1222 lines
85 KiB
Plaintext
1222 lines
85 KiB
Plaintext
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
|
|
**********************************************
|
|
* THE U.F.O. BBS - http://www.ufobbs.com/ufo *
|
|
********************************************** |