part0012

I n the United States, the story of UFOs is usually said to have begun with the famous sighting by Kenneth Arnold, a businessman from Boise, Idaho. While flying his private plane in Washington State on June 24, 1947, Arnold saw nine flat, shiny objects flying in a line near Mount Rainier, and he compared their peculiar motion to a saucer skipping over water. A newsman, inspired by this description, coined the term “flying saucers,” and this became a household word as waves of reports came in of strange objects seen in the skies. Surprisingly, as years passed, these reports did not dwindle away. Rather, they began to be made persistently in countries all around the world, and this continues to the present day.

We have already seen that many of these unidentified flying objects, or UFOs, do not fit very well into accepted scientific theories, and therefore they have proven embarrassing for scientists. Indeed, some were sufficiently strange to outrage practically anyone’s world view. In this chapter, I will give an overview of the typical UFO encounters that people have reported.

I should begin by making some observations about my approach to UFO evidence. All of this evidence consists of stories related by witnesses. As I mentioned in the introduction, even “hard evidence” in the form of photographs or landing traces is practically meaningless if not accompanied by personal testimony. For example, suppose someone presents a metal sample of unusual composition and says that it came from a UFO. Given that the testimony is valid, the metal sample may tell us something about what the UFO was made of. But without the testimony it tells us nothing about UFOs. Thus the crucial evidence in UFO cases is always anecdotal—which simply means that it consists of human testimony.

In recounting people’s UFO experiences, I will often simply tell their story. However, it should be understood that this is generally the story as told by a witness to an investigator. In other cases, it is the story that an author took from an investigator’s report of what a witness told him. In a few cases, it is what a witness directly told me.

The approach of relying on the testimony of others is universally used in science. For example, our knowledge of what Michelson and Morley did in their famous interferometer experiment depends entirely on human testimony and the transmission of that testimony through written reports.

Few people would raise objections to the story of Michelson and Morley. But in the case of the bizarre stories connected with UFOs, one may object that human testimony is not to be trusted and point to the many failings of the human mind and senses. These failings should be considered, but human testimony is still all we have to go on.

I suggest that it is wrong to object to bizarre testimony simply because it is bizarre. To do so is to legislate that only conventionally acceptable statements can be admitted as evidence. This would be all right if nature happened to conform to our notions of what is acceptable, but it is quite possible that nature does not do so. Therefore, my strategy is to give human testimony a chance and recognize that objections to fallible human testimony also depend on fallible human judgment.

In discussing UFO reports, it is important to have a clear understanding of what is meant by a UFO. This term could be used to refer to practically anything that people see in the sky, or on the ground, that seems unusual or unexplainable. However, on the basis of social usage dating back to the days of Kenneth Arnold’s sighting, the term generally refers to something that looks like an unknown, intelligently guided vehicle. Here “unknown” means that the observed manifestation doesn’t resemble known natural phenomena or known manmade objects.

The phrase “intelligently guided vehicle” means that the manifestation either looks like a manufactured object or behaves in a way that is suggestive of intelligence. For example, if something looks metallic, smoothly curved, and symmetrical, we may say that it looks like a manufactured object. This impression is even stronger if it seems to be equipped with windows, doors, or landing gear. In some cases, only a distant light is seen, but the light’s movements may suggest intelligent guidance. Thus, if the light moves about in different directions, witnesses may think that it is not a meteor or a satellite. If the light also seems to move in a way that wouldn’t be expected for a balloon or an aircraft, then they might call it a UFO.

From this we can see that a UFO is anything but unidentified, and the term “unidentified flying object” is a misnomer. Calling something a UFO means that it is a particular kind of phenomenon, as defined above. Thus, we will sometimes find someone saying, “It was not an aircraft or a star. It was a genuine UFO.” This does not mean that the observed phenomenon was genuinely unidentified. Rather it means that the person wants to identify the phenomenon as an unknown manifestation that appears to be an intelligently guided vehicle.

Some UFO sightings involve distant lights seen at night, solid-looking objects seen during the day, or objects detected by radar. J. Allen Hynek has classified these as nocturnal lights, daylight discs, and radar cases. 1 The latter include radar-visual sightings in which a visual sighting was found to correlate strongly with radar observations. In addition, there are the so-called close encounters, which Hynek broke down as follows:

CE2: The same, with definite effects on the environment, observers, or instruments, such as burned, baked, or impacted areas of ground, temporary paralysis of the witness, or interference with electrical apparatus.

The close encounters of the third kind (or CE3s) involve extremely strange material. It is customary in cartoons to associate flying saucers with “little green men.” It is less widely known that humanlike beings of a variety of shapes and sizes have been regularly reported in connection with UFOs since the late 1940s. These beings are often short in stature but are rarely green. Since they tend to be roughly human in form, they are called humanoids.

In some cases, these beings are simply seen, and in others they are said to communicate, often by telepathy. In most CE3 cases, the beings do not physically capture the witnesses, although they are sometimes reported to stun them or temporarily paralyze them. But in recent years, great publicity has been given to a subset of the CE3 cases in which UFO beings are reported to aggressively abduct humans and take them on board their vehicles. These are called UFO abductions or close encounters of the fourth kind (CE4s). I will discuss CE3 cases without abduction in this chapter and leave UFO abductions to Chapter 4 .

There is also another kind of UFO encounter, not included in the four close-encounter categories, in which the witness enters into a friendly relationship with UFO humanoids, engages in extended conversations with them, and may even be taken on rides in their vehicles. These so-called contactee cases are infamous among UFO investigators, and they are often branded as hoaxes. Many probably are hoaxes, but I will argue in Chapter 5 that there seems to be a continuum of cases stretching from CE4s to full-fledged contactee cases. It is very hard to draw a neat line separating these two types of cases, and so a review of the UFO evidence must consider both types.

The statistics on numbers of UFO sightings are extremely variable. I mentioned in Chapter 1 that between 1947 and the end of 1965 the U.S. Air Force accumulated 10,147 UFO reports. One might think that this gives a good idea of how many UFO sightings actually take place. However, by 1981 the Center for UFO Studies in Illinois had compiled a computer-coded file, called UFOCAT, of about 60,000 UFO reports from 113 countries. 2 This file was started by Dr. David Saunders after he joined the staff of the Condon UFO study, and thus it covers the interval from 1967 to 1981. Out of the 60,000 UFOCAT cases, about 2,000 involved CE3s, and 200 involved CE4s. 3

Clearly, the number of UFO reports in any given collection will depend on selection criteria and the number of people who are engaged in collecting reports. It is therefore very hard to estimate the total number of UFO sightings in any given time period or part of the world.

Vallee, writing in 1990, estimated that the number of close-encounter cases known at that time was between 3,000 and 10,000. He went on to argue that an average of 1 close encounter in 10 will actually be reported. Taking 5,000 as an estimate of the number of known cases, this means that 50,000 close encounters may have actually occurred. Since the known cases are concentrated in Europe, North and South America, and Australia, Vallee argued that twice as many cases might turn up if one could fully survey the entire world. This yields an estimate of 100,000 close encounters. 4

Vallee noted that close encounters tend to be nocturnal, with a high peak of activity at 9 p.m. and a lesser peak at about 3 a.m. However, people tend to be in bed between 9 p.m. and 3 a.m., and thus there are fewer potential witnesses in this period. By using statistics for the number of people active outdoors at different times of day, one can compute a curve for UFO encounters per available observer. This rises steadily throughout the night and peaks at about 3 a.m. Vallee suggested that this curve might give a true picture of UFO activity as a function of time of day, and it implies an overall activity level 14 times higher than the actual reported level. He also noted that CE4’s show a pronounced peak between 10 p.m. and midnight. 5

One notorious feature of the UFO controversy is that people will often mistake various known objects or phenomena for UFOs. A good discussion of this is found in Raymond Fowler’s Casebook of a UFO Investigator . 6 He pointed out some causes of false UFO reports:

Manmade flying objects: Aircraft lights, advertising planes with signs made of many lights, the Goodyear blimp, military refueling exercises, amateur aircraft (hang gliders), kites, fireworks, children’s homemade hot air balloons, weather balloons, research balloons of various kinds, rocket launches and reentries, sodium and barium clouds released from rockets for atmospheric tests, satellites (and their reentry), and drops of flares from military planes.

Natural phenomena: Mirages, ball lightning, birds, meteors (fireballs, bolides), stars (for example, Sirius, Capella, and Arcturus in the Northern Hemisphere), planets (Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn), and the moon (often when full and near the horizon).

To give an idea of how often these mistaken identifications are made, Fowler pointed out that in the first 6 months of 1978, the CUFOS hotline received 452 UFO reports attributable to ordinary objects. These were aircraft in 210 cases, stars or planets in 127 cases, and meteors in 54 cases. 7

Stars may appear to move about due to autokinesis, a process caused by the movements of the eye. Celestial bodies may also appear to follow a moving car because, on a straight road, their position relative to the car will stay the same. Other causes of false UFO reports are hallucinations due to drugs, alcohol, or mental derangement. There are also hoaxes, including hot air balloons, frisbees, and models photographed by children, as well as elaborate frauds created by adults. Fowler pointed out that hoaxes make up a very small percentage of UFO reports, and these are mostly pranks by schoolboys.

Sightings of relatively distant objects could be caused by mild misperceptions or simple hoaxes. But spurious close encounters seem to require something stronger. If a person reports a detailed, close-range view of a humanoid, then it would seem that either (1) he actually saw an unusual being, (2) he saw an illusion of such a being projected by an unknown cause, (3) he saw a manmade hoax, (4) he experienced a hallucination, or (5) he is a liar. To evaluate options (4) and (5), it is important to be able to assess the character, mental health, and personal motivations of the witnesses in close-encounter cases.

In some cases, witnesses are mentally imbalanced, and in others they turn out to be “con men,” out to gain money and influence by exploiting gullible people. However, there are large numbers of cases in which the witnesses are sane, responsible people who gain neither profit nor fame from their experiences, and who often try to conceal them in order to avoid ridicule. These cases provide some of the most persuasive evidence for the reality of close-encounter experiences. But one can still propose that failings of perception and memory in mentally sound people might generate reports of bizarre experiences. I will discuss this possibility in more detail in the next section.

Reports by mentally sound people might also be due to very elaborate hoaxes, which may be backed by considerable funding and manpower. It is possible that human beings might, for some nefarious reason, abduct someone and try to disguise this as a UFO abduction. The abductors could wear UFO alien costumes, alter the victim’s consciousness with the aid of drugs and hypnosis, and even take the victim into a Hollywood-style UFO set.

There are, in fact, cases in which something like this may have happened. For example, in one abduction case reported by the British UFO investigator Jenny Randles, a woman named “Margary” (a pseudonym) was apparently abducted, drugged, and programmed with posthypnotic suggestions. When she later began to remember details of the episode, she recalled one of her abductors saying in an amused tone, “They will think it’s flying saucers.” 8

In this case, the abductors were entirely human-looking, and the site to which Margary was taken seemed to be an ordinary house. It is not at all clear what was going on here. For example, why go to all the trouble to stage a phony UFO abduction and then spoil it by making such remarks to the victim?

In recent years accusations have been made linking UFO abductions with military and intelligence establishments in the U.S. and Europe. Researcher Martin Cannon has hypothesized that the CIA is carrying out extensive mind control experiments on U.S. citizens and covering its tracks by disguising these experiments as abductions by aliens. 9 Cannon argues that CIA-developed techniques of hypnosis aided by drugs and radio control could well account for some of the phenomena of mind control reported by abductees. He would attribute the Margary case to a sloppy job done by novices in hypnotic manipulation. 10

Although Cannon’s theory is nearly as extreme as the hypothesis of alien abduction itself, it does explain why many abductees report harassment by what appear to be human secret agents. It might explain why abductees such as Leah Haley 11 and researchers such as Karla Turner 12 report apparent abductions involving military personnel. It also fits in nicely with Jacques Vallee’s charge that the abduction of Franck Fontaine in France was a test of mind control techniques carried out under the orders of highly placed officials in the French government. 13

Of course, it is possible that a certain percentage of UFO abductions are being carried out by human beings and others are due to some other agency. Thus the psychologist Richard Boylan argues that some UFO abductions are “conducted as psychological warfare (PSYWAR) operations by military/intelligence/special operations figures,” but he attributes other abduction accounts to intervention by alien beings. 14

As we will see later on, many UFO close-encounter cases have features that would be quite difficult to simulate by human beings. If UFO close encounters in general are being staged by human conspirators, then this would require a tremendous covert investment in manpower and Hollywood special effects. At present, it seems unlikely that such an enormous effort is being carried out, although there does seem to be evidence of a covert human component in some UFO abduction accounts. I will say more about the possible role of government agencies in UFO encounters in Chapter 3 ( pages 110–15 ).

The psychiatrist Ian Stevenson has made some observations about misperception and failings of memory that are applicable to the evaluation of UFO reports. Stevenson has spent many years studying what he calls spontaneous cases in the field of parapsychology. These are cases in which a person reports some ostensibly paranormal experience outside the confines of a controlled, laboratory situation. These include telepathic and precognitive impressions, out-of-body experiences, memories of past lives, poltergeist cases, and apparitions. Stevenson has specialized in the study of past-life memories in young children, and he has carefully studied the use of interviews with witnesses as the main method of researching these cases.

I will briefly summarize some remarks that Stevenson made about evaluating the evidence for spontaneous cases. Although he did not mention UFOs in his discussion, his observations are quite relevant to the evaluation of UFO reports.

One of his first points was that the adjectives “authentic” and “evidential” are applied to spontaneous cases. A case is authentic if the witnesses and the reporting are highly reliable, so that one can justifiably believe that the events in question happened as reported. It is evidential if it is authentic and there is justification for thinking that the case has paranormal features. 15

J. Allen Hynek expressed similar ideas. He spoke of a credibility index and a strangeness index. 16 The credibility index measures the reliability of UFO witnesses, as indicated by their reputations, medical histories, occupations, sharpness of eyesight, and other factors. He also said that single witness cases should be given “no more than quarter-scale credibility.” The strangeness index measures how far the reported events seem to defy explanation in normal physical terms. Hynek felt that there are UFO cases of high credibility and strangeness, and Stevenson similarly felt that there are spontaneous cases that are authentic and evidential.

Stevenson pointed out that one defect in many spontaneous cases is that the case was not described in writing until considerable time had elapsed. This is also true of many (but by no means all) UFO cases. It leads to the problem that human memories may erode with time and that accounts may be filled in with reconstructions or supplemental material. However, Stevenson pointed out that retention of detail in memory depends on the emotional intensity of the experience, on repetition, and on motivation to remember. Many paranormal experiences involve high emotional intensity and motivation to remember. 17 The same is reported by many UFO close-encounter witnesses.

Stevenson went on to point out four cases in which it could be demonstrated that witnesses retained good memory of paranormal experiences over several years. In one example, a man and his wife wrote detailed accounts in 1909 of an apparently precognitive dream that he had in 1902. Eight years later, the woman wrote another account without consulting any memoranda or discussing the case with her husband. This account differed in only one minor detail from her husband’s earlier account. 18 Stevenson pointed out that in all four cases there was not only little loss of detail but also little elaboration of new detail.

It is often charged that percipients in spontaneous cases tend to embellish their memories as time passes, and this makes it impossible to find out later what they originally experienced. Although Stevenson acknowledged that embellishment does happen, he said, “In my own experience embellishment of the main features of an account occurs very rarely.” 19 He said that he had checked this many times by coming back unexpectedly after one or several years and requestioning a witness about his experiences. I am not aware of any feature of UFO witnesses that would make them more prone to embellishment than witnesses of paranormal events not involving UFOs.

Stevenson noted that embellishment is more apt to occur in accounts given by secondhand reporters of a case than it is by primary witnesses. However, even these reporters do not always embellish the case. He commented, “Quite as often, if not more so, they drop important details and thus diminish its evidentiality.” 20

These tendencies could have a serious effect on UFO reports presented in secondary literature. The authors of UFO books may be more likely to distort testimony than many original witnesses. The only way to guard against this is to be aware of the reputations of UFO authors and identify the biases of particular presentations by surveying a wide variety of books and reports. My own impression after making a broad survey of the literature is that certain popular UFO authors do tend to introduce their own biases into UFO accounts. Often they do this by omitting features of UFO accounts that do not fit into their favored hypotheses.

Another problem with reports of spontaneous cases is malobservation. There have been many studies by lawyers and forensic psychologists in which an event is staged before witnesses, who are later asked to tell what happened. It is observed that the witnesses will frequently make many errors in their accounts of what they saw. For example, in a staged confrontation with guns, they may fail to correctly identify which party pulled out his gun first.

Stevenson commented that, “Such experiments certainly have some relevance to our field, but again I resist their use to reject all human testimony in spontaneous cases.” 21 One reason he gave for this is that witnesses may be confused about details that are crucial in a court of law, such as who drew his gun first. But they are not confused about the basic fact that the main event occurred— in this case an argument in which guns were drawn.

Can a person falsely remember a complete event—such as a bank robbery—which never actually occurred? When we are dealing with a clear, conscious memory by a sane adult of an event which occurred a no more than a few years ago during adult life, it seems unlikely that this will occur. However, memory does have its gray areas. If a person does not have a clear memory of a particular event, then persuasive social pressure may induce the person to “remember” that event, at least vaguely, even though it never happened. This may take place when the person is dominated by an authority figure, such as a psychotherapist, who strongly believes that the person has repressed memories of certain experiences and is able to recover them. It is even more likely to happen when a highly suggestible person is hypnotized for the purpose of recovering lost memories.

In recent years these failings of human memory have become a topic of heated controversy. Many people undergoing certain forms of psychotherapy have supposedly recovered repressed childhood memories of sexual abuse by parents or close relatives. Families have been disrupted when these recovered memories led to bitter accusations and expensive lawsuits directed at family members.

This has resulted in a strong backlash in which accused family members have charged that the recovered memories of abuse are really fantasies generated in the accusers’ minds by the psychotherapeutic process. This generation of pseudomemories has been named the false memory syndrome (FMS), and it has become the focus of a great deal of psychological research.

Proponents of the false memory syndrome argue that human memory is a highly malleable, reconstructive process. Some maintain that repressed memories may not even exist and that the apparent recovery of lost memories is an illusion. Thus sociologist Richard Ofshe maintains that “The notion of repression has never been more than an unsubstantiated speculation tied to other Freudian concepts and speculative mechanisms.” 22

Others say that repressed memories can be recovered, but false memories may also be generated by the recovery process. Extreme statements abound in this controversial area, but the following statement from the American Psychological Association gives a moderate summary of the basic FMS hypothesis: “It is possible for memories of abuse that have been forgotten for a long time to be remembered. . . . It is also possible to construct convincing pseudo memories for events that never occurred. . . . There are gaps in our knowledge of the processes that lead to accurate or inaccurate recollection of childhood sexual abuse.” 23

A review of the evidence suggests that false memories can, indeed, arise in peoples’ minds under the influence of suggestion. This observation can always be used to cast eyewitness testimony into doubt, particularly if the testimony may have been influenced by social pressures. However, the general rejection of human testimony has serious consequences. Child victim expert Lucy Berliner observed: “I don’t think all eyewitness accounts should be discredited as a result [of the false memory syndrome]. Many of the cases in our criminal justice system depend on eyewitness accounts. If an environment is created in which we say not to listen to those accounts, then what do we do?” 24

I would suggest that a reasonable position is that human memory is imperfect, but not totally imperfect. The existence of false memories does pose complications for the interpretation of eyewitness testimony, but it does not imply that all eyewitness testimony should be disregarded.

Unfortunately the idea of the false memory syndrome can be used to totally rule out certain categories of testimony as invalid. This is shown by some of the examples of false memories cited by FMS researchers. For example, Nicholas Spanos and his colleagues cited three categories of false memories in an article published in The International Journal of Hypnosis. 25 These are (1) hypnotically induced memories of past lives, (2) memories of UFO close encounters, and (3) memories of ritual abuse carried out by members of satanic cults. The article took it for granted that the memories in the first two categories must be false since, after all, past lives and UFOs do not exist. The memories of satanic abuse were dismissed as unreal because investigations by law enforcement agencies have failed to show the existence of the alleged satanic cults.

Ian Stevenson has pointed out that hypnotically induced memories of past lives are often spurious. 26 But he also maintained that “rarely— very rarely—something of evidential value emerges during attempts to evoke previous lives during hypnosis,” and he cited two studies of his own in which this happened. 27

It would seem that memories of past lives recovered through hypnosis are not necessarily false. In a few cases, such memories may actually be evidential. If so, then these are presumably part of a larger set of cases that are genuine but not strong enough to be considered evidential. In still other cases, the memories may contain genuine elements as well as elements produced by imagination.

The situation of reports of satanic ritual abuse may be similar. FBI investigator Kenneth Lanning, who has spent years investigating the sexual victimization of children, has pointed out that many accusations of satanic sexual abuse are being made that law enforcement agents have been unable to corroborate. However, Lanning does not dismiss all of these satanic abuse reports as false. He stated that, “Some of what the victims allege may be true and accurate, some may be misperceived or distorted, some may be screened or symbolic, and some may be “contaminated’ or false. The problem and challenge, especially for law enforcement, is to determine which is which.” 28

I would suggest that similar observations might be made about reports of UFO close encounters. The failings of human memory make it likely that many of these reports may contain spurious material. This is particularly true of uncorroborated reports in which hypnosis was used by a zealous investigator to recover lost memories from a highly suggestible witness.

However, since human memory is not completely imperfect, and sometimes works remarkably well, it also seems reasonable to suppose that many reports of UFO close encounters contain realistic material and some may be quite accurate. This is particularly true of multiple witness cases and cases involving responsible adults with clear, conscious memories. The use of hypnosis to recover memories of UFO encounters is controversial, and I will discuss it in Chapter 4 .

I should also note that, according to Stevenson’s analysis, suggestion and social pressure often tend to suppress rather than encourage the reporting of unusual phenomena. Some researchers argue that human errors in paranormal cases “are nearly all in the direction of reinforcing previously held favorable beliefs about paranormal events.” 29 Stevenson said he has encountered this kind of amplification and it is particularly common among people seeking to cash in on their experiences. But he pointed out that many people report paranormal events with great reluctance due to fear of ridicule. And “many subjects also insist that prior to their experiences they had no settled convictions or knowledge about the experiences which parapsychology studies.” 30 He suggested that these people are not likely to amplify normal events into paranormal ones and may do just the opposite. Very similar observations have been made by investigators of UFO close encounters.

Now I will look at a few close-encounter cases in detail. The first case is typical of UFO close encounters in content, but it has an unusual number of apparently independent eyewitnesses who offer corroborating testimony. It was originally investigated by the New York City UFO researcher Budd Hopkins, and I will summarize his account. 31

In January of 1975, George O’Barski, an astute, 72-year-old New Yorker, was traveling home to North Bergen, New Jersey, after closing his Manhattan liquor shop and doing some bookkeeping and replenishing of shelves. The time was around 1 or 2 a.m. In North Hudson Park, across the Hudson from Manhattan, his car radio began to pick up static, and a brilliantly lit object passed the car 100 feet or so to the left. It emitted a quiet humming sound and stopped in a playing field ahead of the car. As O’Barski incredulously drew closer, he saw a roundish, 30-foot-long ship that was now hovering 10 feet above the ground. The ship had evenly spaced windows about one foot wide by four feet high. As it sank to a height of about four feet, a door opened between two of the windows, and nine to eleven small, helmeted figures in one-piece garments emerged and descended using a ladderlike apparatus. They were about 3.5 to 4 feet tall and looked like children in snowsuits.

As O’Barski drove slowly by, watching in terror, the beings apparently ignored him and proceeded to use spoonlike implements to scoop dirt into bags they carried. After doing this, they quickly reentered the craft, and it ascended, moving north. O’Barski estimated that the whole episode took about four minutes. He recalled it consciously, without recourse to hypnotism.

The next morning, O’Barski returned to the site, saw the holes made by the digging entities, and felt one with his hand to convince himself that they were real. As he put it, “A man my age telling a story like this—why, they’d put you away. If you’d come in here a year ago and told me the same story, I wouldn’t have believed you either.” 32

As it turns out, however, Hopkins was able to find other people who may have seen the same flying object. His second witness was a man named Bill Pawlowski, who was a doorman at the Stonehenge Apartments, a high-rise apartment building near the landing site in Hudson Park. Pawlowski testified that he was on duty in the apartment building at 2 or 3 in the morning one day in January of 1975. He looked up into the adjacent park and saw a row of 10 to 15 brilliant, evenly spaced lights, which appeared to be about 10 feet off the ground, with a dark mass surrounding the lights. He walked to the window for a better view and then turned back to call a tenant in the building on the phone. At that moment, he was startled by a high-pitched vibration and cracking sound. A glance at the window showed that it was broken, and later inspection showed that it had been hit from the outside.

As Pawlowski glanced up, the lights had disappeared. He duly reported the incident to the North Bergen police, who came to inspect the window. But he discreetly avoided mentioning the strange lights in the park. Later, however, he did relate the incident to police lieutenant Al Del Gaudio, who lived in the building. Del Gaudio told Hopkins that he remembered hearing Pawlowski’s story about the “big thing with lights on it” and had dismissed it as unbelievable. 33

Another witness located by Hopkins was Frank Gonzalez, a doorman who worked at Stonehenge on Pawlowski’s nights off. He had sighted a similar object at the same location between 2 and 3 a.m. on January 6, six days before O’Barski’s sighting. He described his experience as follows: “I saw something round, very bright, you know . . . with some windows. I hear some noise . . . it’s not like a helicopter, nothing like that. Like a plane, no, no. Something different. . . . Then, you know, I see that light go straight up and I said, ‘Oh God!’” 34

Then there is the experience of the Wamsley family. After Hopkins’s colleague Gerry Stoehrer gave a talk on UFOs to a North Bergen PTA group, he was approached by 12-year-old Robert Wamsley and his mother, Alice. They said that while the family watched the Bob Newhart show one Saturday night in January, Robert looked out the window and saw a round, domed, brilliantly lit craft outside the window. It had rectangular windows that gave off a yellowish glow, and it floated forty to fifty feet off the ground. Four members of the family, including barefooted Mrs. Wamsley in her bathrobe, then ran out into the street and followed the slowly moving object for about two minutes.

The Wamsley family lived about 14 blocks from the Stonehenge apartments, and as the UFO was lost from view it was moving in that direction. Hopkins mentions that this apparently occurred on the same day as O’Barski’s sighting; one piece of corroborating evidence for the date was that both O’Barski and the Wamsleys noted that the weather was unusually mild for January. 35 It would seem, then, that O’Barski, Pawlowski, and the Wamsleys may have seen the same craft on the same date. Gonzalez may have seen the same or a similar craft in another visitation six days earlier.

This story is typical of many UFO close-encounter reports. There is the strange craft, which looks like a piece of flying architecture with no evident means of propulsion. The craft makes a humming sound, and it carries bright lights. Little human figures dressed in suits emerge from it, engage in some apparently meaningless action, and then depart.

The UFO definitely seems to be intelligently controlled. It doesn’t operate according to known physical principles in any immediately obvious way. But, at the same time, the story contains no direct evidence that the UFO is extraterrestrial. This conclusion could only be inferred indirectly by saying that if the “little men” do not live on the earth, then they must come from another planet. But this is surely not the only possibility.

Could the story be a hoax, a hallucination, or a misperception of natural phenomena? Certainly, natural phenomena seem to be ruled out. The hypothesis of hallucination or hoax runs into difficulty because several people testified to seeing the strange object.

One might argue that the witnesses influenced one another, perhaps on a subconscious level, so that they all came up with mutually supportive stories. This might be true of Pawlowski and Gonzalez, who both worked at the Stonehenge apartments. But the three groups consisting of (1) O’Barski, (2) Pawlowski and Gonzalez, and (3) the Wamsleys were supposed to be mutually unknown to one another. If they did influence one another, they must have known one another and that suggests a deliberate conspiracy. Or one might propose that when Hopkins visited Stonehenge, he influenced Pawlowski and Gonzalez to imagine their stories. Then Stoehrer’s talk influenced the Wamsleys to concoct their story.

Of course, only O’Barski saw the little suited figures, and one would have to ask if he had a history of mental derangement. However, Hopkins characterized him as intelligent, “street-wise,” reflective— and a strict teetotaler. Also he was not a UFO “believer” before his experience.

The digging up of soil samples by the little figures is puzzling. This activity has been reported in large numbers of UFO cases, and it has been popularized in movies like ET. O’Barski might have heard about it, but why would he invite ridicule by claiming to have seen such a thing himself?

Now, it turns out that the Stonehenge encounter story has additional features that I haven’t yet mentioned. We can get another perspective on this story by turning to the testimony of the psychiatrist and UFO researcher Berthold Schwarz:

I also saw four of the Stonehenge protagonists in cursory psychiatric and paranormal surveys. . . . EU, the day doorman, and a leading experient, has had lifelong high-quality psi: e.g., possible precognition—he claimed foreknowledge of the UFO activity—apparitions and telekinesis. His son and wife also had unusual presumed psi experiences. EU and the apartment electrician shared a close daytime sighting. They noted how the top floor of their apartment was unique, and might have resembled the stereotyped concept of a conventional UFO by its circular shape, dome, and flashing lights on the sides. EU wondered: “Is there an attraction to this building?” 36

Apparitions and telekinesis? Four protagonists? It begins to look as though the Stonehenge apartment building was a hotbed of psychic and UFO activity. The fact that several persons at Stonehenge had paranormal and UFO interests might cause one to speculate that the whole sighting story was concocted by people with overheated imaginations. But we should consider that Hopkins’s first lead was the story of O’Barski, who—barring conspiracy—had no connection with Stonehenge. How, then, could the story have originated at Stonehenge? And was the Wamsley family driven to lies or hallucinations by stories originating in that apartment building?

The information added by Schwarz illustrates two important points about the UFO phenomenon. The first is that no matter how much one knows about a given UFO encounter case, there is likely to be other important information about which one is unaware. In many instances, this information simply hasn’t come to light during the investigation of the case. In other instances, the investigator may be able to believe and report certain aspects of the case, but he finds other aspects so incredible that he decides not to mention them. Or he may not mention certain aspects because he fears people may dismiss the whole case on hearing of them.

The second point is that UFO encounter cases tend to be connected with paranormal phenomena. Sometimes the witnesses, or people associated with them, have a past history of paranormal experiences. In others, a person will begin to have paranormal experiences after the UFO encounter, involving telepathy, poltergeist phenomena, or psychic healing. This is an empirical observation that I will gradually document with a number of examples. Later on I will consider what it might mean.

Next I turn to a UFO close-encounter case that was reported to Congress on April 5, 1966, during the hearings on Unidentified Flying Objects by the Committee on Armed Services. The report on the case was submitted to Congress by its investigator, Raymond Fowler, who was identified as a project administrator and engineer in the Minuteman missile program. This case involves a close-range sighting of what seemed to be a strange flying machine, and it also involved several eyewitnesses. The total report in the Congressional record occupies about 33 pages.

The story unfolded near Exeter, New Hampshire, during the early-morning hours of September 3, 1965. The first sign that something strange was happening came at 1:30 a.m., when police officer Eugene Bertrand investigated a parked car and found a distraught woman (some reports say two women) who claimed that her car had been followed for some 12 miles by a flying object encircled with a brilliant red glow. She stated that the object dived at her moving automobile several times.

Bertrand rejected this story but was soon summoned back to his police station to investigate a similar story by 18-year-old Norman Muscarello. The teenager had burst into the station at 1:45–2:00 a.m. in a state of near shock. He stated that while he was hitchhiking along Route 150, a glowing object with pulsating red lights suddenly came floating across a nearby field in his direction. He said that the object was as big as a house and that it was completely silent as it moved toward him. After he dove for cover, the object backed away and disappeared over the trees. After banging on the door of a nearby house with no response, he flagged down a car, which took him to the police station.

Bertrand and Muscarello returned to the scene, and at about 2:25–2:40 a.m. both saw the object rise silently from behind a row of trees. As Bertrand later described it, the object was as big as a house. It seemed compressed, as if it were round or egg-shaped, with no protrusions like wings, rudder, or stabilizer. The object had a row of four or five blinding red lights that blinked cyclically, casting a blood-red glow over the field and a nearby farmhouse. Bertrand said that the lights were brighter than any he had ever seen, and he had the impression that he and Muscarello might have been burned if they did not run from the object as it approached them.

The lights seemed to be part of a large, dark, solid object. 37 As nearby horses kicked in their stalls and dogs howled, the object floated about two hundred feet off the ground, yawing from side to side with a fluttering motion like a falling leaf. The total time of the sighting was about ten minutes.

This testimony was confirmed by officer David Hunt, who arrived on the scene in time to observe the object for five or six minutes as it departed in the direction of Hampton. The police also received a phone call from an excited man in Hampton, who reported seeing a “flying saucer” but whose line went dead before he could be identified.

At one point, this sighting was identified in a newspaper as an advertising plane owned by the Sky-Lite Aerial Advertising Agency of Boston. However, some checking showed that this plane was not flying on the night in question, and it carried a sign made of 500 white lights—with no red lights. 38

The Air Force initially proposed that Muscarello, Bertrand, and Hunt had seen high-flying airplanes in a refueling exercise called Big Blast “Coco.” However, the timing of the sighting ruled this out, and Air Force officials concluded:

The early sightings by two unnamed women and Mr. Muscarello are attributed to aircraft from operation Big Blast “Coco.” The subsequent observation by Officers Bertrand and Hunt occurring after 2 a.m. are regarded as unidentified. 39

The high intensity of the lights reported by the witnesses seems to be crucial for the interpretation of this sighting. It would seem that an advertising plane or military planes in a refueling exercise would not produce such an overpowering impression of blinding light to observers at ground level. And if the witnesses were seeing an unknown natural phenomenon, why would the lights be arranged in a row and flash in sequence?

Most of the well-publicized cases recorded in the UFO literature in the forties, fifties, and early sixties involved sightings of strange flying objects from a distance. However, close encounters were also being reported during this time. We have already cited Dr. William Powers’s statement in Science that there were over 200 reports of UFO landings in 1954, many with occupants. The actual level of reporting may have been even higher. Thus Edward J. Ruppelt, the head of U.S. Air Force UFO investigations in 1952, wrote in The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects that he felt plagued by reports of landings, and his team conscientiously eliminated them. 40

It is not clear why UFO reports became so much more prominent after 1947 than they were before. There are earlier reports, but these are relatively few in number. For example, Raymond Fowler, while explaining the origin of his interest in UFOs, pointed out that his mother had a UFO encounter in Bar Harbor, Maine, when she was a child in 1917. Fowler relates that one evening his mother and her sister were returning home with friends from a church club meeting. As they took a shortcut across a field, a huge silent object suddenly appeared overhead, and “hues of reds, blues, greens, and yellows reflected off their frightened faces.” 41 In this case, the terrified children ran for home, and the incident was over.

This encounter is striking because it shares features with the much more elaborate visitations at Fatima, Portugal, which also occurred in 1917. The events at Fatima also involved multicolored lights from the sky which reflected from peoples faces, and they are described in Chapter 8 ( pages 293–96 ).

Going back to 1947, a classical encounter with diminutive humanoids was said to have taken place in Italy on August 14 th of that year. This report is interesting because it antedates all other well-known reports of “little men” from UFOs. At the same time, it was never widely publicized, and so it is hard to see how it could have influenced the many similar cases that took place after it.

The witness in this case was Rapuzzi Luigi Johannis, a well-known Italian painter and science fiction writer. His encounter occurred near Villa Santina, north of Venice and near the borders of Austria and Yugoslavia. Johannis said he first related his story in confidence to two people in America when he visited there in 1950. He tried in 1952 to publish an account in L’Europeo but was turned down since he lacked proofs. He finally published it in an Italian magazine, Clypeus, No. 2–5, in May 1964 under the title “ Ho visto un disco volante. ” 42 I mention these dates to show that Johannis could have made up the story, based on UFO literature available by 1964. Of course, this doesn’t mean that he did make it up.

On the day of the encounter, Johannis, who was interested in geology and anthropology, was hiking up a mountain stream, looking for fossils. He saw, wedged into a transverse cleft in the mountainside, a red, metallic, disc-shaped object with a low central cupola and no apertures. This object had a telescoping antenna and was some 10 meters wide. He noted in his account that at that time he knew nothing of flying saucers.

While looking to see if anyone else was around, he saw two “boys” at a distance of some 50 meters. On approaching them, he realized that they were not human, and he felt paralyzed and devoid of strength. They were not over 90 centimeters in height (about 3 feet) and wore translucent, dark blue coveralls, with red collars and belts. Their heads were bigger than those of a normal man. Johannis said that their facial features, described in anthropomorphic terms, included enormous, protruding round eyes, a straight, geometrically cut nose, and a slitlike mouth shaped like a circumflex accent. The “skin” was of an earthy green color.

After gaping in astonishment for a couple of minutes, he waved his geological pick and shouted something. In response, one entity touched his belt, sending forth a “ray” that left Johannis prostrated on the ground, devoid of all strength to move. He managed to roll over slowly in time to see one entity make off with his pick. The entities then returned to their craft, which shortly flew off, dislodging a cascade of stones from the mountainside. He testified that the disc, as it hovered in the air, suddenly grew smaller and vanished. This was accompanied by a blast of wind which rolled him over on the ground.

After some three hours, Johannis felt strong enough to painfully make his way home. He recalled that he resolved to say nothing about the incident, as he didn’t want to be considered a crazy visionary, or worse. On traveling to New York two months later, he heard for the first time about the flying saucers seen by Kenneth Arnold, and at that time he decided to reveal the story in confidence. He also said that two local people testified to seeing a red ball rising in the sky and vanishing at about the time of the incident.

In this account, there are several features that occur repeatedly in UFO close encounters. The paralyzing ray is standard, and so is the abrupt disappearance of the disc at the time of its departure. In his testimony before Congress on April 5, 1966, J. Allen Hynek made the observation that if UFOs are tangible objects, then they should be seen flying from point to point over considerable distances. Hynek found it puzzling that this is not observed. 43 Instead, UFOs often seem to appear abruptly, maneuver about in a localized area, and then abruptly disappear. After we review more examples of this, I will consider some ideas as to what may be happening.

The little men seen by Johannis were also typical in a number of ways. The uniforms, small stature, big heads and eyes, and slitlike mouths show up repeatedly in close-encounter cases. The green skin, however, is somewhat unusual—despite jokes about little green men.

The validity of the Johannis account depends entirely on the integrity of Johannis himself. He was clearly an intelligent and talented individual, but one might suspect that he was too talented. Did he just make up the story? It is not clear why he would do this or what he had to gain by it, but we cannot rule out the possibility.

In contrast to the Johannis case, Dr. Berthold Schwarz has recounted an equally bizarre story in which a careful evaluation of the character of the witness makes it seem highly unlikely that he was concocting a tall tale. Since the credibility of this story rests on the reputation of Schwarz, I note that he is a psychiatrist who has written books on both child psychiatry and psychical research. He has also written a book on psychiatric aspects of the UFO phenomenon, and that book is the source of the story I am about to present.

At about 10 a.m. on April 24, 1964, a 26-year-old farmer named Gary Wilcox was spreading manure in a field on his dairy farm in Newark Valley, New York. He saw a white, shiny object above the field, just on the inside edge of the woods, and he drove up on his tractor to investigate it. At first he thought it was a fuselage or fuel tank of an airplane, and he went up and touched it. There then appeared from underneath the object two four-foot-tall men holding a metal tray filled with alfalfa, roots, soil, and leaves. They wore whitish metallic suits that left no part of their bodies exposed.

As Wilcox stood there anxiously, wondering what kind of trick was being played on him, one of the men said, “Do not be alarmed,” in an eerie voice that seemed to emanate from the general vicinity of his body. They then asked Wilcox questions about farming and fertilizer and claimed they came from Mars, which is made of rocky substances not fit for growing crops. They made comments about air pollution in congested areas, and predicted the deaths of astronauts Glenn and Grissom from exposure in space. The men then ducked under the craft and disappeared. The craft produced a noise like a car motor idling, glided away for about 150 feet, and disappeared into the air.

In response to the men’s request for some fertilizer, Wilcox later brought a bag of it to the site. The next morning he noticed that it was gone. 44

Now, what kind of person would tell a story like that? Berthold Schwarz carried out a psychiatric examination of Wilcox and found that he “had no past history for neonatal disturbances, serious illness in the formative years, neurotic character traits, dissociative or amnesic experiences, fugues, sociopathic behavior, school problems, head injury, encephalopathy, surgery, or any kind of aberrant behavior.” 45 He was in good health and had been a good student in school. He had no previous interest in UFOs or exotic subjects, and his reading was limited to newspapers and popular magazines. He sometimes attended services at a local Baptist church.

Schwarz tested Wilcox, using the Cornell Medical Index Health Questionnaire, the Rotter Incomplete Sentences Test, and the computer-automated Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI). The results were consistent with physical and emotional health. On the MMPI “a configural search for positive traits and strengths showed correlations for describing the subject as compliant, methodical, orderly, socially reserved, and sincere.” 46

Schwarz concluded, “It would be most unusual . . . for Gary Wilcox to concoct such a fantastic story without some clues for this from his psychiatric examination or from interviews with his friends, acquaintances, and family.” 47 At the same time, he noted that there is no reason to suppose that the beings in the story came from Mars just because they said so.

In a survey of UFO cases, it is important to note that UFO encounters are also reported by children. Here I will give three examples of such reports. One might object that children are prone to lies and fantasy, and therefore their testimony carries little weight. However, as shown by the traditional story of the boy who cried wolf, adults are able to distinguish between honesty and dishonesty in children. One lie may be hard to detect, but a child is unlikely to stop at one, and adults who inquire about the child will learn about his pattern of dishonest behavior.

The stories that I will recount in this section are not as well attested as the Wilcox case, but I think they deserve to be considered. As with all UFO stories, they do not constitute proof. But a satisfying approximation to proof can come only by understanding the overall pattern in large bodies of data, and then judging individual cases by how well they fit into the pattern. If we exclude large sections of data from consideration, we may miss important clues to the pattern.

The first of the three children’s reports is given in an article entitled “The Landing at Villares del Saz,” by Antonio Ribera, a longtime UFO researcher in Spain. 48 The principal witness in this case was an illiterate 14-year-old cowherd boy named Máximo Muñoz Hernáiz. He had an encounter while tending cows in the early part of July 1953 near the village of Villares del Saz, Cuenca, Central Spain. Here are excerpts from an interview of the boy, conducted by the editor of the newspaper Ofensiva:

The boy said that the men were dressed in smart blue suits like musicians at a fair, and they wore flat hats with visors. They also wore metal sheets on their arms, but he couldn’t describe these clearly. After the men reentered the object, it glowed very brightly and flew off rapidly, leaving no exhaust trail and making the same whistling sound as before.

Ribera said that the boy’s father went to the site with the officer in charge of the local police station, and they found footprints plus four holes forming a square 36 centimeters (14 inches) on each side. Other witnesses, including the police constable of the Honrubia Police Post near Villares, reported seeing a flying grayish-white sphere coming roughly from the site in Villares de Saz at the time of the encounter.

Strange though this story is, it is similar to many others told all over the world. If it really does originate with an illiterate cowherd boy from central Spain, it is hard to see why he would have thought of commonly reported details such as the oriental-looking faces, the whistling sound, the glowing of the globe, and its flight without a visible exhaust trail. Presumably, he would have needed coaching by someone knowledgeable, and this doesn’t seem plausible for an illiterate 14-year-old boy from a family of farmers. If the story is false, then it seems likely that the entire description of the boy and his situation must be false.

Another example of testimony from a child comes from 12-yearold John Swain, the son of a farmer living near Coldwater, Kansas. He had a UFO encounter in September of 1954, and wrote a letter about it to one Reverend Baller on Oct. 3, 1954:

You ask me about the saucer I saw. I was disking the field when I saw it. We had tractor trouble. It was late when we got it finished. It was cooled off some, so I worked till 8 p.m. Then I unhitched from the disk and came in. I met it about 400 feet and didn’t see it. I came on a . . . [terrace?]. He was crouched behind it. He jumped up and looked at me, and kind of floated. He jumped into the saucer and it lighted up and took off. It went out of sight. I told Mom and Dad about it. We talked it over. Then Mom called the sheriff. He came down that night and questioned me. He said he would come again in the morning and look and see if there were any tracks around. There was. He sent the reports to Washington, D.C. Signed, John Swain. 49

The tracks in question were said to be wedge-shaped and unlike those made by ordinary shoes. The floating of UFO entities is commonly reported, and once again we see a reference to a flying object that lights up or glows when it takes off. If this is a fantasy, it shows adherence to standard UFO themes rather than free imagination.

For the third example of a UFO encounter reported by children, I turn to South Africa. On Oct. 2, 1978, at about 11:15 a.m., four teenage schoolboys were waiting for the mother of the eldest to pick them up at an isolated spot in the Groendal Nature Preserve in South Africa. The boys became aware of a silver object protruding above the bush several hundred meters away, on the other side of a valley. At this moment, another of the boys noticed two men dressed in silver coveralls about 275 meters to the west of the object. Shortly after this, the two men were joined by a third, and the boys noticed that their mode of walking was peculiar. “They moved only from the knees downward and used their legs like a fin,” one of the boys said. 50

After the matter was reported some 10 days later, the boys were separately interviewed and gave similar stories. They also separately made comparable drawings of the men.

Several investigators, including a major in the police, spent about 90 minutes cutting through dense brush with machetes to reach the site. They found “a depressed area of 6 by 18 meters where the bush had been flattened to ground level and on the outside perimeter of the oval depression, there were 9 marks, each containing 3 or 4 tiny imprints.” 51

In the cases just described, we have seen several instances in which landed UFOs were reported to leave physical traces of their presence on the earth and on vegetation. Since such traces can be evaluated in a laboratory, they provide one of the main lines of scientific evidence for the physical reality of UFOs.

One case involving measurable ground traces was investigated by the UFO study group called GEPAN, established by the French space agency CNES in 1977 (see page 38 ). This case was described as follows by the head of GEPAN, Jean-Jacques Velasco:

At about 5 p.m. on February 8, 1981, Monsieur Collini was working quietly in his garden at Trans en Provence. Suddenly his attention was attracted by a low whistling sound that appeared to come from the far end of his property. Turning around, he saw in the sky above the trees something approaching a terrace at the bottom of the garden. The ovoid object suddenly landed. The witness moved forward and observed the strange phenomenon behind a small building.

Less than a minute later, the phenomenon suddenly rose and moved away in a direction similar to that of its arrival, still continuing to emit a low whistle. M. Collini immediately went to the apparent scene of the landing and observed circular marks and a clear crown-shaped imprint on the ground. The Gendarmerie arrived the next day to report, and, following our instructions, took samples from the ground and surrounding vegetation. On D+39 [39 days after the sighting], a GEPAN team was sent to investigate. The first results of the analysis proved interesting, with soil and vegetation samples showing significant effects, in particular biochemical disturbances to plant life. 52

The investigation showed that the witness had no psychological problems and that his testimony was internally and externally consistent. It also found signs of ground heating at the landing site to between 300° and 600°C, and the probable deposition of trace quantities of phosphate and zinc.

A biochemical analysis was carried out by the biochemistry lab of INRA (Institute National de la Recherche Agronomique) under one Prof. Bounias. This study dealt with the chlorophyll and carotenoid pigment content of a species of wild alfalfa growing in the area of the landing site. At 39 days after the sighting, a 30–50% reduction in chlorophyll pigments A and B was observed, with young leaf shoots showing the highest losses along with signs of premature senescence. The strength of the effect correlated strongly with distance from the center of the landing site. However, there were no signs of residual radioactivity. 53

This investigation seems to show that some UFO phenomena are amenable to serious scientific investigation. In this case, the integrity of the witness and the empirical measurements at the landing site combine to indicate that something unusual but physically real did actually happen. Perhaps the simplest hypothesis to explain the observed data is that an unknown type of flying machine did land in M. Collini’s garden, pause for a minute or so, and then fly away.

UFO ground trace cases have been studied extensively by Ted R. Phillips, who is a longtime UFO investigator and has participated in several scientific UFO studies in the United States. In 1981, he reported on a 14-year study of 2,108 physical trace landing cases from 64 countries. 54 Of these, he personally investigated over 300. He summed up his study by saying:

Phillips presented a number of statistics on UFO landing reports with physical traces. For example, in the first four decades of this century, his records showed about 6 physical trace cases per decade. This shot up to 43 in the 1940s, and in the 1970s there were 1,001 physical trace cases.

Out of his total of 2,108 cases, he said that about 275 involved two witnesses, and about 430 involved three or more. Humanoids were reported in 460 cases, and in 310 of these the humanoids were small compared to normal humans. In 87 cases, they were of normal size, and in 63 they were considered large.

Phillips gave the following data on the external features of the observed UFOs in his cases. Each feature is accompanied by the number of cases in which it was reported:

The landing traces were described as circular, oval, or irregular in shape. Vegetation in the traces was burned, depressed, or dehydrated, and there were often symmetrically arranged marks that were suggestive of landing gear imprints.

Statistics can give us some idea about what is typical, but they cannot explain it. However, statistical analysis can reveal some interesting patterns in UFO data. For example, some statistics on humanoid reports were compiled by the UFO investigators Coral and Jim Lorenzen in a book published in 1976. 55 In a collection of 164 reports dating from 1947 to 1975, they classified humanoids as small (under 40 inches) and large (over 40 inches). They also divided the reported UFOs into different categories, including large and small discs, and large and small egg shapes.

In reports mentioning large discs, 24 featured large humanoids and five featured small humanoids. In reports mentioning small discs, there were nine featuring large humanoids and 28 featuring small humanoids. Thus the size of the beings seems to roughly parallel the size of the discs. The same pattern showed up in the cases with egg-shaped UFOs. I don’t know the explanation of this pattern, but it would be interesting to see if it shows up in Phillips’s physical trace cases as a correlation between humanoid size and landing track spacing.

In addition to producing physical effects on the ground, UFOs are also well known for producing transient electromagnetic effects on motor vehicles. This was described as follows by Roy Craig in the famous Condon Report:

Of all physical effects claimed to be due to the presence of UFOs, the alleged malfunction of automobile motors is perhaps the most puzzling. The claim is frequently made, sometimes in reports which are impressive because they involve multiple independent witnesses. Witnesses seem certain that the function of their cars was affected by the unidentified object, which sometimes reportedly was not seen until after the malfunction was noted. No satisfactory explanation for such effects, if indeed they occurred, is apparent. 56

On October 20, 1986, near Edmonton, Queensland, a 41-year-old local woman driving home from Cairns along the Kamma Pine Creek road began to experience extreme difficulty in controlling her car. It was pulling to the right side of the road. About 400 meters further along the road the dashlights and headlights almost faded out. The woman then heard a buzzing sound and the vehicle lost power from the engine. The witness looked up to see a bright oval, blue-green light ahead. She had her “foot flat on the floor,” but the motor seemed only to be idling and the car continued to travel forward at a fairly slow speed. These phenomena continued for approximately 4 kilometres. 57

The lady said that the whole experience took some 8 to 10 minutes, and that the UFO seemed to be traveling roughly parallel to the road. While passing over a one-lane bridge, the UFO “suddenly took off,” and she regained full control of her car. She testified that the car was all right before and after the episode.

One explanation that is sometimes offered for such incidents is that they are caused by a natural phenomenon involving a vortex of electrified plasma. This idea has recently been elaborated by the English meteorologist Terence Meaden in an effort to explain the celebrated English crop circles, and UFO researcher Jenny Randles has suggested that it might account for some reported UFO phenomena. 58 The “bright oval, blue-green light” that paced the Australian lady’s car might be interpreted as a glowing plasma that produced a buzzing sound and interfered with her car’s electrical system. But for this to happen, very high energies would be required within the electrified mass, and it is very hard to see what natural process might produce such energies and contain them within a limited volume of space for longer than a fraction of a second. From an orthodox scientific point of view, it is almost as hard to account for a plasma vortex that can interfere with a car for 8 minutes as it is to account for a flying machine of nonhuman origin.

It turns out that UFO car-encounter cases are not all the same. They fall naturally into several distinct groups, and this includes a group in which some kind of electrified plasma may be involved. This breakdown into groups can be accomplished by performing a statistical analysis on a large collection of cases.

Such a study was carried out by Dr. Donald Johnson, a psychologist and statistician who is director of a New Jersey management consulting firm. 59 Johnson performed a cluster analysis of 200 car-encounter cases ranging in date from 1949 to 1978. This analysis used the following three variables: duration of the event, estimated distance from the automobile to the UFO, and estimated size of the UFO.

For each case, these three variables can be thought of as the x, y, and z coordinates of a point in space. (Actually Johnson used the “standard deviates of base-2 log transformations” of the variables.) We can imagine that the 200 points corresponding to the 200 cases may fall into a number of clusters in space. The cases in a cluster all share something in common, and they differ from the cases in another cluster. Cluster analysis does not tell why the cases should fall into distinct groups, but it can help researchers identify such groups for further study.

Cluster 1: [19] Small objects (2 meters) that appear for one or two minutes at very close distances. Some are red, white, or yellow-orange balls of light that may be related to ball lightning. But eight involve reported landings.

Cluster 2: [48] Larger than average objects (12–20 meters in diameter), maintaining a distance of 200–300 meters. Encounters last 15–20 minutes on the average. Over half are domed discs, and a third are described as metallic. Other features of these cases are: hovering (58%), light beams (21%), falling leaf motion (25%), and repair activity, in which entities emerge from a landed UFO and seem to work on it.

Cluster 3: [33] Objects slightly smaller than average size (six meters), at medium distance (90 meters), with encounter times usually under one minute. Over half are metallic, and they typically depart rapidly from a landing (42%) or a position close to the ground.

Cluster 4: [11] Objects of average size, but approaching closely to an average distance of about 15 meters. Encounter times average to about one hour. Many of these cases involve pursuit (82%), landing (45%), and abduction (27%). Nearly 66% involve physiological effects such as paralysis, electrical shock, tingling, or heat. There are often noises (e.g., humming) from the UFO (45%), a light beam (45%), and the UFO often has multiple colors (45%). The UFO often shot up or away very quickly when departing (64%), and 75% of the witnesses experienced fear or panic during or after the event.

Cluster 5: [62] Objects 9–10 meters in diameter, with average distance of 25 meters and average encounter time of 5 minutes. Over 60% are classic domed discs, with 40% described as metallic, and 58% described as whitish in color, or as having a white light. Other features are hovering (68%), landing (40%), and departing at incredible speed (39%). Half of the witnesses expressed fear.

Cluster 6: [12] Large objects (typically 60 meters in length), sometimes cigar shaped, that are seen only for a couple of minutes at moderately large distances (110 meters). Half are glowing in red or orange colors (and none are green). Other characteristics are: blocking the roadway and quickly departing when detected (30%), hovering (50%), landing (50%), shooting away rapidly (50%), and silent flight (75%). They generally leave no physical traces.

Cluster 7: [5] Small objects (1 meter or less in diameter), at average distance of 150 meters, with an average encounter time of 45 minutes. There are no electromagnetic effects, and none of the objects are described as metallic. Johnson suspected that these may be natural phenomena.

Once a number of clusters have been identified based on the three variables, one can ask if the clusters differ significantly in other ways. For example, do reports of domed discs tend to fall mainly in certain clusters and not others? If this happens, then it indicates that the clusters are meaningful. Different clusters involve different kinds of phenomena.

According to Johnson’s analysis, there are indeed a number of features that tend to be strongly present in some clusters and not others. It would seem that there are different kinds of UFO car-encounter cases, with some involving natural phenomena and others involving different kinds of structured flying machines.

Johnson concluded, “My advice is to watch out for the noisy, domed-disks with the bluish-white light beams, because the odds are that if you encounter one of those you are likely at the very least to suffer some physiological effects. This appears to be particularly true if the object is hovering over the roadway in front of your car, and seems to take an interest in your course of travel!” 60

The topic of photographic evidence for UFOs is vast, and I will be able to touch on it only briefly. Over the years, many photographs have allegedly been made of UFOs, and there are also movies and videotapes. In some cases, these photographic records show only points of light, and thus they may represent airplane lights or natural phenomena. However, there are many cases where the photograph or movie clearly shows a structured, metallic craft. In these cases, there is always the question of whether or not the images have been hoaxed. Unfortunately, it is practically impossible to prove in any given case that a hoax has not been perpetrated.

The status of photographic evidence for UFOs was summed up by William K. Hartmann in the Condon Report. After surveying various photographic cases, he admitted that “A very small fraction of potentially identifiable and interesting photographic cases remain unidentified.” Regarding these cases, he said,

1. None of them conclusively establishes the existence of “flying saucers,” or any extraordinary aircraft, or hitherto unknown phenomenon. For any of these cases, no matter how strange or intriguing, it is always possible to “explain” the observations, either by hypothesizing some extraordinary circumstance or by alleging a hoax. That is to say, none of the residual photographic cases investigated here is compelling enough to be conclusive on its own.

3. The residual group of unidentifieds is not inconsistent with the hypothesis that unknown and extraordinary aircraft have penetrated the airspace of the United States, but none yields sufficient evidence to establish this hypothesis. 61

Cases that must involve either an unknown flying machine or a hoax are perhaps not as rare as Hartmann suggests. A large collection of such cases can be found in the book UFO Photographs, by Stevens and Roberts. 62 Here is one example of a case from that book.

On July 29, 1952, George Stock, a lawnmower repairman in Passaic, New Jersey, was in his yard working on a mower. At about 4:30 p.m., he saw an unusual object flying in the sky and yelled to his father to bring their box camera. With the camera, Stock shot seven black and white photos of a solid-looking, metallic disc with a semitransparent dome on the top. This object seemed to be about 20 to 25 feet in diameter, and it was traveling slowly about 200 feet above the ground. Stock had the photographs developed by a local photo developer named John H. Riley and had them published in the Morning Call , Vol. CXLI, No. 28 of Paterson, New Jersey, on Aug. 3, 1952.

Stock was contacted by George Wertz of OSI (the Air Force Office of Special Investigation), who strongly insisted on obtaining the negatives of Stock’s photographs. These were retained by the Air Force for six months, and then, after many complaints by Stock, five of the negatives were returned.

The case was investigated by August Roberts, who found that a woman living three and a half blocks from Stock’s house also saw a disc-shaped flying object at about the time Stock took his pictures. There were other witnesses, but these suddenly became silent. Stock himself seemed to be undergoing considerable harassment, and at one point he turned over the remaining five negatives to Roberts, saying, “You tell them you took them, or that they are fakes. I don’t need all this.” 63

What are we to make of this case? If we examine the pictures, we see that they clearly must be either fakes or images of a genuine craft of the typical domed-disc variety. It seems that both Roberts and OSI officer Wertz heard a rumor that some neighbor saw Stock “throwing up a model.” But they were not able to trace it down, and Wertz felt on the basis of his study of the photos that “the object in question was quite high and that therefore a very large model must have been used, if it was a model.” 64 According to Roberts, Wertz was noncommittal about the Stock photos but tended to lean in favor of the idea of their being genuine.

One feature of both UFO reports and photographs is that although it is widely acknowledged that UFO shapes largely fall into a few basic categories (such as disc, sphere, and ellipsoid), their detailed forms show great variety. As a result, there are relatively few cases where identical-looking UFOs have been independently photographed in different locations. The Stock case provides one example, since UFOs looking very similar to Stock’s were photographed in mid-1952 in Chauvet, France, and Anchorage, Alaska. 65

Another example of two apparently independent pictures of nearly identical UFO shapes was reported by Dr. Bruce Maccabee, a Navy physicist who is the chairman of the Fund for UFO Research in Maryland. During the evening of July 7, 1989, Mr. Hamazaki of Kanazawa, Japan, videotaped an object that passed nearly over his house. Maccabee described the shape of the object as a bright square with a dark hemisphere extending below it, giving the impression of the planet “Saturn with a square ring.” 66 It seems that a virtually identical object was photographed by Michael Lindstrom in Hawaii on January 2, 1975. According to Maccabee, the only notable difference between the Hamazaki and Lindstrom UFOs was that the Hamazaki UFO had a bright ring with a dark hemisphere, and the opposite was true of the Lindstrom UFO.

In recent years, with the proliferation of home video cameras, a number of interesting videotapes have been made of UFOs. Two such tapes were made by an anonymous witness in Pensacola Beach, Florida, on March 24 and 31, 1993. 67 The second tape is particularly interesting, since it shows a UFO hovering for some time and then abruptly disappearing. When the tape is played frame by frame, the UFO was seen to move quickly off the screen in a series of elongated images after its apparent disappearance. Analysis by researchers Bruce Maccabee and Jeffrey Sainio indicated that the UFO was moving off the screen with an angular acceleration of about 911 degrees per second squared.

The videotape did not make it possible to determine the distance of the UFO from the camera. But if the object was 1000 feet away, it would have been 8–9 feet wide and its acceleration would have been about 500 times the acceleration of gravity. (At closer or further distances from the camera, these figures should be changed proportionately.) This acceleration was maintained uniformly for 4 video frames or about 4/30 of a second. Maccabee calculated that at a distance of 1000 feet, the UFO would have reached a speed of 2,650 feet/sec. when it went off the edge of the screen. This is about 2.3 times the speed of sound.

As always, it can be argued that the videotape was hoaxed. But if it was genuine then it provides quantitative evidence for the well-known ability of UFOs to make abrupt changes in velocity and to suddenly appear and disappear. In this case, the disappearance of the UFO was due to a high rate of acceleration which caused it to become invisible to the eye.

My last illustration of photographic evidence is taken from another important category: photographs and movies that were reportedly taken by military personnel but are not available to the public. In Chapter 1 ( pages 29–30 ), I presented testimony from Dr. Elmer Green regarding UFO photos and films taken on military bases by scientists and engineers who were members of OSWG, the Optical Systems Working Group.

Here is a similar case. It is based on the testimony of Dr. Robert Jacobs, a former first lieutenant in the Air Force, and now Assistant Professor of Radio-Film-TV at the University of Wisconsin. Jacobs claimed that on September 15, 1964, he was in charge of filming an Atlas F missile test at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. He said that a couple of days after making the film he was summoned by his superior officer, Major Florenz J. Mansmann. The major asked Jacobs to view the film and drew his attention to what it showed at a certain point:

Suddenly we saw a UFO swim into the picture. It was very distinct and clear, a round object. It flew right up to our missile and emitted a vivid flash of light. Then it altered course, and hovered briefly over our missile . . . and then there came a second vivid flash of light. Then the UFO flew around the missile twice and set off two more flashes from different angles, and then it vanished. A few seconds later, our missile was malfunctioning and tumbling out of control into the Pacific Ocean, hundreds of miles short of its scheduled target. 68

Dr. Green said that members of his group were told by military authorities that there were no records that the UFO incidents they witnessed had ever happened. But they weren’t ordered not to talk about them. Green also pointed out that none of the high-quality UFO photos and movies taken by OSWG were made available for study to the scientists preparing the Condon Report. The Condon Report’s conclusions on photographic evidence, mentioned above, were based entirely on photographs shot by civilians on the spur of the moment with amateur camera equipment .

sound	214
external lights	207
light beam	183
dome	144
UFO rotated	125
heat	117
ports or windows	207
vertical ascent	184
landing gear	159
vapor	128
antenna	117