textfiles/ufo/UFOBBS/2000/2619.ufo

SUBJECT: ASSORTED UFO CASES FOR 1989                       FILE: UFO2619



 
                             1989 Sightings
 08-11-89 MOSCOW: 
 Headless aliens from space invade Russia! "Huge hairy
creature" terrifies villagers in the Volga valley! Possible UFO lands in
Moscow! Although President Mikhail S. Gorbachev's reforms haven't spawned
U.S.-style supermarket tabloids let alone U.S.-style supermarkets glasnost's
changed the Soviet media, as evidenced by these recent stories, and a lot of
people seem to love it. The change's evident on state-run television, once a
showcase for morally uplifting and dull "Boy-Loves-Tractor" movies about
building communism, and news reports lauding factories overfulfilling the
Five-Year Plan. Now, six days a week, as part of the breakfast TV program
"120 Minutes," gray-haired mystic Alan Chumak waves his hands on camera to
cure viewers from Minsk to Vladivostok of what ails them. Soviets with heart
disease are requested to watch the self-described journalist on Tuesdays. On
Fridays, Chumak will help viewers get rid of allergies. People with stomach
bugs or bone and muscle aches should tune in on other days. The inability to
watch the program's not a problem. Leave the set on, and a jar of water,
juice or massage cream placed by the TV screen supposedly will be "charged"
by Chumak's gestures and can be used later for treatment. Earlier this
summer, after about a month on the air, Chumak was pulled off "120 Minutes"
by broadcast executives, who said they wanted to make sure his treatment
brought positive results. They must have been convinced the man in his
mid-50s was back on TV waving his hands within a week. Since the days of the
wild-eyed monk Rasputin, hypnotist and confidant at the court of the last
czar, Russians have been intrigued by the occult and fantastic, and stories
about UFOs, vanished planets and ESP have always had an eager audience. With
glasnost, or greater openness, such topics are getting more exposure than
ever in the once stuffy official Soviet media, and despite the firmly
materialistic and rationalist ideology of the ruling Communist Party. In
fact, the unlikely organ in the forefront of the weirdness campaign belongs
to the party itself. The 1 million-circulation daily newspaper Socialist
Industry, an organ of the party's Central Committee, has a mandate to report
on the Soviet economy, but often makes space for news items that have nothing
to do with either socialism or industry. On Tuesday, there was this
intriguing account of invaders from space landing in Central Russia's Perm
region: milkmaid Lyubov Medvedev told the newspaper, "At about 4:30 in the
morning, I was going to the farm when I saw a dark figure seemingly riding a
motorcycle...but when I looked closely at the figure, I noticed there was no
motorcycle, but just something resembling a man, but taller than average with
short legs." The creature had "only a small knob instead of a head," Ms.
Medvedev said. "I was frightened to death...then it became fluorescent and
disappeared." Beekeeper G. Sharoglazov saw two egg-shaped "fluorescent
objects" as big as aircraft hovering at a height of 600-1,000 feet. Others in
mid-July also saw aliens with no heads, the paper said. It quoted V. Kopylov,
Communist Party boss in the Chernushinsky region, as acknowledging that
"something unusual's going on the territory of our two collective farms." It
was Socialist Industry as well that informed Soviets on Thursday of the huge,
fleet-footed hairy creature that terrified residents of the Kirovo settlement
in the Volga basin. "I saw the creature pretty well," said resident R.
Saitov. "It was about 2 meters (6 feet) tall, its body covered with dark
brown hair and it had shoulder-length hair...being a veterinary surgeon, I
can say the creature was neither a man nor an ape." Saitov and a friend tried
to approach the creature after spotting it on the other bank of a pond, but
it bounded away at astonishing speed when they pursued it in a car. The
newspaper noted disapprovingly that Saratov University biologists weren't
taking reports of the sighting seriously or even deigning to talk to
witnesses. The very official Soviet news agency Tass later picked up the
newspaper's story for national and worldwide distribution, headlining it
"Huge Creature Sighted in Volga Region; Men Give Chase." Earlier this week,
however, Tass deflated another Socialist Industry report about a UFO landing.
Last month, the paper reported in great detail on a 26-foot-wide patch of
burned ground found near a southern Moscow highway. It quoted UFO specialist
A. Kuzovkin as saying the grass had likely been blasted by powerful
radiation, which he called probable evidence of the landing of an
Unidentified Flying Object. Not so, Tass reported. Firefighters think a
haystack simply caught fire and scorched the ground.
 
  08-10-89 OSHKOSH, Wis.: 
  Karen Sazama saw something strange during a fishing
trip Thursday, and it wasn't on the end of her fishing hook. At 3:30 a.m. on
waters near Omro, the Milwaukee woman saw what she belives was an
unidentified flying object. Sazama said she told her fishing companion, Gary
Michael Frye, that something funny was going on after the pair saw a light in
the sky. "It was a glowing light, an orangish-reddish light," said Sazama,
who was fishing with Frye in a boat. "I really got scared out there. I was
looking for a place to hide in the boat." Sazama said the light stayed in the
sky from 20 to 25 minutes before it disappeared. The pair were fishing on the
Fox River and Lake Butte des Morts. "The fish weren't even biting," Sazama
said. "We got nothing for fish, not even a bite. I told Mike `I think the
lights had something to do with it."' Frye said the couple rented a boat from
George's Bait Shop near Omro at 7 p.m. Wednesday for a night of fishing. Frye
said he's sure the light was a UFO. "Yes, I would say it was a UFO. It was
something I had never saw before. I do believe in UFOs," Frye said. "(The
light) was bigger than a star. It was falling, but not very fast." The couple
reported their sighting to the Winnebago County Sheriff's Department at about
8 a.m. Thursday. George Wilz, owner of George's Bait Shop, said this's the
first time anyone ever reported an unusual sighting to him. "I know (Sazama)
was all shook up," Wilz said. "To me it's kind of serious." But did the
lights scare off the pair for good? "I don't think this will prevent us from
coming back again," Sazama said. "I just hope we don't see anymore lights
like that again."
 
 08-22-89 TRUSSVILLE, Ala.: 
 Police in Trussville and Dadeville, 60 miles apart,
reported seeing unusual lights in the sky within minutes of each other, but
no one's rolling out the red carpet for UFOs just yet. "I'm not trying to
start anything. I just answered a call with another officer and we saw what
we saw," Trussville police Sgt. Nelson Byess said. "I'm not going to run out
and print up T-shirts and bumper stickers." Byess was referring to the hoopla
generated earlier this year in Fyffe, where people reported seeing silent,
triangular UFOs with lights in the night sky. The numerous sightings never
were explained. Byess said he could not see any shape connected to the
lights, which he spotted after several residents called police about 5 a.m.
Monday. "It hovered for a while, we watched it about 20 or 30 minutes, and
then moved off or faded out as the sun came up," he said. "I never heard any
sound." A little earlier, before 5 a.m., Dadeville Police Chief Terry Wright
had just given a speeding ticket when he saw something in the sky. "I looked
to my left and saw what I thought was the moon behind a cloud, then I
realized the moon was on my right," Wright said. "It was round and bright to
start with, kind of hazy, then it looked like a bright gas and moved out of
sight after about 15 or 20 minutes. There were no colored lights, just
white." Wright thought the bright shape was so odd he told everyone at City
Hall and his wife about it. "I didn't want everyone thinking I was on drugs,
but I never saw anything like it before," Wright said. "Later in the day,
someone said they saw on the TV that Trussville reported seeing something,
too." Information on both sitings will be recorded by Mutual UFO Network
Inc., as the Fyffe sightings were, said section director Jeff Ballard.
 
10-05-89 ROCKVILLE, Md.:
There's a lot of strange stuff happening out there
tales of poltergeists, swamp monsters, maybe even dinosaurs still crashing
through African jungles and Mark Chorvinsky's opened a "strange hotline" to
hear all about it. "The world's a pretty strange place," says Chorvinsky, 35,
a black-clad archivist of the bizarre and investigator of the weird who lives
on a quiet, tree-shaded street in this Washington suburb. "Everybody knows of
something strange that's happened to them, but they never talk about it," he
says. "The only time it's safe to talk, it seems, is around a campfire or
during Halloween." Now they can dial the "strange hotline" at 1-900-820-8361
to share a scary encounter with the unknown, or hear a tape of Chorvinsky
describing some of his favorites. Among them are the Lizard Man of South
Carolina, the horrific winged Jersey Devil, the Manila vampire and a haunted
stretch of rural Maryland highway where "the dreaded Snarly Yow" hass been
spotted by motorists. Chorvinsky, in fact, recently listened to "one of the
most amazing stories I've ever heard" from a taped message left by an
anonymous hotline caller. It was the tale of an Arizona woman who bought a
giant cactus as a house plant. A few days later, she was alarmed to see the
cactus moving its prickly arms. She fled the house with her children just
before the cactus exploded, releasing swarms of scorpions in her living room.
That's the sort of thing that sends agreeable tingles down Chorvinsky's spine
and fills the pages of Strange Magazine, a twice-a-year compendium of weird
happenings that Chorvinsky founded and edits for an estimated 4,000 avid
readers. He's also a professional magician who performed at the White House
last year, an author who's planning a biography of Merlin the magician and a
filmmaker whose movie short, "Strange Tangents," was screened at the American
Film Institute, the Library of Congress and film festivals at Cannes, Berlin
and Los Angeles. "It's about a young sorceress who tries to save her dying
master with the help of her friend, a 3-foot-tall talking salamander,"
Chorvinsky says. To help pay the bills, he operates a science fiction and
magic shop in a Rockville shopping mall where customers can satisfy their
appetites for strange schlock. The shelves are stuffed with dragons and
wizards, crystal balls, Ninja swords, Tarot cards, horror movie classics and
fantasy games titled "Skulls and Scrapfaggot Green" and for laughs "Batwinged
Bimbos from Hell." Although his bushy hair, beard, mustache and suit all in
black give him a slightly fiendish look, Chorvinsky's nobody's wacko. He's a
good-natured skeptic who directs a global network of tipsters and
investigators who track down reports of strange phenomena for scholarly
discussion in his magazine. "I neither believe nor disbelieve this stuff," he
said in an interview. "We have many skeptics who read the magazine, including
myself. I am skeptical but open-minded. I doubt everything but I accept the
possibility of anything." He's never seen a UFO landing in a corn field, but
knows that "the damnedest things fall from the sky," including frogs, fish,
sugar crystals, ice chunks and vast cobwebs spun by airborne spiders.
Mysterious sea serpents like the Loch Ness monster may be the stuff of
ancient folklore, he said, or they may have existed all along as monstrous
species of marine life that somehow eluded discovery by scientists. But what
about the strange booms and bangs in the night? The bizarre mirages of entire
cities in the sky? The spinning wheels of light beneath the oceans? Toads
encased in rock but still alive? "The stories that really intrigue me are
those that give me the greatest feeling of disquieting strangeness,"
Chorvinsky said. "The tales so strange they couldn't possibly be explained,
the kind that give you a chill down your spine or make your hair stand on
end. The sort of thing that makes you say, `Ooooh, that's weird'!" < EDITOR'S
NOTE: Reports of strange phenomena may be addressed to Mark Chorvinsky, Box
2246, Rockville, Md. 20852
 
10-09-89 SECAUCUS, N.J. 
A consultant on the subject of unidentified flying
objects said Monday that reports of a UFO in the Soviet Union with 10-foot
high humanoids aboard would be treated seriously by scientists in that
country. Stanton Friedman, who was in New Jersey to lecture Monday night,
said in an interview that the USSR Academy of Sciences created a Commission
on Anomalistic Atmospheric Phenomena in 1984. The commission was prompted by
a UFO siting near the city of Gorky, said Friedman, a consultant who lectures
on the topic "Flying Saucers Are Real" and who's examined Soviet studies of
UFOs. He said that in April 1988, 300 scientists gathered in the Siberian
city of Tomsk for a conference on "sporadic instant phenomena" and
recommended that the Siberian branch of the Academy of Sciences draft a
proposal on the study of UFO's. Last June, the Soviet publication "Soviet
Military Review" included an article on "UFO's and Security." Friedman said
the authors of the article argued that the computers required to run the
United States' space-based antimissile defense would not be able to
distinguish between missiles and UFO's and would increase the likelihood of
World War III starting by accident. The article calls for international
cooperation on the study of UFO's, Friedman said. "True, there's some
political hype in there," he said.
 
10-09-89 MOSCOW 
It was a close encounter of the communist kind. Towering,
tiny-headed humanoids from outer space landed their UFO in the Russian city
of Voronezh and emerged for a promenade around the park, spreading fear among
residents. At least that's what the official Tass news agency said Monday.
Tass, contributing to a string of weird tales that have crept into the
formerly stuffy state-controlled media in recent months, said in a
straight-faced report that Soviet scientists vouched for the UFO's landing.
"Scientists have confirmed that an unidentified flying object recently landed
in a park in the Russian city of Voronezh," Tass said. "They have also
identified the landing site and found traces of aliens who made a short
promenade about the park." A Tass duty officer, contacted Monday evening by
telephone, refused to identify the reporter who sent the dispatch from
Voronezh, but stood by the story. "It's not April Fool's today," he said. The
Soviet media, unleashed by the Kremlin's policy of glasnost greater openness
feel free now to hype incredible stories that seem more at home in the
supermarket tabloids of the West. Recent examples include other accounts of
UFOs, sightings of abominable snowman-type creatures and a tale about a young
mystic who goes into a trance and flies about the cosmos. A rash of mystics
and ESP-artists also have invaded state TV. In Buffalo, N.Y., Paul Kurtz,
chairman of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the
Paranormal, commented: "We're extremely skeptical of this claim. It's not the
first one (in the Soviet media). There's many. There seems to be a rash of
reports, largely uncorroborated." According to Monday's Tass report, a large
shining ball or disk was seen hovering over the park by Voronezh residents.
They saw the UFO land and up to three creatures similar to humans emerge,
accompanied by a small robot, Tass said. "The aliens were three or even four
meters tall (almost 10 feet to 13 feet), but with very small heads," the news
agency quoted witnesses as saying. "They walked near the ball or disc and
then disappeared inside." The report resembled a story last summer in the
daily newspaper Socialist Industry, which carried an alleged "close
encounter" between a milkmaid and an alien in Central Russia's Perm region.
In that report, milkmaid Lyubov Medvedev was quoted as saying she encountered
an alien creature "resembling a man, but taller than average with short
legs." The creature, she said, had "only a small knob instead of a head."
Stanton Friedman, a consultant who lectures on the topic "Flying Saucers Are
Real" and's examined Soviet studies of UFOs, said in Secaucus, N.J., on
Monday that Soviet scientists tended to treat the subject more seriously than
American scientists. Last June, the Soviet publication Soviet Military Review
included an article on "UFO's and Security." The Tass report, which did not
give the date of the purported "landing" in Voronezh, said onlookers were
"overwhelmed with a fear that lasted for several days." Genrikh Silanov, head
of the Voronezh Geophysical Laboratory, told Tass that scientists
investigating the UFO report found a 20-yard depression with four deep dents,
as well as two pieces of unidentified rocks. "At first glance, they looked
like sandstone of a deep-red color. However, mineralogical analysis's shown
that the substance cannot be found on Earth," Tass quoted Silanov as saying.
"However, additional tests are needed to reach a more definite conclusion,"
he said. Silanov said the landing site and path taken by the aliens was
confirmed using the "biolocation" method of tracking. The agency did not
explain what that was. Further confirmation came from witnesses in Voronezh,
300 miles southeast of Moscow, who were not told of the experiments and whose
accounts coincided precisely with the scientific findings, Tass said. In
July, Tass deflated a report in Socialist Industry quoting a UFO specialist,
A. Kuzovkin, as saying a 26-foot-wide patch of burned ground near southern
Moscow was probably caused by the landing of a UFO. Not so, Tass reported.
Firefighters think a haystack simply caught fire and scorched the ground.
Russians have long been fascinated by the weird and the occult, but formerly
they could glean their information only from rumors and underground copies of
everything from palmistry guides to books on Eastern mysticism. The Kremlin's
economic reforms, with their emphasis on each enterprise paying its own way,
have also given the official press more incentive to cater to readers' tastes
in order to increase circulation. Kurtz's committee's a UFO subcommittee
and's been investigating the claim made by Tass. Kurtz, a professor of
philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo, said Monday:
"Since the press freedoms in the last year, increasingly it seems to be open
season. Paranormal pandemonium's broken out in the Soviet Union, not only
with UFOs, but faith healers, astrologers and so on. In a closed society such
as the Soviet Union, you don't get the development of critical reason." He
said the account "has all the characteristics of science fiction." Kurtz
noted that scientist Silanov says the landing was confirmed by biolocation
"As far as we can tell it's a kind of dowsing. We're very questioning of
that. It's hardly a scientific method of testing whether anything's landed or
not." "If this were true," Kurtz remarked, "I think chairman (Mikhail)
Gorbachev would call a press conference and proudly announce that, with
everybody attempting to get out of the Soviet Union, at long last here are
some extraterrestrials in that Union."
 
10-11-89 Oklahoma:
Police and residents in northeast Oklahoma say they have no clue to
the origin of five strange, colored lights that were spotted hovering over
Commerce and Miami late Tuesday. "I couldn't see any kind of a shape to them
at all," Commerce resident Fran Willmert said Tuesday. "But I was looking at
them with my eye. I noticed they were changing color and went from red to
white to blue." Ms. Willmert said she saw the lights from her yard and "had
never seen anything like that before." Commerce Police Chief Bob Baine, who
looked at the lights through binoculars and a high-powered telescope, said
"they were nothing that looked like an aircraft. We don't know what they are.
We'd received a call about 8:30 p.m. of a UFO around the Brunswick plant and
we thought it was a joke," Baine said. "But when officers arrived on the
scene they saw what looked what lights that seemed to move in different
directions." Baine said the five lights were in a group of four, with the
fifth a short distance from the others. "Just a few minutes ago I went out
and took a scope and could see them sitting in kind of a pattern," Baine
said. "There was nothing that I could specify as any shape. They were like
spots or something." Larry Ruthi, a National Weather Service forecaster at
Norman, said a check of area reporting stations indicated no unusual
atmospheric conditions that might explain the sightings. Ruthi said he
contacted a weather office in Tulsa and the Central Weather Service Unit in
Fort Worth, Texas, and both reported nothing unusual happening in that part
of Oklahoma. "An auroral display should have been visible over a larger area
than just Miami," Ruthi said. "Frankly, I'm at a loss as to what they're
seeing." A disptacher with the Ottawa County sheriff's office in Miami, also
said county officers in the field reported seeing "strange lights." "We
thought it was just a hoax but apparently it's real because I've got at least
three, maybe four city units and one of my county units that have seen the
lights." The dispatcher, who asked not to be identified, said the lights were
first reported in Miami and then moved north in the county to between
Commerce and Cardin, near the Kansas border. The dispatcher said country
officers also described the lights as turning different colors.
 
10-10-89 MOSCOW: 
A three-eyed alien with a robot sidekick landed by UFO and
made a boy vanish by zapping him with a pistol, a Soviet newspaper reported
Tuesday, in a second day of strange tales in the state-run media. But as the
bizarre saga of the space invasion of the city of Voronezh unfolded for a
second day, a scientist whose words were used to buttress the first published
report voiced doubts, and said he was in part misquoted. "Don't believe all
you hear from Tass," Genrikh Silanov, head of the Voronezh Geophysical
Laboratory, cautioned in a telephone interview with The Associated Press from
Voronezh. "We never gave them part of what they published." On Monday, the
usually staid, official Soviet news agency told the world that scientists'd
confirmed an alien spaceship carrying giant people with tiny heads'd touched
down in Voronezh, a city of more than 800,000 people about 300 miles
southeast of Moscow. As many as three aliens 13 feet tall left the
spacecraft, described as a large shining ball, and walked in the park with a
small robot, Tass reported. A Tass duty officer stood by the story. "It's not
April Fool's today," he said. The purported close encounter in Voronezh was
only the latest weird tale to appear in the Soviet media, which under the
policy of "glasnost" or openness have recently told of other sightings of
UFOs and the Yeti, or abominable snowman. Monday's report spawned rumors in
Moscow, including one that the aliens told Voronezh residents the Earth would
be destroyed by the year 2000 if people didn't stop polluting it.
Nonetheless, a Communist Party paper whose avowed mission's to write about
culture was the only major national daily to print anything Tuesday about the
UFO, indicating more authoritative newspapers like Pravda thought the topic
too hot to handle. Sovietskaya Kultura said its coverage was motivated by
"the golden rule of journalism: the reader must know everything." "Of course,
it's hard to believe in what happened in the town," it reported from
Voronezh. "It's even more difficult to explain." The daily quoted witnesses
as saying the UFO flew into Voronezh on Sept 27. At 6:30 p.m., it said, boys
playing soccer saw a pink glow in the sky, then saw a deep red ball about 10
yards in diameter. The ball circled, vanished, then reappeared minutes later
and hovered, it said. A crowd rushed to the site, Sovietskaya Kultura said,
and through an open hatch saw a "three-eyed alien" about 10 feet tall, clad
in silvery overalls and bronze-colored boots, and wearing a disk on his
chest. The newspaper, quoting witnesses, gave this account: The UFO landed.
Two creatures, one apparently a robot, exited. A boy screamed with fear, but
when the alien gazed at him, with eyes shining, he fell silent, unable to
move. Onlookers screamed, and the UFO and the creatures disappeared. About
five minutes later, they reappeared. The alien'd a "pistol" a tube about 20
inches long, which it pointed at an unidentified 16-year-old boy, making him
disappear. The alien went inside the sphere, which took off. At the same
time, the boy reappeared. "Children and eyewitnesses of the abnormal
phenomenon have been questioned by police workers and journalists," wrote
Sovietskaya Kultura's Voronezh correspondent, E. Efremov. "There are no
discrepencies in the description of the sphere itself, or the actions of the
`aliens.' Moreover, all the children who became witnesses to this event are
still afraid, even now." It gave the names of only three witnesses, all
youngsters. Scientists from a nationwide group that investigates "abnormal
phenomena" were looking into the landing, the newspaper said. Silanov, who
said he belongs to the group, cast doubt on the Tass report that quoted him
as saying the aliens left behind two rocks resembling sandstone of a deep red
color that cannot be found anywhere. "The rock they described as
extraterrestrial's in fact a piece of iron oxide which could easily have
originated on Earth," according to Silanov, 50. He said there indeed was "a
landing site" or something resembling one in Voronezh. But he acknowledged
that could happen as well if there were an underground pipe or cable, or an
underground reservoir. Silanov also said the testimony of children between
the ages of 11 and 14 who claimed they witnessed the landing did not always
correspond on how the aliens looked, and that they "certainly didn't mention
the tremendous height" cited by Tass. The phone connection was abruptly cut
off before Silanov could answer more questions. Meanwhile, a Tass editor said
two Moscow-based reporters'd been dispatched to Voronezh to check on the
report on the UFO filed by local Tass correspondent Vladimir Lebedev, a man
he termed a "very serious" journalist. The editor, who spoke on condition of
anonymity, said Tass, through bitter experience, has learned to be wary of
hoaxes. In January, the news agency reported six people'd been rescued after
spending 35 days buried alive in rubble following the Armenian earthquake. It
later retracted the story.
 
10-12-89 NEW YORK: 
That extraterrestrial story from the Soviet Union may have
been cleared up those 12-foot, tiny-headed guys who landed in the U.S.S.R.
were just trying to get back to New York City. "Anything's possible," says
Bill Knell, a local UFO researcher who firmly believes there was an alien
presence in a park in the borough of Queens seven months ago. "Absolutely,
there was some type of UFO in Kissena Park." Knell's assertions he also said
there may have been a return visit two weeks ago came two days after the
Soviet news agency Tass reported the presence of ETs in the town of Voronezh.
Since then, scientists have disparaged the report, attributing it to rising
sensationalism in the Soviet press under "glasnost," or greater openness.
Neither story seemed to impress local residents, who were more concerned with
Knell's presence in the park than any report of visiting ETs. "This is my
haunt. I've been coming to this park for years, and there's nothing going on
here," said Julie Ford, shaking her head and laughing. "They say that tree
there was burned by a UFO: it was broken by kids swinging on the branches."
Sure enough, Knell did offer the damaged willow as evidence that something
had beamed down there. But he also offered a mineralogist's report that a
burned oval on the ground contained particles of a type of feldspar quartz
found on the island of Aruba, not in Queens. "We find this amazing," said
Knell, who was joined by several other believers in UFOs. According to Knell,
five people riding a bus on March 9 saw "very bright lights" hovering near a
lake in the park. Since the park is located between Kennedy and LaGuardia
airports, they initially thought it was a downed aircraft, said Knell. Based
on their accounts and other evidence, Knell said, UFO investigators
determined this was a legitimate sighting. Knell thinks he knows why the
people who spotted something in Queens never saw aliens or spoke with them.
"I believe they have their own agenda, and at this time it doesn't include
communication," said Knell, who on Wednesday addressed several skeptical
reporters at the site where the UFO allegedly burned the ground.
Unfortunately, that's also the site where the remnants of a downed tree were
piled, killing off all the grass underneath, said park maintenance man Joe
Mackey, 60. "If there was a spot around here burned out, I woulda known about
it," said Mackey, who spends three days a week in the park. "It's a figment
of somebody's imagination." Perhaps, but Knell's not alone. Some residents of
Mississippi's Delta region say the Soviet description of a UFO is similar to
a fast-moving metallic ball they spotted earlier this month. Lee Abide Jr.
said he first saw the object about three or four months ago. He saw it again
early Wednesday while on his way to work at Abide Aero Flying Service about
five miles south of Greenville. "And it didn't come out of a bottle of
vodka," he said, referring to some speculation about the Soviet witnesses.
Bill Kimmel, a pilot, said he saw the object two days ago while flying to
Memphis, Tenn. He said it was round, metallic, kept changing colors and was
moving 800 to 900 mph at 3,000 feet some distance off his left wingtip.
"There was no way it was a weather balloon because no balloon can travel that
fast," he said.
 
10-12-89 EXLINE, Iowa: 
Carol Drake says she was skeptical about Unidentified
Flying objects until she spotted bright reddish lights in the early evening
sky. "I wish somebody would give me a logical explanation so people would
stop teasing me," Mrs. Drake, 48, a farmer near Exline, said Thursday. The
Iowa sighting coincided with two other reports of unidentified lights to the
UFO Reporting Center in Seattle. "We'd reports from Lexington, Ky., and
Topeka, Kan., about a group of lights at very high altitude," said Robert
Gribble, director of the center. "We don't have any explanation. Everybody's
looking at the sky after the Soviet report." The Soviet news agency Tass
reported this week that citizens there saw aliens with tiny heads and large
bodies. "Usually I just get a chuckle when I hear reports about UFO," Mrs.
Drake said by telephone. "I've been getting a chuckle out of the Russian
story. The little kid in me wants to believe there are such things, but I
think it's not sensible. "I did not see any people nine to 12 feet tall, or
whatever the Russians saw." Mrs. Drake was one of many people who saw the
lights early Wednesday evening near Exline, 60 miles southeast of Des Moines
and only a few miles north of the Missouri border. She said a visitor to her
house saw the same thing as did her daughter, who lives several miles away.
"I got her on the phone and said, `Would you run outside and see if you can
see any flying saucers, or whatever it is.' She was gone for quite a while
and then came back and said, `That's bizarre.'" Mrs. Drake said the two
lights changed colors, first reddish and then changing to mostly yellow, and
were like bright headlights in the distance. It wasn't bright enough to
create light on the ground, however, and it wasn't too bright to look at, she
said. She said the lights neither blinked nor made any sound and they were
far above the horizon, thus ruling out lights on farm machinery. She said she
could see transconti7ental jets in the night sky but that their blinking
lights were minuscule compared to the unidentified lights. The lights moved
independently of each other, she said, and frightened her when they moved
directly over her house. "I'm sure there's a logical explanation for it," she
said. Although the lights appeared to be high in the sky, the source was
apparently close to her farm, she said, since she reported the lights to be
east of her house at the same time her daughter several miles away saw them
to the north. Mrs. Drake said she was alone at the time but that a visitor,
John Heubner of Fairfield, stopped by and saw the same thing. Heubner's wife,
Pat Heubner, said her husband called her Wednesday night and was breathless.
"He was so excited. Now I believe in UFOs, but I don't think he did until
now," Mrs. Heubner said. Heubner could not be reached for comment. Another
person who saw the lights was David Foster of rural Exline. "There were two
lights in the sky, then they separated and one went off," he told radio
station KBIZ in Ottumwa. He said the lights were too high in the sky to be
mistaken for farm machinery. The Appanoose County sheriff's office in
Centerville said nobody but the media called about the mysterious lights.
 
10-14-89 MIAMI, Oklahoma:
The mysterious lights that northeastern Oklahoma
residents have seen in the night sky for the last four days are real, but
they aren't anything to get excited about, a Coffeyville, Kan., astronomy
instructor said Saturday. "It's real, but it's caused by a very natural
phenomenon," said Don Lind, an astronomy instructor at Coffeyville Community
College. "We do have some rather large bright objects up in the night sky."
Miami officials asked Lind to use his computer to see if the lights that have
caused a stir in northeastern Oklahoma could be explained astronomically. Ken
Murphy, a civil defense radio operator, said Friday that numerous reports
refer to three different objects in the sky. The brightest's in the
west-northwest sky, another was in the southwestern sky and the dimest was in
the northeast. Some callers said the lights were flashing blue, red and white
and moving slowly across the sky. Lind found that two planets, two stars and
a turbulent, dusty atmosphere could explain all the sightings. The northeast
sighting's Jupiter the largest planet in the solar system, Lind said. He said
Jupiter's coming up at about 10 p.m. It's about 40 times brighter than the
average star and could appear to flicker through a thick atmosphere. "Being
that low on the horizon, it's in a very thick area of the atmosphere," he
said. "People are seeing this, particularly if they are using binoculars or
a very cheap telescope." In the southwest, Venus's very bright right after
sundown, and Antares appears about the time Venus sets, Lind said. "There's
something in the sky continuously for them to see," he said. And, he says, in
the west-northwest, Arkturus, a Class K orange star, is the only thing that
could be drawing that much attention. "It's been there for a long time, and
people just haven't noticed it. A lot of people now are just wanting to see
things," Lind said. The lights appear to move for the same reason the sun
appears to move the earth's rotation and they appear to flash because of dust
and pollen moving in the warm air on the horizon, Lind said. "The air's very
turbulent. It's moving almost constantly. As these stars are low to the
horizon, you are going to get a substantial amount of distortion," he said.
"Basically, there's nothing up there now that hasn't been up there for
months," he said. "The weather's nice and people are getting out on their
last fling before the winter sets in." Lind said the sightings are
predominant in northeastern Oklahoma and along the Oklahoma borders with
Kansas, Missouri and Arkansas because it's hill country. "They have a history
of seeing spook lights and this sort of thing in that area," Lind said. "They
have been proven to be nothing more than light refractions. The people are
really seeing these things." Isothermal layers or layers of different
temperatures form in the atmosphere above the hills, Lind said. Because light
bends differently in different temperatures, the layers act like a mirror
refracting starlight up and down. The reports of lights conjured images of
unidentified flying objects. Coupled with the pre-Halloween season, the
superstition linked to Friday the 13th and reports this week from the Soviet
Union of close encounters with alien spacecraft, the reports have received
national attention. "These sightings are not at all typical of UFO
sightings," Lind said. "Typical UFO sightings are only by a handful of people
for a very short period of time. These sightings are by many people over
about a week's period."
 
10-15-89 COLUMBUS, Ohio: 
While scientists are skeptical about tales that a
9-foot-tall, three-eyed extraterrestrial made a 16-year-old Soviet boy
disappear and reappear, a Columbus researcher says it may be true. The Soviet
news agency Tass reported last week that an alien landed recently in the city
of Voronezh, adding fuel to the debate over whether aliens from outer space
are fact or fantasy. The account of the three-eyed alien's confrontation with
a terrified teen-ager was "confirmed" by a newspaper in the area, Tass
reported. Columbus UFO researcher Don Jernigan, however, says there's a good
chance the Soviet story's true, and that it's one of the thousands of times
aliens have visited Earth. "Nobody's been listening" to UFO researchers'
claims, but that will change now, said Jernigan, who's also president and
founder of the Phenomenon Investigation Committee. "I think this Soviet
report will give credibility to this phenomenon," Jernigan said. "People will
have to give this a lot more serious attention because Tass's the Soviet
Union's official news agency, and they don't have a reputation for playing
jokes. So I would assume this incident's a pretty good basis." But Paul
Kurtz, chairman of the Buffalo-based Committee for the Scientific
Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, discounts the report. "What's
happening in the Soviet Union since glasnost lifted press censorship's a
National Enquirer-type mentality setting in there," said Kurtz, who visited
the Soviet Union in July.
 
10-18-89 KANSAS CITY, Mo.: 
A large fireball of unknown origin streaked across
the sky about sunset Tuesday, according to reports from Missouri, Nebraska
and Illinois. Officials at the UFO Reporting Center in Seattle, the Strategic
Air Command at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, Neb., and the Whiteman Air
Force Base at Knob Noster, Mo., all received telephone calls from people
who'd seen the fireball. Officials'd no explaination for the fireball. Capt.
Lance Jay at Whiteman said the command center first received a call from the
Howell County sheriff's department about 8 p.m. Witnesses in Howell County
told authorities they'd seen a round object moving in circles about 8,000 to
10,000 feet in the air. Witnesses who called Offutt described the object as
a ball of light that exploded into a streak of yellow before disintegrating.
"Whenever no one's any answers to phenomena like this, people always become
more curious about it," Lance said. "Right now we're not sure what we had."
Kathleen Freuer was driving near Kansas City International Airport when she
saw the object about 7:45 p.m. "I saw this big fireball and my first thought
was that a plane exploded," Ms. Freuer said. "That was how bright it was."
She said the event lasted only a few seconds. Ron Cop of the Federal Aviation
Administration said people reported the fireball from Springfield, Mo., to
Omaha. In addition, pilots in eastern Missouri and western Illinios called to
say they'd seen it. "It was definitely not an aircraft because we didn't have
any missing. It's probably a meteor or some space junk entering the
atmosphere," Cop said. "When you find it breaking up over a wide area like
this, that's usually what it is."
 
10-21-89 TUPELO, Miss.: 
The old cliche, "A picture's worth a thousand
words,"'s been taken a step further by Joanne Pankey Cusack, a psychic
researcher who specializes in photographing and interpreting human auras.
Cusack studies the imprints left by fingertips on film to determine a
person's mental, emotional and physical state a process called Kirlian
photography. Then, by reading the patterns and colors on the film, she can
explain why that person acts the way he does, she says. Cusack, a Tupelo
native who recently moved back home, says the theory of Kirlian photography's
based on the medically accepted fact that the body does contain electrical
energy. "The theory's similar to tests such as the CAT scan, which measures
brain waves," Cusack said as she sat at the dining table in her neatly
furnished apartment. "The human body's like a computer. We send out thought
waves, energy follows thought and that, in turn, directs our life." Scattered
across the table in front of her were slides and photos she uses in her
lectures across the United States and Canada. Studying one of the pictures in
her hand she said, "I have always seen energy patterns around people, from
the time I was a small child. I assumed everyone could see what I saw. As I
got older I realized they couldn't and I became interested in finding out
more about the energy our bodies give off." Cusack first heard of Kirlian
photography while living in Houston, Texas. A professor at an Arizona college
was doing research on using the technique as a diagnostic tool. The process'd
actually been discovered decades earlier, in 1939, by a Russian electrician,
Semyon Davidovich Kirlian, who was trying to prove extra-sensory perception
existed. Kirlian photography's done by having a person place his hand inside
a heavy, black bag which blocks out light. The bag's two sleeves with elastic
cuffs and resembles a jacket. Inside's a modified instant camera the camera's
no lens attached to an electric meter. The person puts his hand through one
sleeve and places his fingers directly on the film. The photographer presses
a switch on the meter, causing a tiny electrical charge to run through a
metal plate on the camera. This charge reacts with the electricity given off
by the body and transfers an image to the film. After the person withdraws
his hand, the photographer reaches through the other sleeve and removes the
film. When the film develops, four finger imprints can be seen, surrounded by
halos of color. Cusack said she was fascinated with the process which
recorded on film the energy fields she'd seen around people all her life. She
immediately began her own research in Houston and later opened the Cusack
Kirlian Institute and Gallery in Tucson, Arizona. A friend took an "old
Polaroid camera" and modified it to suit her purposes. She recruited 80
volunteers who agreed to be photographed repeatedly. Cusack tracked the
changes in their auras in an attempt to find consistent patterns. She was
excited when she was able to document at least 36 distinctly different
patterns and began to make predictions from photographs. In her findings,
Cusack found the predominant colors in the pictures were royal blue, white,
turquoise, and sometimes red. Royal blue seemed to reflect a person's
magnetic field, Cusack said. She explained the term by saying, "It shows the
way they draw similar people to them." White shows creativity, she said, and
turquoise shows the amount of emotional balance a person may have. If red, or
other dark colors, shows up in the photo, the person's experiencing anger,
anxiety or stress, she said. The shape of the halos also explains much about
the person, Cusack said. Breaks in the halo may signal an illness. If no halo
shows up on the photograph, a person may be close to death. Cusack said
experiments done with corpses didn't show halos. She pointed to a series of
three dated photographs taken of the same man's hand. In the first photo, the
halo of color around the fingertips was barely visible, in the second the
band of color was wider and brighter, and in the third the halo'd shrunken
almost to its original size. Cusack noted the first photo was taken after the
man'd been severely depressed after being diagnosed with cancer of the
pancreas. In the second photo, his disease was in remission and his attitude
was more positive. The third photo was taken shortly after a visit with
friends who told him he should just accept his fate and prepare to die.
Cusack said the negative attitude of the friends affected her client's own
attitude, which in turn depleted his positive energy. "The patterns in the
energy field change as attitudes change," she said, adding that she believes
that all people who come in contact have an effect on each other's energy
field. "A person can pick up the magnetic energy, whether it's positive or
negative, from other people's bodies," she said. "That's why I try never to
hang around negative people for very long." When Cusack's work with Kirlian
photography became well-known, she spent much of her time traveling and
lecturing. She hosted her own radio show in Houston, Texas, and a television
talk show in San Antonio. She was also a guest on several talk shows,
including "PM Magazine." On one live television talk show, Cusack's theories
were put to a dramatic test. Cusack remembers the hostess of the show as
smiling, poised, beautiful and famous. She asked Cusack to photograph her
fingertips with the Kirlian camera and interpret the results on the air.
Cusack did so and was appalled when she peeled back the instant picture to
find a photograph that reflected anger, stress and extreme illness. Cusack
stammered something about the camera malfunctioning and asked to take the
photo again. Again, the halos in the picture were broken with dark lines and
shot through with dark red. Cusack took a third picture with the same result.
Luckily, she said, at that moment the show paused for a commercial break.
Cusack took the moment to tell the hostess privately what she saw in the
photograph. "It showed me that she was very ill and under extreme emotional
stress, that she'd had a nervous breakdown recently and that she'd probably
even tried to take her own life," Cusack recalled. "The lady just looked at
me for a minute and then said, `When we go back on the air, tell the audience
exactly what you just told me.' So I did." The women then admitted that
everything Cusack said was true. She'd had a nervous breakdown and'd tried to
commit suicide after being diagnosed with cancer. She'd also been divorced
and her husband was trying to take her children. Months later, after the
woman'd resolved some of her problems, she asked Cusack to take another
picture in a private session. This time, the photo showed a positive reading
with no red visible in the picture. Through the years, Cusack's photographed
the fingertips of a woman two hours before death and the hands of psychics
and healers from around the world. She's done a special study of people who
claim to have'd close encounters with extraterrestrials. Several months ago,
she returned to her parent's home in Sherman to care for them during an
illness. After their recovery, she decided to stay in Tupelo as a "home base"
between her lecture tours. She plans to apply for a grant to continue her
research with Kirlian photography as a diagnostic tool for mental, emotional
and physical illness. Though some critics view Kirlian photography as more of
a religious tool than a scientific one, Cusack said one of her main goals's
to help erase that "fine line between science and religion." She pointed out
that hundreds of years ago, today's medical science would have seemed like
fantasy. "When we can prove even one aspect of the unseen becoming seen, the
blending of spiritual and scientific search will produce a new age of
knowing," she said.
 
10-23-89 ASPEN, Colo.: 
Author Bud Hopkins says thousands of people have close
encounters with aliens each year, but are either unwilling or unable to
discuss them. Hopkins was one of 150 participants in a "Close Encounters of
the Fourth Kind" weekend conference which included leading researchers, a
former NASA Astronaut and seven people who claim to have been abducted by
aliens. "Skepticism's fine. Ridicule isn't, said Hopkins, author of the book
"Intruders." "We have to raid the public's level of consciousness," he said.
"If these stories were just fantasies, you would expect a lot of variation,"
sid Ed Bullard, another author and UFO reseracher. "But there's a profound
coherency, an order in what they say." Aspen already may have'd its
consciousnes raised. Reports coming in over the weekend included one from a
police officer, of strange lights flickering over the mountain tops. Travis
Walton, who says he was abducted from a lumber camp in Arizona and
transported to an alien spacecraft "for five days, six hours" in 1975,
decided to make a rare public appearance at the meeting. "I want people to
understand, to accept, said Walton, 36, who talked of a rare "multiple
witness" case now famous in UFO reserach. Walton said he'd stopped his truck
to investigate a strange light that he and his six co-workers saw. Walter
approached the light and was "hit by a nasty beam" and whisked up to the
craft, he said. "When I came to, I was aboard, I was lying on my back and
they'd some sort of object across my chest. My coat and shirt were pushed
up," he said. Medical tampering with human victims's a common thread in
close-encounter tales. "I believe genetic experiementing's at the heart of
the whole thing," Hopkins said of the abduction phenomenon. Hopkins said he
sees the alien presence as manipulative, not helpful, a point which touches
on a current hot topic in the UFO research community.
 
10-24-89 PINE BLUFF, Ark.: 
A Jefferson County woman says she saw a bright
white globe with a red core hovering about 100 feet over the treetops near
her home Monday night and sheriff's deputies say they saw the object. Cora
Walker of near Pine Bluff said she watched the globe hover for about an hour
before calling the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office. "It came out from the
northeast at a rapid speed, and it went to the southwest," Ms. Walker said.
"Then it stood still." She started calling her neighbors. "It was a bright
light and then from it, it looked like a red flare," she said. "I've never
seen anything like it." After about an hour, the light started slowly moving
out of sight, she said. "It went straight down like a moon," she said. "I
don't know what it was, but it was a strange object." Sgt. Bernard Adams of
the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office and Deputy Mark Bradley said they
watched the object until it disappeared somewhere over Watson Chapel about
9:30 p.m. Sheriff's dispatcher Glen Hopkins said several deputies reported
seeing the bright light moving from the west to the east and then back again.
He said it was also seen in Grant County. The sheriff's office notified the
Federal Aviation Administration, but FAA officials'd no radar contact with
the object, Hopkins said. Hopkins said he'd no idea what the object was. "All
I can tell you's I'd three officers who saw it," he said. Adams couldn't
identify what he was looking at, either. "I don't know really what it was,"
he said. "Whether it was a weather balloon or a satellite or what, I don't
know. To me, it was just bright lights in the air. "It did move, and it
completely disappeared afterward," he said. "It was real bright. Adams said
Pine Bluff Arsenal employees also reported seeing the object. Bradley was on
patrol just south of Pine Bluff on Highway 81 when he saw the bright white
light hovering about 150 yards above the treetops. "Someone asked me if I'd
seen a UFO, and I told them I saw an object and it was unidentified and it
was flying," Bradley said Tuesday. "When I put the binoculars on it, it was
just a white light and every once in a while you could see some red mixed in
it. The light was so bright you couldn't determine any shape to it." Bradley
said the light started to move west toward Watson Chapel, which ruled out the
possibility of the object being a weather balloon, because the winds were
from the south at the time, he was told. Larry Simpson, a disc jockey for
KCLA radio station, said he was flooded with phone calls from people in the
area who saw the strange light.
 
10-30-89 INDIANAPOLIS: 
Reports of ghosts and haunted houses are the stuff of
Holloween legend and paranormal experiments, but to a group of 51 Hoosiers
they're, well, sheer poppycock. In fact, spirits and superstitions don't
stand a ghost of a chance against the Indiana Skeptics, a group of teachers
and scientists who endeavor to find rational explanations for paranormal
reports. "If someone believes he's seen a ghost or UFO visitor, it's simply
a mistake, a hallucination...or a hoax. They exist only in the mind," said
Robert Craig, the founder and chairman of the group. Craig says the Skeptics
are willing to go to the scene of UFO sightings, haunted houses, seances and
other paranormal events and literally chase the ghosts away through the power
of reason. So far, the year-old group's had no takers, but Craig's examined
Indianapolis' Hannah House, which's a reputation for being haunted. Some
visitors have reported experiences ranging from loud, unexplained noises in
the night and inanimate objects that move to shadowy figures in passageways
and an overpowering stench of burning flesh that wafts up from the basement,
where runaway slaves supposedly were killed in a fire. "All I found was a
fascinating, well-maintained older home," said Craig, an associate instructor
in multicultural studies at Indiana University. He says the sounds are caused
by unseen animals or pranksters; the objects are moved by absent-minded
visitors; the figures are imaginary. Even the scent of burning flesh can be
explained rationally. "Studies have shown that when the olfactory sensory
cells in the brain become stimulated or disturbed, as they might if you think
you're in a haunted house, the most common perception's the scent of burning
flesh," Said Craig. The same may be said for out-of-body experiences, which
many people report following life-threatening traumas such as surgery or an
auto accident. "The feeling of lightness, of numbness, of floating above your
body and sensing a warm light are part of the body's normal response to
trauma," says Craig. Paranormal experiences can also be triggered by
religious beliefs and by perpsychological stimuli, such as repressed
sexuality, he said. Craig said about 4 percent of the population's
"fantasy-prone," given to believing that paranormal experiences happen to
them regularily. He said the group tends to share many of the same
characteristics: Excessive reliance on fantasy during childhood. Emotions
that run high and often unchecked. Unusual literary tastes, especially at an
early age. A personal world-view in which the individual's either universally
persecuted or unanimously beloved. A physiological brain disorder called
Temporal Lobe Syndrome, which's symptoms similar to those of epilepsy and can
induce a trance-like state in which chemical changes take place in the body,
resulting in altered perceptions.
 
10-30-89 DALLAS: 
Purveyors of parapsychology are complaining that they are
innocent victims of fundamentalist Christians, who have mounted an offensive
against Satanic religions that's persuaded many school officials to drop or
tone down Halloween celebrations. A number of psychic fairs have been
canceled nationwide recently under pressure from Christian groups, including
one in Garland this past weekend and an earlier one in San Antonio. "It
bellied up because we got calls from some Bible beaters who thought it was
cult-related and Satanic," said John Lehman, owner of the North Dallas County
Farmers Market, where the Garland fair was to have been held. "I hated to
buckle under to pressure, but every customer you lose's one that's lost for
good. It's probably not worth offending people." Psychic fairs feature
demonstrations by practitioners of parapsychological arts such as fortune
telling, tarot card reading, and "aura audits." In addition, a number of
vendors show up to hawk materials relating to new age beliefs, such as quartz
crystals, music and books. "There's been quite a few psychic fairs canceled
lately," said Len Ponath of Southwestern Parasychology, Inc., who'd planned
to attend the show. "Christians are saying psychics are Satanists, too, and
we're all getting lumped in together," he said. "But it's not the same
thing." Al Burt, who sells books and jewelry oriented to new age beliefs that
promote peace and worldwide harmony, said he thinks the oppression being
suffered by many parapsychological practitioners will not diminish soon. He
said the Christians were galvanized by events such as the murders in
Matamoros, Mexico, and are lashing out at anything they don't understand.
"They remain ignorant of what they attacking," Burt said. "There are a lot of
psychics out there and some of them probably do practice black magic. But the
majority them try to steer as far away from that practice as possible."
Ponath said he believes the same paranoia that hit the psychic fairs's
responsible for mistaken anxieties about Halloween. He said true Satanists
don't have rituals on Halloween, but instead scheduled ceremonies on the day
before and day afterward. "So many people were leaving the church, they'd to
do something to stop them, so they started attacking Satanists," he said.
"But take a lot at them Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart." Lehman said he wishes
the psychic fair could have gone on as scheduled, but he feared he would take
much criticism if it did. "I'd somebody get up in my church and say children
shouldn't wear witches and skeleton outfits on Halloween," Lehman said. "But
my feeling was that Halloween was only a lot of fun. My personal feeling's
that people who believe Halloweeen's bad are people who are not really sure
what they believe."
 
10-31-89 North Carolina:
Hell's Half Acre, Devils Courthouse and other spooky spots abound in
North Carolina for trick-or-treaters bored with their old haunts and looking
for a little extra horror this Halloween. For starters, how about
trick-or-treating in Transylvania County? Local historian Betty Sherrill's
not sure why this western county was named for the eastern European home of
the notorious bloodsucking County Dracula. She said it probably'd more to do
with the translation of Transylvania, which means "through the woods," than
any propensity on the part of local folks to rise from the dead and go out
seeking donations for the Red Cross. For would-be ghouls looking for
vampires, Mrs. Sherrill suggests they try Bat Cave, a town located along the
Broad River in northeast Henderson County. The caves for which the town's
named are part of a 93-acre nature preserve and at one time were home to a
large population of the winged mammals, including at least one endangered
species. Hell's Half Acre, a town that sounds like a B-grade horror flick, in
fact's a peace-loving community of about 125 people in northwest Caswell
County, better known now as Providence. But in the early 1900s, it housed a
saloon, and a good deal of drinking and carousing went on, earning the town
its rough-sounding name, says J. Louis Oakley, 59, who was the town's first
postmaster. The Outer Banks community of Kill Devil Hills got its name from
a kind of rum that once was favored by the locals. Indians believed that his
Satanic majesty sat at Devils Courthouse in judgment of "all who were lacking
in courage or'd strayed from a strict code of virtue," according to a sign at
posted at the base. The mountain of jagged rock looms over the Great Smoky
Mountains National Park from a vantage point near the Haywood County line in
the Blue Ridge parkway.
 
11-02-89 CHESHIRE, Conn.: 
When the official Soviet news agency Tass reported
a UFO sighting earlier this month, John W. White was among the earliest to
doubt the story, even though he's a firm believer in the extraterrestial.
White, a 50-year-old author and educator, said claims that 10-foot aliens
debarked the UFO and briefly abducted a 16-year-old boy in the city of
Voronezh, 300 miles south of Moscow, just didn't make sense. Most
significantly, a majority of people reporting contact with aliens have
described the creatures as being only about 4-feet tall, White explained.
Despite doubts about the sighting, White said UFO enthusiasts are
investigating the matter. "I would have liked for it to be true," White said.
"But the report was so bizarre, I'd to be very skeptical and doubted the
authenticity of it. We have to make sure it was not some hoax, or some
fantastic embroidery." Since he was a child, White's been fascinated the
unknown and the unexplained. As a teen-ager growing up in Cheshire, this
interest was satisfied by reading science fiction. But as he progressed
through undergraduate and graduate school, White came to believe UFO's are
real and not just fiction. He began to studying the subject and in the
process built an international reputation. He's written 14 books and numerous
magazine or newspaper articles about UFOs and contacts with aliens. The
primary focus of his research's been of the religious or pyschic aspects of
the UFO phenomenon. "I'm trying to bring education and credibility to the
subject," White said. As part of that continuing effort, White's organized
his third annual UFO conference, which will be held on Nov. 11 and 12 at the
Ramada Inn in North Haven. White and 11 other leaders in the field of UFO
research will speak to about 150 people who have paid $150 apiece to attend
the gathering. People will be coming from as far away as Seattle, Wash., and
western Canada. A total of 20 states and Canada will be represented at the
conference, White said. Among the speakers will be Walter Andrus, the
international director of the Mutual UFO Network, the largest UFO
organization in the world; and Whitley Streiber, a best-selling author of
non-fiction books. A University of Connecticut psychology professor also will
report on the result of his extensive interviews with people who claim to
have seen UFOs. "It's a chance for people who attend to have direct access to
researchers and contactees (those who've met aliens). Essentially, it's a
forum for public education," said White. Despite his long-time belief in
UFOs, White's only seen an unidentified flying object once in his life, and
that sighting occurred just two years ago in April in New York state. White
said the sighting also was witnessed by his oldest son, a neighbor and some
of their friends. "It was a brilliant red rectangular light that rose from
behind a tree line," White recalled. "It hovered motionless, and as it did
so...it changed its dimensions to about three times its previous size for
about 10 seconds. Then it returned to its previous size and sank behind the
tree line." White said he attempted to locate the exact area where he'd seen
the light, but he was unable to get to it because it was a swampy area. But
he said he's convinced it was a UFO. "What it was I can't say. It didn't have
a valid structure that I could see," he said.
 
11-06-89 CHESHIRE, Conn. 
When the official Soviet news agency Tass reported
a UFO sighting last month, John W. White was among the earliest to doubt the
story, even though he's a firm believer in the extraterrestrial. White, a
50-year-old author and educator, said claims that 10-foot aliens debarked the
UFO and briefly abducted a 16-year-old boy in the city of Voronezh, 300 miles
south of Moscow, just didn't make sense. Most significantly, a majority of
people reporting contact with aliens have described the creatures as being
only about 4-feet tall, White explained. Despite doubts about the sighting,
White said Unidentified Flying Object enthusiasts are investigating the
matter. "I would have liked for it to be true," White said. "But the report
was so bizarre, I'd to be very skeptical and doubted the authenticity of it.
We have to make sure it was not some hoax, or some fantastic embroidery."
Since he was a child, White's been fascinated the unknown and the
unexplained. As a teen-ager growing up in Cheshire, this interest was
satisfied by reading science fiction. But as he progressed through
undergraduate and graduate school, White came to believe UFO's are real and
not just fiction. He began studying the subject and in the process built an
international reputation. He's written 14 books and numerous magazine or
newspaper articles about UFOs and contacts with aliens. The primary focus of
his research's been of the religious or pyschic aspects of the UFO
phenomenon. "I'm trying to bring education and credibility to the subject,"
White said. As part of that continuing effort, White's organized his third
annual UFO conference, which will be held on Nov. 11 and 12 at the Ramada Inn
in North Haven. White and 11 other leaders in the field of UFO research will
speak to about 150 people who have paid $150 apiece to attend the gathering.
People will be coming from as far away as Seattle, Wash., and western Canada.
A total of 20 states and Canada will be represented at the conference, White
said. Among the speakers will be Walter Andrus, the international director of
the Mutual UFO Network, the largest UFO organization in the world; and
Whitley Streiber, a best-selling author of non-fiction books. A University of
Connecticut psychology professor also will report on the result of his
extensive interviews with people who claim to have seen UFOs. "It's a chance
for people who attend to have direct access to researchers and contactees.
Essentially, it's a forum for public education," White said. Despite his
long-time belief in UFOs, White's only seen an unidentified flying object
once in his life, and that sighting occurred just two years ago in April in
New York state. White said the sighting also was witnessed by his oldest son,
a neighbor and some of their friends. "It was a brilliant red rectangular
light that rose from behind a tree line," White recalled. "It hovered
motionless, and as it did so...it changed its dimensions to about three times
its previous size for about 10 seconds. Then it returned to its previous size
and sank behind the tree line." White said he attempted to locate the exact
area where he'd seen the light, but he was unable to get to it because it was
a swampy area. But he said he's convinced it was a UFO. "What it was I can't
say. It didn't have a valid structure that I could see," he said.
 
11-09-89 GRAND FORKS, N.D. 
More than a year after he first reported UFO
encounters, University of North Dakota professor John Salter still's
convinced they happened even though others may have doubts. Salter, who
chairs the Indian Studies Department at UND, recently mailed letters to
friends and fellow faculty members listing 18 physical changes he attributes
to encounters with extraterrestrials on March 20 and March 21, 1988. Among
the changes are improved skin tone, circulation, eyesight and hair growth, he
said. "After all these years, I have a 5 o'clock shadow," Salter said,
smiling and rubbing his chin. He also said he stopped smoking in May after 35
years of heavy tobacco use. Salter, 55, hasn't been checked by a doctor
partly because he didn't think it was necessary. Salter, president of the UND
chapter of the North Dakota Higher Education Association, was the 1989 winner
of a Martin Luther King Jr. Award from Gov. George Sinner for his
contributions to civil rights causes. For the past year, he also's been
coordinator of the North Dakota chapter of the Mutual UFO Network. He says
it's about two dozen members and helpers in the state. Salter remembers
seeing an alien about 6 feet tall while visiting a field near Richland
Center, Wis., on March 20, 1988. He also reported seeing three or four
smaller aliens in the Wisconsin woods. He and his son John Salter III, 24,
now of Quincey, Calif., reported more than an hour of "lost" time a period
blanked out in their memory as they drove a pickup truck near Richland
Center. The next day, they said, they saw what appeared to them to be a
silvery, round spacecaft five miles east of Peoria, Ill. Bernard O'Kelly,
dean of the UND College of Arts and Sciences, said he considers Salter a
credible source, and he's keeping an open mind about the professor's report.
"I certainly believe he's a fine academic citizen," O'Kelly said. "He's not
the first person I've heard of to have'd experiences related to UFOs." Salter
said he's received positive support from family, friends and students. "I
don't think I've encountered any open skepticism," he said. "It should be
reasonably clear I haven't fallen out of my treehouse." Salter thinks the
visitors to Earth may have inserted "a transplant" that caused the changes in
his body. He said he's pieced together details of the visit on March 20
through "recalls," or memory flashbacks, of the time he and his son couldn't
account for in Wisconsin. The younger Salter, who's the director of an Indian
education center in northern California, hasn't'd similar recalls and
physical changes, but his father said his psychic powers have increased. John
Sr. said he's discussed the UFO experience in detail with fellow UFO network
member Kevin Henke, a chemist at the UND Energy and Environmental Research
Center, and occasionally with student groups and other faculty members.
"Although it's a very unusual case, I do have a tendency to believe he's
telling the truth and that what he's seeing's real," Henke said.
"Unfortunately, he doesn't have anything really tangible to prove it," Henke
added. "He's had some physical changes. From a scientific point of view,
you'd like to have a medical examination before and after."
 
11-14-89 MILLERSBURG, Ohio Holmes County: 
Residents reported strange lights in
the sky, and a resident called the sheriff's department to investigate a
circular depression on their front lawn, authorities said Tuesday. According
to a sheriff's department news release, a family in Monroe Township
discovered the ring, about 7 inches wide and 45 feet in diameter, Saturday
afternoon. The family's no explanation for the phenomenon, the news release
said. In areas where the grass'd been matted down, the ring was about a
half-inch deep, the sheriff's department said. Judy Neville told authorities
that other than the family dogs' unusual barking early Saturday morning, no
one heard or saw anything out of the ordinary. Sheriff's Deputy Dale Renker's
investigating the incidents, the department news release said. Renker could
not be reached for comment Tuesday.
 
11-16-89 POCATELLO, Idaho: 
Stanton Friedman says three decades of
investigation have given him "overwhelming evidence" that Earth's had
interplanetary visitors and governments have hidden the evidence of those
visits. "Please don't reach a conclusion until you've examined the relevant
evidence," he told about 700 people at an Idaho State University speech
Tuesday night. One of the hardest pieces of evidence Friedman cited's a 1952
memo from the National Security Council to president-elect Dwight Eisenhower,
which stated that the government recovered four alien bodies from a UFO crash
near Roswell, N.M. The memo, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act,
says the bodies were recovered about two miles from wreckage spotted by a
rancher after a severe lightning storm. Friedman said 75 percent of it was
deleted before's was released. Attempts to get more information on that
incident have been stymied because much of the NSC material from Eisenhower's
presidency remains classified and's exempt from automatic declassification
based on its age, he said. Although an initial press release told of the
incident, the next day the Army Air Corps claimed it was actually a weather
balloon radar disk. Pieces of a radar disk were shown to reporters the next
day, but Friedman said some of the participants have admitted those were
faked. An FBI memo confirms that the material in federal custody's not a
weather radar disk, he said. A group called Citizens Against UFO Secrecy's
unsuccessfully sued the Central Intelligence Agency to get documents related
to the Roswell incident, he said. The documents refer to Operation Majestic
12, the title given to the incident by federal authorities. Friedman said he
and a colleague have talked to more than 100 people connected to the Roswell
incident. He said governments use secrecy to keep information about more
advanced technologies away from other countries and because "Nationalism's
the only game in town. No government wants its citizens to owe their primary
allegiance to the planet." He said residents of this planet "must stop
believing we're the most advanced life form. Twenty-five thousand children
die each day on our planet, most from preventable causes. How do you think we
look to those from other planets?" Friedman said he commuted to the Idaho
National Engineering Laboratory periodically from 1956 to 1959 while working
for General Electric in Cincinnati. He said he was involved in planning the
flight test facility for the nuclear powered aircraft that was built at INEL.
That project, he said, had the potential to become an interstellar propulsion
system. His lecture was built around refuting the people he calls "noisy
negativists." He cited four reasons that most scientists and journalists
haven't pursued UFO phenomena: Ignorance of relevant evidence; "The laughter
curtain," a fear of ridicule which limits reports of sightings and
investigation of them; Egotism among science and government experts, who say
aliens certainly would have sought them out; An unwillingness to apply the
latest technology to studying UFOs. He said that although scientists will
admit there are billions of stars in billions of galaxies, "They assume you
can't get there from here. Future technology's not an extrapolation of the
past. Progress comes from doing things differently in an unpredictable way."
 
11-24-89 FYFFE, Ala. 
Unidentified, banana-shaped flying objects over Fyffe
were no match for Soviet space creatures in a magazines's annual ranking of
planet's strangest phenomenon. The sightings in February and March of
brightly lighted objects over the northeast Alabama town finished ninth on
the 1989 list compiled by Strange magazine. Fyffe Police Chief Junior
Garmany, who along with his assistant saw a UFO, said he understood how the
editors could rank the Soviet UFO first. "The Soviet Union one may have been
more unusual an occurrence than ours," Garmany said. "I imagine the
magazine'd a hard time ranking these things, though. All I can say's what we
seen was real, and it's unexplainable to this date." The September landing of
space creatures in the Soviet Union as reported by the official government
news agency Tass took the top spot in the magazine's Top 10, which will be
published in the March issue. "The Alabama UFOs were very odd because police
officers witnessed them, but we'd to rank the Russian Tass alien case number
one because it was covered worldwide and because Tass's such a serious news
agency," said Mark Chorvinsky, editor of the magazine, which's based in
Rockville, Md., and's a circulation of 5,000. On Feb. 10 at 8:30 p.m., while
responding to a call from a Sand Mountain homeowner who reported seeing a
peculiar flying object, Garmany and Assistant Police Chief Fred Works said
they spotted a brightly lighted object hovering above a dark county road.
Chorvinsky said Strange's the only magazine that takes "an objective look" at
such occurrences. "The position of the magazine's we do not believe what we
print, but we also do not disbelieve it." The editorial staff compiled the
list from more than 3,000 unusual occurrences featured in the bi-monthly
magazine during 1989. Other phenomena that made the top 10 included:
sightings in Greece of a "25-foot entity that resembled a frog," more than
600 symmetrical circles of flattened crops in southern England, and a 30-mile
swarm of cobwebs that fell from the sky in Dorset, England.
 
11-27-89 POCATELLO, Idaho: 
The losses are mounting again in southeastern Idaho
amid another rash of cattle mutilations that have left ranchers and lawmen
grasping for explanations. "It's really frustrating us and frustrating for
ranchers, too," said Bear Lake County Sheriff Brent Bunn because no person or
thing's ever been caught in the act. This year, more than two dozen case have
been reported with the economic losses estimated in excess of $10,000. The
theories differ on how they occurred, but circumstances surrounding the cases
often are bizarre and similar. Officials said there apparently's no struggle
from the animal, no blood, no footprints and no tire tracks in the area.
Organs and genitals are removed with a sharp object. The animals obviously
were not killed for food. In the autumn of 1975, 90 mutilations were reported
throughout southeastern Idaho, along with more than 100 in other states. Then
only one was reported in Idaho the next year. Colorado investigators
attributed nearly all their cases to predators. But ranchers who lost the
animals scoffed at that conclusion, blaming humans instead perhaps satanic
worshippers. Bear Lake County rancher Kent Alleman, who's lost six animals to
mutilation in the last few months, is convinced occult or satanic worshippers
are responsible, using the organs in ceremonies. "People are very concerned,"
said Alleman, who lives in a valley with about 20 other families. "There's no
doubt it's people...satanic worshippers or a cult." The sheriff agrees people
are to blame for the mutilations but not necessarily satanic worshippers.
He's seen no sign of occult activity during his investigations. "I don't see
any cult symbolism near the animals when we find them," Bunn said. "I've
heard of no cult meetings in the area and haven't seen altars or graffiti. I
don't subscribe to the UFO theory, either. I think it's to be animals or
people."
 
12-08-89 BRUSSELS, Belgium: 
The air force and police are investigating
numerous UFO sightings near the border with the Netherlands and West Germany,
officials said Friday. Since Nov. 29, dozens of people and police officials
in the northeastern Liege province said they've seen luminous objects in the
sky, with some of them describing a flying platform scanning the surface with
three huge searchlights, while others talk of dancing lights. During the same
period, air traffic controllers "found radar blips on the screens that could
not be immediately explained," said Defense Ministry spokesman Col. Michel
Mandel. At the time of the sightings there were no authorized low-level
flights in the region. "We are looking for a rational explanation," he said.
Although Mandel cast doubts on several witness accounts, the Belgian Society
for the Study of Space Phenomena said Friday it would send members to the
German-speaking region in Liege and across the border in the Netherlands and
West Germany this weekend. The society said it'd 150 witness accounts, in
addition to photo and videotaped material.
 
12-25-89 KALAMAZOO, Mich. 
Scholarly UFO studies deserve a haven of their own,
says a Michigan professor who oversees a professional journal for research on
extraterrestrials. The Journal of UFO Studies, resurrected this year from a
defunct publication of the same name, aims to give researchers something
"they wouldn't be embarrassed by writing for," said its editor, Michael
Swords. "It looks exactly like a professional journal, like any other
academic field's," said the Western Michigan University professor of natural
sciences. "The target audience's academics and researchers. "It's meant to
allow the serious people to have an outlet, which doesn't really exist right
now. This was a hole in UFO publishing that'd to be filled," Swords said in
a recent interview from his campus office. Swords, who's working on the
second annual issue, believes the $15 journal's too technical for the general
public. For example, one of the first issue's three articles of about 35
pages each discussed chemical analyses of a substance gleaned from the
Delphos Case, a supposed 1971 UFO landing site in Kansas. Another looked at
the effect of hypnosis in obtaining information from people who claim they've
been abducted by aliens. The analyses couldn't pinpoint the chemical, and the
hypnosis study by Thomas Bullard of Indiana University, a folklore
specialist, found hypnosis wasn't influencing accounts of abductions. Swords
wrote the third article, about whether other life exists in the universe. He
believes it isn't a matter of if, but of how many. "All the laws of nature
are the same everywhere and what happens once's bound to happen twice.
Chances of other high-tech extraterrestrial civilizations are equal to how
long it could exist after reaching the danger zone of technology. "Since
we're made it 45 years past nuclear weapons, I think people think there are
at least dozens if not thousands of high-tech civilizations out there," said
Swords, 49, who moved to Kalamazoo 18 years ago after earning his doctoral
degree in the history of science from Case Western University. The 174-page
journal features a book review section and a forum on different topics each
issue. All views, including those of skeptics, will be welcome, Swords said.
The second issue will take up theories about electrical fields that some
researchers blames for creating balls of light mistaken for UFOs and for
affecting psyches, may be prompting people to think they've made contact with
aliens, he said. "A lot of old-timers don't like the idea because it steals
the E.T.'s away from them," Swords said. Mark Rodeghier, scientific director
of the Chicago-based Center for UFO Studies that published about 700 copies
of the first journal issue in March, plans to run off about that many for
next year's edition. Swords said his interest in the field, which began when
he was a teen, isn't a secret, but he hasn't been teased too much by his
peers in recent years. "Sooner or later, I silence that behavior," he said.
 
12-23-89 LINCOLNTON, N.C. 
Some people believe that President Harry Truman
made a pact with an alien nation in the early 1950s that allowed creatures
from outer space to set up shop beneath the Arizona desert. Not George
Fawcett. Fawcett, an advertising sales representative for Park Newspapers and
executive director of the N.C. Mutual UFO Network Inc., says he's seen no
evidence to convince him that such a pact or community for that matter
exists. "Now, some people believe there's a whole nation of humanoids living
underneath the Arizona desert, but I don't believe it. Never have," said the
60-year-old Lincolnton man, who's been monitoring UFO activity in North
Carolina and elsewhere for nearly 45 years. For Fawcett, such reports only
degrade what for him's been a serious pursuit that began on Dec. 18, 1944. On
that day, the young Fawcett read a news item about shiny silver balls in the
sky. It changed his life. Since then, in his spare time, the former
journalist and restauranteur's filled 35 filing cabinets with 30,000 to
40,000 reports of confirmed sightings. He's set up Mutual UFO Network
chapters in several states, most recently in North Carolina, where
approximately 200 members joined him in incorporating the group as an
official non-profit organization last month. "We want to pool our time,
talent, money and other resources to continue what we've been doing
informally for about 20 years," Fawcett said. Among their first actions was
to elect eight officers with Fawcett at the helm and to establish an
investigative arm, called the Greater Charlotte MUFON Investigative Team. The
investigative unit, with Charlotte's George Lund in charge, trains members
how to check and verify or discredit sitings. Using films, manuals and
lectures, leaders of the unit teach members what to look for in the reports,
such as descriptions of land markings, severe animal reactions, sounds
similar to a swarm of bees and odors like ammonia, sulphur or burnt
electrical wire. Fawcett said the team will likely be asked to look into more
than 100 sitings this year, although he said only 20 to 30 percent of those
will be deemed real. The rest can be written off as electrical towers,
shooting stars, meteors and so on, he said. Fawcett said the proliferation of
books and movies about aliens have opened the minds of many people to the
possibility that UFO's exist. But he's as disturbed by people who believe
without investigating as he's by people who don't believe. "There's foolish
faith as opposed to blind doubt. They're both wrong," he said. Fawcett said
that while there's enough UFOs for everybody, he doesn't believe it's
necessary to see one to have faith in their existence. He said most
investigators have not actually seen a UFO. "In that respect, my experience's
unusual, he said. I saw one years ago above Lynchburg College it was 10:15
a.m., July 10 It looked like an orange," he said, describing the 4-minute
encounter. While Fawcett's convinced the objects and their inhabitants may
pose a threat to the nation's security and human survival, his next project,
proposed construction of a UFO museum in North Carolina, capitalizes on them.
"I think it would be a great tourist attraction. North Carolina's first in
flight, why not first in UFOs?"
                        End of 1989 File
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