and perhaps even has done at some point in our past. What I am very sceptical of is the popular notion of ET visitation as presented in the UFO lore that has emerged since the late 1940s. This has developed out of a multi-directional feedback loop between UFO experiencers, UFO book authors, mainstream popular culture and those in the military and intelligence worlds who would exploit and shape these beliefs and ideas.”

So will the US Government or one of its alphabet agencies really stage a massive UFO sighting on December 21, 2012? We’ll have to wait to see. But with the London Olympics, Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and the US presidential election all taking place in 2012 perhaps we shouldn’t be so focused on December 21 in particular.

1986 UFO Cases

The 1980s were a boom period for UFOs with bestselling books like The Roswell Incident by Charles Berlitz and William L. Moore and input from Stanton Friedman, Timothy Good’s Above Top Secret and Whitley Strieber’s Communion. There were also movies and TV series like Steven Spielberg’s ET: The Extraterrestrial, Predator starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, James Cameron’s Aliens, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and documentaries such as Unsolved Mysteries.
 
And if all that wasn’t enough in 1987 US President Ronald Regan even spoke about "an alien threat from outside this world" in a speech to the United Nations, and that same year the major US soap opera The Colbys featured a storyline in which the character Fallon reported being the victim of an alien abduction! In a guest article for this blog UFO author and historian Rupert Matthews wrote: "The Colbys TV series and Whitley (Strieber) book launched the abduction phenomenon into the mass media. Suddenly the television, magazine and newspaper world could not get enough abduction stories. Many researchers took to hypnotic regression of witnesses in an effort to get more details and more coherent versions of events. Sadly some researchers had little or no training in hypnotic treatments and made some key errors of technique that would later discredit their findings. Nevertheless UFOlogy in the later 1980s became dominated by abduction stories obtained largely by hypnotic regression. It seemed that the answer to the entire UFO riddle might finally be within grasp of researchers."
 
The decade also ended with Bob Lazar's famous allegations that he had worked at the secret Nevada Area 51 or Groom Lake base back in the late 1980's on a back-engineering program involving captured alien saucers. There’s no doubting then that the 1980s marked a turnaround in the popularity of the UFO subject after years of declining interest in UFOs following the US Air Force’s decision to close down their UFO investigation Project Bluebook in 1969.
 
One year that seems to stand out is 1986. What with it being 25 years now since the UFO events of that year I asked Nick Redfern, who blogs for UFOMystic, if there were any good 1986 cases I should research. Nick replied: "Probably the only two good ones I can think of for that year, is one which was a Jumbo Jet sighting of a UFO over Alaska. I'm pretty sure a Google search will find it. And I know there was a very good Brazilian military UFO chase/sighting in that year, and that the US Defense Intelligence Agency released its files on the case a few years ago, so they may be at the DIA website, as they have their FOIA-UFO files posted there."
 
A Google search found an AP article entitled "FAA Presses Investigation of Lights Seen Over Alaska" about the Jumbo Jet sighting Nick Redfern had told me about. The sighting took place on November 17, 1986 and involved an encounter between a Japan Airlines Boeing 747 freighter aircraft and three UFOs as it flew over Alaska, en route from Iceland to Anchorage.

According to the crew, "two small objects and one huge Saturn-shaped object were in sight and on radar for more than 30 minuets". The unidentified lights were "yellow, amber and green" and the largest one "showed up on the plane's weather radar".

The pilot changed course and altitude multiple times in an attempt to explain the unidentified objects and VHF radio communications were garbled at the time of the sightings.
 
In 2006 the pilot, Capt. Kenju Terauchi, was interviewed by two Kyodo News journalists about the sightings. The interview was picked up by various UFO websites. Here is an extract from the interview on UFOcasebook.com:

"Suddenly,” Terauchi said, "600 meters below, I saw what looked like two belts of light. I checked with the Anchorage control tower. They said nothing was showing on their radar." But something was emitting those lights, and whatever it was seemed interested in the jumbo, for it adjusted its speed to match to match the plane's – "like they were toying with us," said Terauchi.   That went on for seven minutes or so. "Then there was a kind of reverse thrust, and the lights became dazzlingly bright. Our cockpit lit up. The thing was flying as if there was no such thing as gravity. It sped up, then stopped, then flew at our speed, in our direction, so that to us it looked like it was standing still. The next instant it changed course. There's no way a jumbo could fly like that. If we tried, it'd break apart in mid-air. In other words, the flying object had overcome gravity."

 
But the strange events of flight 1628 were not over yet for Capt. Terauchi and his crew. UFO authority Richard H. Hall wrote about the third "gigantic" UFO Terauchi witnessed that night in the second volume of his The UFO Evidence:

About 5:30pm, while in the vicinity of Fairbanks, AK, Capt. Terauchi checked a white light behind the plane and saw a silhouette of a gigantic spaceship. It was walnut-shaped, symmetrical above and below, with a central flange. Capt. Terauchi said, “It was a very big one, two times bigger than an aircraft career.” At its closet point, the large object cast such a bright light that it illuminated the cockpit, and Terauchi could feel heat on his face. Radio communications again became garbled during the close approach. The veteran crew became frightened by the large object and requested permission to change course. After the course change they looked back and saw the object still following them. Increasingly fearful, they requested a descent to get away from the UFO (“We had to get away from the object.”) After they descended and turned again, the object disappeared. The FAA at first confirmed that several of its radar traffic controllers had tracked the B-747 and the large object, and that US Air Force radar had also done so. Later official statements backed away from this and tried to a ascribe the radar targets to weather effects. On December 29, 1986, the FAA issued a report saying, We are accepting the descriptions of the crew, but are unable to support what they saw.

More recently the Japan Air Lines flight 1628 sighting was featured on the History Channel's UFO Files series in an episode entitled "Black Box Secrets" and the case has gained a reputation as being perhaps one of the best UFO sightings ever.

Another good pilot aircraft sighting in 1986 happened on May 11, in Sedona, AZ. A pilot, Robert H. Henderson, and his wife travelling in a Cessna 172 saw a dome-shaped object make a head-on pass at them and fly beneath their plane at an estimated 1,200 mph.
 
There were a concentration of sightings in Brazil in 1986, including many physiological effects cases between March 19 and June 15. The best of which was the UFO chase case Nick Redfern had mentioned. The Telegraph ranked this case, known as São Paulo sighting after the airport where the UFOs were tracked from, number eight in a 2009 "list of 10 of the most famous UFO incidents in history". Telegraph contributor Sasjkia Otto wrote in the newspaper that on the night of May 19, 1986 “around 20 UFOs were seen and detected by radar in various parts of Brazil. They reportedly disappeared as five military aircraft were sent to intercept them."
 
The São Paulo case was discussed openly by high ranking Brazilian officials. It was first reported by Colonel (Ret.) Ozires Silva, president of the state-owned oil company Petrobrás, who was flying on an executive Xingu turbo-prop, when he and the pilot saw and pursued the mysterious lights for about 25 minutes. The incident was covered widely in the Brazilian media at the time, leading to a press conference at the Ministry of Aeronautics in Brasilia on May 23, with air traffic controllers and air force pilots involved in the scramble mission.

At the press conference the Minister of Aeronautics, Brigadier General Otávio Moreira Lima, said: “Between 20:00 hrs (5/19) and 01:00 hrs (5/20) at least 20 objects were detected by Brazilian radars. They saturated the radars and interrupted traffic in the area. Each time that radar detected unidentified objects, fighters took off for intercept. Radar detects only solid metallic bodies and heavy (mass) clouds. There were no clouds nor conventional aircraft in the region. The sky was clear. Radar doesn't have optical illusions. We can only give technical explanations and we don't have them. It would be very difficult for us to talk about the hypothesis of an electronic war. It's very remote and it's not the case here in Brazil. It's fantastic. The signals on the radar were quite clear."

The Minister also announced that a commission would study the incident. Air Force Major Ney Cerqueira, in charge of the Air Defense Operations Center (CODA), added: "We don't have technical operational conditions to explain it. The appearance and disappearance of these objects on the radar screens are unexplained. They are Unidentified Aerial Movements... The technical instruments used for the identification of the lights had problems in registering them. CODA activated two F-5E and three Mirages to identify the objects. One F-5E and one Mirage remained grounded on alert. A similar case occurred four years ago (1982 Commander Brito VASP airliner radar-visual incident). The lights were moving at a speed ranging between 250 and 1,500 km/hr. [150 to 1,000 mph] The Air Force has not closed the case."

Today São Paulo continues to be a UFO hotspot. In March 2011 a video shown on Brazilian TV of a disc-shaped object hovering in the clouds for a minute or so – before disappearing in a bright flash was widely circulated. The Telegraph writing that: "The television station explained the clip originated from two motorists who saw the object as they were driving near the town of Agudos in Sao Paulo state. They hopped out of the car to shoot the video with their hand-held camera. According to the TV station, the cameramen reported the earth shaking at the same time the unidentified flying object vanished in a blast of light."

In 2010 Brazil's government ordered its air force to officially record any sighting of unidentified flying objects.

There were other sightings in 1986. In Butler, PA, on January 7, a UFO emitted six light beams toward the ground. And around 20 minuets later in Pittsburgh, a silver-gray disk with body lights and mist formed around it was seen hovering above the city, before moving out of sight.

There was also a good landing case in Calalzo di Cadore, Italy on August 15 of that year. Strong physical traces were left at the landing site, and after a two hour memory loss the witnesses reported seeing two humanoid beings.
 
The 1980s then saw an increase in the popularity of the UFO subject, and while blockbuster films such as ET and bestselling books like Communion played a large part in this turnaround, solid UFO cases like those of 1986 were also important.

Sources:
http://www.nytimes.com/1987/01/05/us/faa-presses-investigation-of-lights-seen-over-alaska.html
http://www.ufocasebook.com/jal1628surfaces.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/ufo/6041498/UFO-Files-top-10-UFO-sightings.html
http://www.phenopedia.com/index.php/1986_S%C3%A3o_Paulo_UFO_sighting
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/ufo/8357480/UFO-spotted-in-Sao-Paulo.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-10947856
Richard H. Hall, The UFO Report: A Thirty Year Report Volume II, (Scarecrow Press, Inc, 2001) p.142-143.

A Room 101 Interview with Mack Maloney, author of UFOs in Wartime

From the foo fighters of WWII to the ghost rockets of the early Cold War, UFO sightings have always seemed to be more frequent during times of conflict. In his book UFOs in Wartime, author Mack Maloney takes a look at sightings not just from 20th-century conflicts but as far back as the time of Alexander the Great too.

Richard Thomas: How did you first become interested in the UFO subject as a writer?

Mack Maloney: I've always been interested in UFOs. Even as a kid, I read anything I could get my hands on having to do with UFOs. I think everyone likes to believe there's more to life than just life, and for me the thought that these things were flying around, appearing to people, things from some other place, I just found it fascinating and still do. So when I had the opportunity to write a book about them, I jumped at the chance.

Richard Thomas: Why did you decide to focus on UFO reports during times of conflict in your new book UFOs in Wartime?

Mack Maloney: I was having lunch with my editor and I mentioned to him that from what I'd read in the past, it seemed that lots of people see UFOs during times of war or just before a war starts. I had just read something about the foo fighters, and I'd known about the UFO incursions over U.S. ICBM bases in the 60s and 70s, and I just had the thought that whatever UFOs are, they might be particularly interested in us when we are either at war or preparing for war. My editor thought that it might be a good idea for a non-fiction book, even though I'm primarily a fiction writer. We went through the process and the book is the result.

Richard Thomas: The subheading of your book is What They Didn't Want You To Know. What do you think the authorities don't want us to know?

Mack Maloney: They don't want us to know what they know about UFOs. It's as simple as that. But the question is, what do they know? Do they know what UFOs are, and are keeping this news from us? Or do they not know what they are and they're keeping that news from us? It's a 50-50 question it could go either way. But they know a lot more than they are letting on. I'm absolutely convinced of that.

Richard Thomas: One of the earliest UFO reports you discuss in the book is Christopher Columbus' sighting. What do you think Columbus saw that night and would you agree that too much attention has been given to the Kenneth Arnold sighting and Roswell Incident from 1947 as the start of the modern UFO era?

Mack Maloney: What did Columbus see? It seems like he saw what would be normally described as a UFO a bright light, acting strangely in the sky, something that is not a star or the moon, or a meteor falling to earth. Whatever those things are, that's what Columbus saw. As for Kenneth Arnold's sighting being given too much attention, I agree that it has, at least in the context that these unidentified flying objects have been around for centuries. They didn't suddenly appear that day Kenneth Arnold saw them. What happened that day was the American press finally woke up to the story and branded them in this case, as flying saucers.

Once that happened then everyone became aware that unknown things were flying through our skies. But up to that point, no one in the media and apparently not in the military either, had ever thought that the foo fighters of World War Two and the Ghost Rockets of 1946, and the Ghost Fliers of 1933 and all these things that were seen by Alexander the Great and by people in the Bible and in medieval times were all connected that they were UFOs too. We just hadn't given them a name yet. So, yes, the popular involvement started with Kenneth Arnold's sighting, but UFOs had been around a long time before that. And as for Roswell -- I don't think anything extraordinary happened there. No crashed saucer, no recovered bodies. Nothing.

Richard Thomas: The Los Angeles Air Raid is perhaps the best-known UFO case from WWII in the United States. What do you think of the speculation that the US Army was able to shoot down and recover whatever was in the air on that day?

Mack Maloney: I did not come across anything to indicate the Army or the Navy shot down anything that night. The only thing that came out of the sky were spent anti-aircraft shells falling back to earth after being shot at whatever was flying overhead and missing their target. What is apparent is that both the Army and Navy were completely baffled and confused about what happened and they were at each other's throats the next day.

Richard Thomas: The most famous UFOs from the Second World War are the "foo fighters" spotted by both Allied and Axis pilots during that war. What are your thoughts on Nick Cook's book The Hunt for Zero Point in which he speculates that the Nazis could have been working on anti-gravity saucer-shaped aircraft?

Mack Maloney: I haven't read Nick Cook's book, so I can't comment on it directly. However, I will say that as far as the speculation that the foo fighters were actually Nazi superweapons, we reject that notion in the book. Simply put, the Nazis didn't have the resources from 1943 onward to even maintain their armies in the field, never mind create some futuristic flying machines that were seen doing fantastic things. By 1944, the Nazis were building the cockpits of their Me-262 jet fighters out of wood because they didn't have enough metal and steel to do the job. Second, if the foo fighters were Nazi weapons, why isn't there a single instance of a foo fighter firing on any Allied warplanes? If they were Nazi superweapons, why were they seen the Pacific theatre as well? Why was no vast super weapons manufacturing facility ever found in Germany after hostilities had ceased? And finally, if the Germans had these fantastic weapons, why did they lose the war?

Richard Thomas: The Rendlesham Forest Incident is often called the "British Roswell" but Jacques Vallee has suggested that it was a psy-op. How likely or unlikely do you think that explanations is?

Mack Maloney: I respect Jacques Vallee for all the tremendous work he has done in this field. And I've read only very little about his theory that the whole Rendlesham Affair was a psy-ops. But my first reaction would be to question whether the U.S. military or some U.S. intelligence service would actually run a psy-ops over the Christmas holidays. Why then? Government spooks have lives too. They go on vacation. They need time off. It seems like an unlikely time to conduct a psy-ops. Plus how was it done? Did the spooks construct a fake device that was able to float above the forest floor and then take off at a high rate of speed? Where they able to construct the half dozen large glowing lights that people saw in the sky one of those nights? Were they able to somehow stage the "crash" of some object into the woods and have it shine brightly with three vivid colours? Were they able to manipulate the radiation detection devices on aircraft flying over the forest to make it seem like the area was saturated with radiation? That's a lot of trouble to go through to psychologically test a bunch of Air Force types who, for whatever reason, couldn't get a holiday leave to go home for Christmas.

Richard Thomas: What do you think are some of the other best UFO cases from the Cold War era, not just the 1980s but the Korean and Vietnam Wars too?

Mack Maloney: The Korean War was pivotal in the U.S. government's investigation of UFOs. They'd closed up Project Grudge about six months before war broke out, basically saying UFOs didn't exist and that they were either misidentified aerial phenomena, the work of crackpots or people with delusions. But then, once the war broke out, a lot of U.S. pilots started seeing UFOs over Korea and the U.S. military realized they couldn't say all their pilots were crazy or hoaxers or delusional. So, they were stuck. Some UFO researchers believe that was one big reason the Air Force started Project Blue Book. So many of their pilots were seeing UFOs over Korea, they just couldn't ignore it. And there were some spectacular sightings. About two months into the war, three Navy fighter bombers were about to bomb a North Korean convoy when they encountered two enormous flying discs. And I mean these things were gigantic.

Then there were a couple cases of UFOs orbiting high above U.S. ships out at sea and playing hide and seek with carrier aircraft sent up to intercept them. There's an incredible story told by Dr Richard Haines in his book, Advanced Aerial Devices Reported During the Korean War, about a UFO appearing in the midst of a battle between U.S. infantry and North Korean soldiers. The object took fire from both sides, but then it bathed the American soldiers with some kind of ray, and two days later, nearly all of them were very sick. Really frightening stuff. I highly recommend the Haines book to anyone who wants to learn what happened in Korea when it came to UFOs. We just scratch the surface in our book.

For Vietnam, we came across a number of episodes. All of the sightings from Vietnam are strange because, I believe, the war itself was very strange. The most well-known is probably the Hobart Case, where US fighter planes fired at UFOs off the coast of the DMZ and wound up hitting this Australian warship, the HMAS Hobart, and killing four Australian sailors and wounding dozens of others. A very tragic story that got very little play here in the States at the time.

Richard Thomas: Are there any cases from the recent civil war in Libya or other recent conflicts you would like to include if you ever did a second edition?

Mack Maloney: If we did a second edition, we'd have to start just before 9/11, and cover all the conflicts in the Middle East. That might take up the entire book: Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Syria maybe. That whole part of the world is turning upside down and when things like that happen, especially militarily, UFOs are usually on hand. Who knows what stories are out there, just waiting to be documented?

Richard Thomas: Where can readers buy UFOs in Wartime and have you got any plans for another UFO book?

Mack Maloney: UFOs in Wartime is published by Penguin-Berkley Books, so it's on sale at every bookstore in the United States and Canada. It can also be bought online at Amazon.

Whether there will be another UFO book in the near future, time will tell. I would like to do another one, but in a strange way our friends in the UFOs will have to cooperate and provide us some good stories. And so far, they're not returning my calls.

READ RICHARD'S ROOM 101 COLUMN FOR BINNALL OF AMERICA

UFOs in the 1980s

The following guest article is by Rupert Matthews, author of the book Roswell.

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UFOs in the 1980s

By Rupert Matthews

Back in the mid-1980s the world of UFOlogy was becoming dominated by two quite different facets of the phenomenon. Of the two the more mainstream were the abduction events that were beginning to be reported by an increasing number and range of people. The other phenomenon was popular with the media and general public, but less well favoured by serious UFO researchers: crop circles. Of the two, crop circles dominated the media - probably because of the impressive photos that could be printed in newspapers on slow news days to fill a half page at low cost.

Meanwhile, some researchers were beginning to suspect that some incidents that were reported by the witness as being an alien abduction were, in fact, psychological in origin. Researcher Margaret Fry in the UK produced a number of cases in which a witness reported being abducted and undergoing the usual types of experiences, while others reported that the person supposedly being abducted was, in fact, fast asleep or in once case being operated on under anaesthetic in a hospital.

At the time there was a huge amount of controversy over these cases. Some held that they disproved the entire alien abduction hypothesis and proved that those reporting abductions were simply hallucinating. Others sought to debunk the cases in order to prove the witnesses were lying or that the researchers had fabricated evidence.

Back in 1986 it does not seem to have occurred to anyone that those witnesses reporting abductions while quite clearly not being abducted were dreaming or hallucinating, but that this did not of itself disprove that alien abductions really did happen. It is well know that people often hallucinate that they are taking part in historic events, scenes from movies and the like. Perhaps the people in question had read about an abduction, and then hallucinated about it later on.

In hindsight the spat seems to have been a case of “sound and fury, signifying nothing”.

Equally pointless in hindsight were the press stories that sought to link the tragic crash of the Space Shuttle Challenger to a sighting of a UFO many miles away at the time of the crash. The two were obviously unrelated, and the link seems to have been invented by a journalist looking to boost sales of his newspaper. Sadly it served merely to undermine the credibility of UFO sightings in the minds of some members of the public.

The next year saw the damage to credibility repaired somewhat. The major US soap opera The Colbys featured a story line in which the character Fallon reported being the victim of an alien abduction. The story line had a few features that dramatised the events for a TV audience, but generally followed the sort of events that real witnesses had reported and did much to bring the idea of alien abductions to a wider audience in a sympathetic way.

That same year Whitley Strieber published his book Communion to rave reviews. The book retold what Strieber said were a prolonged series of encounters with a humanoid life form that physically resembled a “grey” alien. The book sold in vast numbers and was an international best seller.

The Colbys TV series and Whitley book launched the abduction phenomenon into the mass media. Suddenly the television, magazine and newspaper world could not get enough abduction stories. Many researchers took to hypnotic regression of witnesses in an effort to get more details and more coherent versions of events. Sadly some researchers had little or no training in hypnotic treatments and made some key errors of technique that would later discredit their findings. Nevertheless UFOlogy in the later 1980s became dominated by abduction stories obtained largely by hypnotic regression. It seemed that the answer to the entire UFO riddle might finally be within grasp of researchers.

The search for new, better and more dramatic abduction cases became increasingly frantic through 1988 and 1989. Publication followed publication as new reports cascaded out and researchers sought to find a pattern to the abductions and the apparently medical examinations and experiments conducted during them.

Thus far, the researchers had been concentrating on the UFOs and their occupants. But in 1989 a man named Bob Lazar came forward to claim that he had spent some time working at the highly secretive American military research base known as “Area 51”. He claimed that the US military were in touch with aliens - which matched the general description of “greys” - and were in the process of reverse engineering alien technology. The claims reignited ideas of a conspiracy between the aliens and certain human organisations (usually the US government in some form) which had lain dormant for more than a decade.

The new wave of conspiracy speculation would soon combine with studies of alien abductions to produce new ideas and theories that would dominate research in the 1990s.
 

 
Rupert Matthews is the author of the book Roswell which is available on Amazon and from all good bookshops. You can find Rupert’s website at www.rupertmatthews.com. He also maintains a blog about the unexplained at www.ghosthunteratlarge.blogspot.com.

The Starr Case

The following guest article is by Rupert Matthews, author of the book Roswell.

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The Starr Case
By Rupert Matthews

Not too different was the sighting at Old-Saybrook in Connecticut, USA, on 16 December 1957. Mrs. Mary Starr, a retired teacher, was awoken about 2.00am by a bright light shining into her bedroom. She looked out the window to see a cigar-shaped object hovering about 15 feet away in her backyard.

The object was about 30 feet long and dark grey in colour. Along the side was a series of square windows from which a bright light streamed out. Through the windows, Starr could see two men walking about. The object was only about five feet tall, so Starr estimated the men to be about three feet tall, but that they were otherwise quite human. They seemed to be wearing jackets that flared at the waist and had on square helmets that carried a reddish-orange light on top.

Mrs Starr opened her window and leaned out to get a better look. At this point a third figure came into sight through the windows. Then the light inside was switched off and the outer skin of the object began to glow with a dull blue colour. What looked like a wire antenna then rose out of the top of the object and began to emit sparks.

After about five minutes the antenna slid back into the object, which began to glow more brightly. The UFO then moved off as a row of small, circular lights appeared around its centreline. After clearing the yard fence, the object tilted upward and accelerated out of sight.

 
 
Rupert Matthews is the author of the book Roswell which is available on Amazon and from all good bookshops. You can find Rupert’s website at www.rupertmatthews.com. He also maintains a blog about the unexplained at www.ghosthunteratlarge.blogspot.com.

Maryland Aliens

The following guest article is by Rupert Matthews, author of the book Roswell.

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Maryland Aliens
By Rupert Matthews

Another similar sighting was made barely a week later by Mrs. Suzanne Knight at Seat Pleasant, Maryland, USA. At about 9.30pm the newly married Knight was at home with her sister, her husband being absent on business. She was tidying up the kitchen when she heard a loud buzzing noise coming from the back yard. Looking out she saw what she at first thought was an aircraft diving down to crash into a field.

The object was shaped like an aircraft fuselage, though without wings or tail and was plunging down at a steep angle and high speed. As Mrs Knight watched in alarm, the object pulled out of its dive and came to a standstill, hovering at a height of about 300 feet some 250 feet from the house.

The sides of the object had what looked like square windows through which streamed a bright yellow light. Through the windows Mrs Knight could see several square objects that she later likened to filing cabinets with sloping tops. On top of the object was a dull red light or glow that seemed to be rather diffuse. Underneath the object was slung a long yellow tube or box which also had windows.

At the front of the object was a larger window through which Mrs Knight could see a man. He was sitting bolt upright and staring straight ahead without moving. He had on a hat or helmet of some kind. His skin and clothing appeared yellow, though Mrs Knight thought that this might be due to the yellow light. Otherwise he looked quite human.

After watching the object hover for what she thought was a minute or more, Mrs Knight left the window to phone the local newspaper and call her sister. The newspaper phone was engaged, and her sister did not reply to her shouts.

Mrs Knight then returend to the kitchen window in time to see the object climbing back into the sky. The internal lights had gone out and the object was now more reddish in colour than silver. It began to shimmer as if it were being seen through a heat haze, then it accelerated away.

Mrs Knight’s sister arrived at this point to ask why she had been calling for her. Mrs Knight told her of the UFO, but the sister merely laughed and said that she must have been dreaming. Her husband was more sympathetic and suggested she report the matter, which she did.

 

Rupert Matthews is the author of the book Roswell which is available on Amazon and from all good bookshops. You can find Rupert’s website at www.rupertmatthews.com. He also maintains a blog about the unexplained at www.ghosthunteratlarge.blogspot.com.