A wave of UFO sightings fascinate a small town in Virginia.

CASE DETAILS

Wytheville, Virginia, is a small town nestled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Country music station WYVE calls itself the voice of Wytheville. On most days, life there is usually quiet and uneventful. But that was not the case on the morning of October 7, 1987. Radio reporter Danny Gordon checked in, as usual, with the county sheriff and heard an unbelievable tale. According to Danny, three Wythe County sheriff’s deputies all claimed to have seen a UFO:

“It was a filler piece that came on at the end of the news which I usually relegate to something that’s may be unusual, like we had one police officer who killed five chickens at once with two shots, and that was a story that ran as kind of a ‘ha ha’ piece, and this was another ‘ha ha’ piece and being a very skeptical newsman, it was definitely not in my lead part of my news.”

However, Danny’s “ha ha” piece sparked some unbelievable listener responses. Reports of UFO sightings poured into WYVE. With the switchboard jammed, Danny set up a special call-in program for the following week:

“Being a brass tacks journalist, I always believe there is a plausible, logical explanation. And I felt at that time that it was military of some nature and that we would find the reason in a short period of time.”

Danny thought the UFOs were most likely experimental aircraft being tested out of Virginia’s Langley Air Force Base. But he was repeatedly told by the military that there was no testing going on. As more and more residents came forward with their stories of UFOs, the military finally came up with one explanation. They said the cause for the UFO sightings was not experimental aircraft but rather planes refueling. But according to Danny Gordon, that explanation was impossible:

“I called the Pentagon and talked to the Air Force General there, who told me if they’re refueling under 13,000 feet, then somebody’s butt’s in a sling. And to this day, we don’t know if they were refueling at 5,000 feet. But at the same time, I have asked, if it is military, then I’ll back off the story and leave it alone if you tell me because I’m a patriot. And each time I’m told it’s not us, we’re not doing it, and we haven’t been doing it.”

On October 21st, just two weeks after the first sighting, Danny and his friend, Roger Hall, drove to the area where most of the sightings had occurred. According to Danny, they brought along a 35-millimeter still camera, as well as a video camera:

“We were headed home, after two hours of fruitless searching… And I just happened to look to my left and saw a very unusual object coming across the horizon. I pulled off to the side of the road in a hurry, jumped out, he got out of the right side, and as he got out I noticed the craft coming at me was very large, it had a dome shape to the top of it, and no wings, and had what appeared to be a strobe putting out multi-colored lights on the right side of the craft. As I watched the sky, from the left came the red ball. As the big mothership went into a small skiff of clouds, the red ball docked with the craft… We looked at each other and realized, no pictures. The camera was not in my hand, the camera was not in his hand, and we both knew we blew it.”

The next night, Gordon and Hall went out again. This time they did take photographs. With the film still undeveloped, Danny called a press conference for the following day, October 23, 1987:

“The night before the press conference, I received a phone call from somebody who refused to identify himself, and he said that I need to be aware that the CIA and the federal government were very much interested in the Wythe County UFOs. I started to wonder what I’d stepped into. And my wife was urging me to back off, to leave it alone, and I was receiving some anonymous phone calls saying… it’s not for your place to be messing in defense matters.”

After the press conference, Danny discovered that his house had been broken into. Although nothing was stolen, Danny was convinced that someone was looking for his photographs. When developed, the pictures revealed only vague streaks of light in the sky. But six weeks later, Danny had another opportunity to photograph the UFOs. He was out shopping with his wife and daughter when they encountered some unexpected visitors:

“We looked very quickly and saw, what I thought was one large object, which later appeared to be four flying disc shapes. As soon as the objects were photographed they disappeared from view. When the pictures came out… they showed four definite shapes of objects in the sky, but the most impressive point in the four photographs, the objects appeared to change shape or life formations within one click of the camera. They go from a teardrop shape, to a round ball shape, then they go to a flying saucer-like disc shape, and then they go to a egg shape as they go out of sight.”

The people of Wytheville knew that something extraordinary was happening in their small town. Within a three-month period, there had been more than fifteen hundred sightings. One of the first occurred near Interstate 81, a mile from downtown Wytheville. Eyewitnesses said the craft resembled a brightly lit, spinning carousel. Immediately, other sightings were reported. One local resident, Patricia Aker, experienced a total of ten UFO sightings:

“I’m not mistaken about what we saw. Absolutely not. Because we’d never seen this before. The best way I can describe them is that they sort of looked like a cross between a helicopter and an airplane, with no noise.”

Then there was Mary Jane Williamson’s sighting, which happened directly above her house in the center of Wytheville:

“It had all the white lights, in the front, just a big semi-circle of white light, and it was just huge, I mean, it was just absolutely huge. You just had this feeling of something really, really big, just moving, just drifting over your head and no sounds or anything.”

Three months after the initial wave of sightings, Danny was packing for a broadcasters’ conference in Virginia Beach. It was there that he was to speak about his UFO coverage:

“I received a phone call at home from a retired military intelligence officer, and first he told me to make sure that I taped the conversation so he could put the date, and everyone to be aware, and I said, why do you want to tape this? And he said, I want your friends to know, that if something happens to you, that I forewarned you. He told me that because of his investigations into the UFO field that they had hit his son and caused his son to die with some kind of virus connected to leukemia. He said that he had information that the federal government was not very happy with my UFO investigations… he said, they want to quiet you…”

Less than one month after the disturbing phone call, Danny had two surprise visitors at his home. The two suited men said they were newspaper reporters and stayed for approximately forty-five minutes. According to Danny, one of the men interviewed him while the other roamed through the house snapping photographs:

“They told me when they left they would send me a copy of the article so I could peruse it, and when I didn’t get one I called the newspaper and they said, well, these two guys are not on our payroll. They don’t work for us. So who they were I don’t know, but they were in my house, saw my pictures, saw my negatives, talked to my family, took pictures and then left but they were not with the newspaper.”

A few weeks later, Danny sat down to organize and catalogue his UFO photographs:

“When I got to the canister which had the UFO negatives, I quickly opened it up and found some UFO negatives, but the one negative with the shots from the shopping mall was missing. Now I felt like maybe there was something in those photographs that I was not seeing, so I took the photographs to some other people to look at. We used magnifying glasses and we measured angles trying to find out why these photographs were so important. And we’ve yet to discover why anyone would want to steal that… set of four in a series of photographs of the UFOs.”

Two months later, the stress of the late night phone calls, the home break in, the strange visitors and now the missing negatives finally took its toll on Danny and he had a heart attack. Doctors later determined that the attack was brought on by severe exhaustion. Danny was warned that continued involvement with the UFO controversy could kill him:

“If I had my choice, I’d not report the UFO story again. It’s just been too hard on my life and created too many problems. Don’t look up. Because once you look up and you tell somebody what you saw, your life is changed forever.”

Danny Gordon says that today, Wytheville has moved on from its days as a UFO town and is now enjoying its booming arts and business communities. But if history is any indicator, sometime soon, in another small town, someone else will look up and his or her life will never be the same.

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Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season four with Robert Stack and in season five with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.

Is the “missing time” phenomenon responsible for several alien abductions?

CASE DETAILS

Hundreds of people claimed they have had a bizarre experience called “missing time.” You are about to meet one of them—a member of the Air Force who disappeared for an entire hour. Under hypnosis, he described his abduction, believe it or not, by aliens.

At 8:45 PM on October 1, 1966, a bus pulled up in front of Dutra’s Market, in the small Cape Cod village of North Truro. Only one man got off the bus, nineteen-year-old Airman First Class Robert Matthews. He was reporting for his first tour of duty at a nearby Air Force base and noticed that the area was deserted:

“I got off where the bus driver told me where I was supposed to get off. And he told me to phone the base and they would send a truck down to pick me up. I told him that I was in front of Dutra’s Market and he told me to stay there and that there would be a truck there to pick me up in a minute. While I was standing there, I saw these lights you know, moving from right to left across the sky. That’s when I felt this fear.”

Matthews called the base again and informed them that something strange was happening:

“When I called the base again, they asked me where I’d been and he told me, he says, we sent a truck down there already. And I says, well I’ve been standing here waiting and no one’s been by here.”

The Air Force told Bob Matthews that a driver had arrived to pick him up at 8:50 PM, just five minutes after his first phone call. The driver claimed that Matthews was nowhere in sight. Almost an hour later, at 9:45, the base had received the second call from Matthews. Yet in Bob Matthews’ mind, those two phone calls had been made less than four minutes apart.

According to Budd Hopkins, an author of several books on the phenomenon, the “missing time” Bob Matthews experienced is a mini-period of amnesia:

“It is not perceived as a break in which something happens and then a resumption. It is… remembered as continuous and… the half hour trip… turns out to be a two hour trip or whatever, and this is sometimes experienced in conjunction with a UFO sighting or something like a light, but not always.”

In 1964, Hopkins experienced a UFO sighting himself. He has since delved into the field and became an expert on the subject of missing time and alien abduction:

“I began getting phone calls from people and letters and many of their sighting reports had pieces of missing time in them. They could not account for what, why something that should’ve taken 15 minutes took two hours and a half, a drive in a car, which involved in a sighting of a UFO. And we began looking into those cases and discovered one after another of these abduction cases.”

Bob Matthews was one of the people who contacted Budd Hopkins:

“I was on vacation looking for something to read and on the shelf there in front of me, I saw this book with this creature on it you know. I read the book and I thought someone had stepped into my head and taken my innermost fears and put them in a book. It brought tears to my eyes, you know, I couldn’t believe this was actually happening to someone else.”

After weeks of intensive interviews, Budd Hopkins put Bob Matthews under hypnosis to explore the details about what happened to him outside of Dutra’s market. According to Bud, hypnosis is a very useful tool in retrieving lost memories:

“So I connected myself with a psychiatrist and a couple of psychologists who were doing the hypnosis. And we began looking into a number of cases. Bob Matthews’ case is… a very good missing time case because of the fact that there is an indirect witness to his having been missing…”

Bob’s recollections were so vivid that he was able to return to Cape Cod and reconstruct what he believed took place outside Dutra’s Market:

“Under hypnosis, I observed in the sky, three lights moving in this direction. They hovered over here. And the red one came at me so fast… I walked up to… the ramp and I looked inside. And I saw four beings sitting… And the place reminded me of a doctor’s office.”

There’s no question that Bob Matthews’ story of alien abduction stretches the imagination. The idea seems unbelievable, even to those who claimed it happened to them. But some take their stories even one step further than Bob’s. They say they’ve been victims of experiments… and they claim to have physical evidence to prove it.

Budd Hopkins has organized support groups for these people so they can compare their disturbing experiences of missing time and alien abduction. Kristina Florence, a New York choreographer, believed she has had multiple experiences of missing time and alien abduction. In 1974, Kristina was 17-years-old when she, her mother, and her older sister crossed the Mojave Desert on their way to San Francisco. According to Kristina, their car overheated near Barstow, California, and they took the first exit off the highway:

“Somewhere along the line we got to this park. My sister got out of the car and I heard her run around the back and all of a sudden she said, oh my God, come out here quick. And the next thing I remembered consciously was that we were lying on this blanket in the middle of the park as if we’d had a little nap, just lying there. Our mom was still not around. And we woke up and we were like, whoa, what happened. And then the next thing I remember, the three of us are just driving like hell. We never talked about it until my sister just called me up one day and we sort of began to talk about it further and realized that we’d both had this very bizarre memory of this missing time thing. And she knew about Budd and she suggested I get in touch with Budd.”

Kristina took her sister’s advice and contacted Budd Hopkins. She agreed to undergo hypnosis, hoping she could recall some details about what had happened that afternoon in Barstow:

“Under hypnosis, I started having this picture that my sister’s getting out of the car and then I get out of the car and I looked up and there was something above the car. And I was so scared, I didn’t know what it was… And I was trying to start the car and it wouldn’t start. Then the next memory that I had under the hypnosis was that I was on a table and there were some people around. There was this screen, it was about as wide as a large television screen but it was paper thin and it was just moving around the table and it wasn’t attached to anything. And I could see three-dimensional shapes of my skull and my whole body. It was just taking pictures. And it was just this huge spherical room that was just covered with dials, there wasn’t space. It was just dials. And I felt like they put like these rubber pants on me or something with things attached. And then they left the room. And I lay there and I was asking for my sister and somebody was telling me she’s okay, she’s alright… that’s the last thing I remember. Then we were back on the grass.”

If Kristina’s abduction actually happened, then the question is: why? Bob Matthews may have the answer:

“Ultimately the focus becomes reproductive and the interest seems to have to do with taking sperm and ova samples. And the whole central focus of the physical part of it seems to deal with the idea of an ongoing genetic experiment and these abductees are involuntary victims or specimen in this ongoing genetic experiment.”

The idea of abduction by aliens may seem outrageous. Yet those who have experienced missing time episodes believe that is exactly what happened to them. Of course, there is no proof either way. Perhaps someday, science will discover a reason for missing time. Until then, the rest of us should just be glad that all of our minutes have been accounted for.

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Three people suffer radiation burns after a fire-spewing UFO hovers near their car.

CASE DETAILS

On December 29, 1980, Betty Cash, Vickie Landrum, and Vickie’s 7-year-old grandson, Colby, were returning home after dinner on State Road 1485, near Dayton, Texas, on the outskirts of Houston. At around 9 P.M., according to Vickie Landrum, they noticed a bright light in the sky:

“You could see it through the trees. It started to get real close. Then I knew it wasn’t a plane.”

Betty Cash described what happened next:

“We didn’t know what it was, but we knew there was something that was lighting up the sky. We had begun to feel heat, and all of a sudden Vickie screamed for me to stop. And when I stopped, she went forward and her handprint was imbedded into the dash of the car. And I thought, well, I’ve got to see what this is. So I got out, walked toward the front of the automobile, and I stood there looking up to try to figure out what this object was. It was a diamond- shaped object. Then at the bottom, flames were shooting out. The heat was tremendous. It just felt like I was burning from the inside out. When I reached for the door handle, the door handle was so hot, I couldn’t even begin to hold on to it. I was more than scared. The only thing I was thinking was, are we going to get out of here alive?

Vickie Landrum said that just moments later, a large squadron of helicopters descended on the area:

“They were the large helicopters that have the double rotaries on them. I counted 22 and I knew they had to belong to the army.”

For years Betty, Vickie, and Colby have battled with the government, trying to get clear answers about what actually took place that night. They’ve also fought against mysterious illnesses whose symptoms appeared just hours after the encounter. According to Vickie Landrum, later that night, at around 1 A.M., Colby woke up crying:

“He was begging me for water. He had a fever and he had vomited all over the bed.”

The next morning, Vickie and Colby were still suffering from nausea and what appeared to be severe cases of sunburn. Betty was in even worse shape. Her temperature was dangerously high and large red welts had appeared on her face and hands.

Over the next four days, Betty’s condition grew more serious. Vickie finally convinced her to see a doctor in Houston. He immediately admitted Betty to the hospital. Three weeks later, she underwent treatment for acute radiation poisoning. Betty was in the hospital six weeks. She lost more than fifty percent of her hair and patches of skin on her face. She was treated by Dr. Brian McClelland:

“There’s absolutely no doubt in my mind that Betty was exposed to high doses of radiation. As to what the source was, I can’t exactly say.”

After her release from the hospital, Betty asked for help from UFO investigator John Schuessler, a former NASA project manager:

“We had done several interviews with Betty and Vickie, and then we went out to the location where this happened. They were very clear on where it happened and how it happened. They told us exactly where along the road they stopped, because there were markers that identified the spot. They were able to point out exactly where they saw the object coming down out of the sky, over the road, and hovering there. They were able to point out a spot on the road that indicated that it had been heated to an extreme level of heating. It was burned, and it was very clear to the naked eye. Several weeks after we went to the spot and saw this burned area, someone dug up the road and hauled it away and replaced it with new asphalt. Some of the witnesses that watched this happen said people brought in unmarked trucks, dug up the road, put the material on the trucks, covered it with a tarpaulin, and drove away.”

John Schuessler also questioned everyone living within a 5-mile radius of the area:

“At least 10 other people had seen the object, and seven or eight other people had seen the helicopters. And their descriptions were all very similar to what Betty and Vickie described.”

One eyewitness was police officer L.L. Walker, who was in the area on the night that Betty and Vickie encountered the object:

“My wife Marie and I were returning from her mother and dad’s. As we were coming out of some tree lines, I saw a helicopter. It was shining a spotlight at the ground. Then I heard the noise of other helicopters behind it. And I stopped the car, ’cause I didn’t know what was going on. The helicopters were military and they were all flying fairly low to the ground, and all of them had search beams on. I thought maybe there was an airplane down, but they didn’t hesitate. They kept going in the same direction, which would probably intersect the area where Vickie said her encounter was.”

Convinced that the military was somehow involved, Betty and Vickie appealed to their senators. The Air Force agreed to a meeting at Bergstrom Air Force Base. As they entered the room, Vickie noticed a large map. The exact spot where the encounter had occurred was clearly marked.

According to Betty and Vickie, they were questioned for more than two hours. The interview was recorded by a military stenographer. In the end, the two men denied that any military or government operation had been conducted at that time and place. The women were told they were entitled to file a claim and the Air Force would review the case. Four weeks later, Betty and Vickie’s claims for medical damages were denied.

What did Betty Cash, and Vickie, and Colby Landrum see in the Texas sky on that winter night in 1980? John Schuessler offered two explanations:

“One is that it was an experimental craft of some kind, probably from our government. The other, it was an unidentified flying object, possibly extraterrestrial.”

Vickie Landrum:

“I don’t believe in little green men. And it had to be an object. It could have been a spacecraft that the government was carrying, but our government was carrying it.”

Betty, Vickie, and Colby continue to battle illnesses that doctors say could be the result of massive radiation exposure. Betty has been diagnosed with several types of cancer. She, Vickie, and Colby all have white blood cell counts that are far below normal. Their immune systems now have difficulty fighting off even minor infections. Dr. Brian McClelland:

“Vickie’s having visual problems. And there are lots of suggestions that they may be related to radiation as well, but that depends on the kind of exposure. And someone needs to tell us what the exposure was so we can figure it out.”

Betty Cash said that all she wants is information that could help her medically:

“If it’s a top-secret object that’s protecting the United States, then I could say I could forgive them for that. But at least they owe us to tell us exactly why we were burned, and what type of radiation that we were exposed to and how much.”

After the UFO incident, Betty Cash was hospitalized for cancer treatments at least once every year. She died 18 years later at the age of 69. The Air Force declined to be interviewed for this story. Their official position is that no military or government operation occurred.

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Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season three with Robert Stack and in season four with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.

A police officer sees a UFO and its occupants land in the New Mexico desert.

CASE DETAILS

On April 24, 1964, in the small town of Socorro, New Mexico, Police Officer Lonnie Zamora spotted a local teenager speeding through town. Officer Zamora followed the teenager to the edge of Socorro and out into the desert. Zamora had no idea the strange twist his life was about to take:

“I could see a white object to my left there. I thought it was a turned-over car. When I got up on top of the mesa there, I looked down, and I saw this big white object on the ground. I thought I could see something around the craft there. I could see some figures. Looked like they were walking around the craft.”

According to Lonnie, there were red markings on the hull; a vertical arrow with a horizontal line beneath it and a crescent-shaped line above it. Lonnie tried to radio police headquarters but was not able to break through the heavy static. After hearing two metallic sounds, like doors clanging shut, Lonnie said he noticed the small figures were gone:

“I saw this flame come up from underneath it, then I ran back behind the car, and it went up two, 20, 30 feet up in the air. It just stayed there for a while. And then, finally, it just took off slowly to the west. At first, you know, after I got to my senses, I said, ‘Did I see it or didn’t I, you know? What happened, you know?’”

With his radio now static free, Lonnie called an old friend, Sergeant Sam Chavez of the New Mexico State Police and told him to hurry to the site:

“I could tell that Lonnie was excited and probably scared. Lonnie Zamora, he’s a very dependable, honest type of person. He’s not one to create or make stories or build things up to make it exciting or anything like that.”

When Sam arrived, he and Lonnie noticed what looked like landing marks on the ground:

“We found some indentation on the ground where this thing had landed and the marks into the ground were 9 inches deep, 8 inches long, and 9 inches wide. I started looking for tracks, human tracks, but the only thing I found were impressions on the ground that were made by a perfect circle. But I found no human tracks. No shoe prints.”

U.S. Army officials at the nearby White Sands Missile Range sent Captain Richard T. Holder to investigate:

“My first impression was that it was something from the range that needed possible help. You know, first aid, attention, or at best, security. The more I got into it, the less convinced I was that that was the case.”

Holder noticed the unusual marks left in the sand and a bush burned to a crisp on only one side:

“Everything we saw seemed to support the story that officer Zamora recounted. Nothing gave me the slightest hint that he did this as a hoax or cooked it up for fame or fortune.”

After their investigation, the Air Force agreed that Lonnie saw something, but they insisted that it must have been a secret military aircraft. UFO expert and author Jerome Clark said the official explanation doesn’t hold water:

“They never were able to find any such evidence that any such thing was being tested at the time. And, in fact, even today, not an iota of evidence has emerged to support that claim. Nonetheless, the Air Force line on the case is that this is a credible witness. He clearly saw some kind of structured flying vehicle and that it must have been something that we built even if we can’t find it anywhere.”

Air Force officials brought in Dr. J. Allen Hynek, a respected astronomer and consultant on Project Bluebook, the Air Force’s official study of the UFO phenomenon. Dr. Hynek found the physical evidence convincing. But according to Jerome Clark, the most persuasive argument was Lonnie Zamora himself:

“Dr. Hynek was enormously impressed by Lonnie Zamora. He thought there was virtually no possibility of a hoax. He expressed huge disdain for the Bluebook handling of the report. And he said it was clear that the story that Bluebook had cooked up about this possibly being some kind of experimental aircraft was a story that even Bluebook knew to be untrue, but which was invented to keep Congress from harassing the Air Force.”

How do we explain what Lonnie Zamora saw? No matter what others believe, Lonnie has no doubt that what he witnessed was not of this earth:

“If they want to believe me, good. If they don’t want to believe me, it’s all right, too.”

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Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season eight with Robert Stack and in season one with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.

Did a UFO crash in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947?

CASE DETAILS

In 1947, a mysterious craft was found near Roswell, New Mexico. The government said it was a weather balloon, but eyewitnesses believed it was a UFO.

The story began in July of 1947, when a violent electrical storm swept over the desolate plains of South Central New Mexico. At his remote ranch house, “Mac” Brazel patiently waited out the lightning and thunder when he heard a strange thunder clap.

Kevin D. Randle has written extensively on the Roswell UFO:

“The story is that Mac Brazel supposedly heard a loud crash at some point during the storm and didn’t know if it was related to the storm or not. According to his son, Mac was on the range the next day, looking to see which fields may have gotten precipitation the night before. And in his process of looking to see where the rain had come down, he found the debris field spread out near his ranch house.”

Something had crashed in one of Mac’s fields the night before. According to Kevin Randle, the object was broken up beyond identification:

“The debris field was approximately three quarters of a mile long, maybe as much as two or three hundred feet in width. Scattered along there were bits and pieces of material we refuse to call… metal, because from the descriptions we have, it was more of a plastic- like material. Very strong, very lightweight. Pieces of it were described as being three or four feet long but as light as a feather, as thin as newspaper. There were metal beams that were slightly flexible but very strong.”

Some of the metal pieces appeared to have strange qualities and unusual tensile properties. The pieces could not be cut or burned.

The following Monday, Brazel reported his discovery to the Sheriff, who informed the nearby Roswell Army Air Base. That afternoon, Mac Brazel led two Army intelligence officers to the crash site. One of the officers was Major Jesse Marcel, Sr., whose primary duty was to investigate air accidents. Even with his experience, Marcel was unable to identify the craft. Marcel died in 1982, but before his death, he was interviewed about what he saw that day:

“It was just fragments strewn all over the area, an area of about three quarters of a mile long and several hundred feet wide. So we proceeded to pick up the parts. I tried to bend that stuff, it would not bend. I even tried to burn that, it would not burn. See, that stuff weighs nothing. It’s not any thicker than tin foil. We even tried making a dent in it with a 16 pound sledgehammer. I was certain… it was not a weather balloon, nor an aircraft, nor a missile. It was something else which we didn’t know what it was.”

Late on the night of July 7th, Major Marcel loaded his car with the unusual debris and drove back to Roswell. But before going to the base, he stopped by his home. He wanted to show his family what he had found. Jesse Marcel, Jr., was 11 at the time and remembered the strange material his father brought home:

“When he came back to the house, he had a bunch of wreckage with him and he brought the wreckage into the house. Actually awakened my mother and myself out so we could view this because it’s so unusual. It was about two o’clock in the morning. He spread it out so he could get some basic idea of what it looked like, what it was. We were all amazed by this debris that was there probably because we didn’t know what it was, you know just the unknown.”

The most remarkable fragment was a short piece of I-beam, which was covered with strange symbols and markings. Jesse Marcel, Jr. was convinced the object was from another planet:

“This writing could be described as Egyptian hieroglyphics, but not really. The symbols that were in the I-beams were more a geometric type configuration, in various designs. It had a violet purple type color. And was actually an embossed part of the metal itself. Years after this incident happened, we would talk privately among ourselves about what the possibilities of… what this thing was, and I feel that we, well I know we came to the conclusion that it was not of earthly origin.”

Major Marcel took the wreckage to the Roswell base, where he was stationed. That same morning, Colonel William Blanchard, the commanding officer in Roswell, made a crucial decision. He went public with the story of Mac Brazel’s discovery. Second Lieutenant Walter Haut was the Public Information Officer for the Roswell base at the time. Colonel Blanchard ordered him to issue a press release, telling the country that the Army had found the wreckage of a flying saucer. Second Lieutenant Haut never questioned his commanding officer’s orders:

“In 1947, when a colonel told a first lieutenant to do something, the first lieutenant did that. There’s a little bit of difference. You didn’t have any democracy back in 1947 in the military establishment.”

The press release was immediately picked up by newspapers across the country. The story created an uproar. Then surprisingly, that same day Barney Barnett of Socorro, New Mexico, discovered the wreckage of a similar UFO-like object. Vern Maltais was a friend of Barney’s at the time of his discovery:

“Barney was just a real straight forward, just what you would call a real straight guy. He wouldn’t… tell you one story out of color or nothing. That’s why I was really surprised when he related this information to me about a crashed saucer. He told me that he come on this space ship. It was during the daytime. It was an oval shape, and it had crashed and it had broken open. There was beings laying about, four beings laying on the ground, not in the… spaceship. They were scattered not too far from the object. He did describe that their heads were larger than the bodies by proportion. And they had some type of clothing on that looked a little bit different, not exactly like our spacesuits or that sort of thing. But four were laying on the ground.”

Barney told Vern that he reached the crash site at about the same time as a group of archaeology students who had seen the wreckage from their nearby dig. The military also discovered the second crash site after an aerial search, but arrived too late to properly secure the area. Barney Barnett and the students had a clear and detailed look at the craft and its occupants. But according to Vern Maltais, their story was hidden from the public:

“When the Army showed up, they immediately escorted these people from the scene and then at that time they give them a warning not to relay any information. From that time on, Barney never mentioned it to anybody until the time that he told me about the thing.”

All efforts to track down the members of the archaeology dig have been unsuccessful. While the Barnett story has only been told second hand, many believe there is too much supporting evidence to completely dismiss it.

On July 8, 1947, newspapers across America published accounts that a UFO had supposedly crashed in New Mexico. That same day, a cargo plane carrying the debris from the crash site arrived at an Air Base in Forth Worth, Texas. Brigadier General Roger Ramey, was a high ranking Army Air Force official at Fort Worth. Within hours, Ramey’s office issued a new press release stating that the material recovered in New Mexico was not a UFO, but was the wreckage of a U.S. Army weather balloon.

According to his son Jesse, Mac Brazel was immediately skeptical:

“My dad said obviously it was a cover up story. It was not a weather balloon. He was a little disturbed about that, but he had his own security classification to protect. He could not really go public with hey, this is not a weather balloon. So he had to keep that to himself.”

But the UFO incident was still very much alive for Mac Brazel. At the time, a rumor surfaced that Mac was briefly detained at the Roswell Base until after the new press release had been circulated and accepted by the public. When Mac returned to his ranch, all traces of the “Roswell Incident” had apparently been removed from the area.

In spite of circumstantial evidence, there was no real proof to dispute the Army’s statement that the wreckage was a weather balloon. Then, more than 30 years later, UFO researchers obtained a document containing, what they believed, was new evidence. Known as the MJ-12 memo, this top secret document was mailed anonymously to a UFO researcher in 1984.

The contents of the report stunned researchers. It claimed that four small beings had been recovered from the crash site in Roswell. All four were dead. The report also stated that the news media was issued a cover story claiming the object had been a “misguided weather balloon.” The government has consistently refused to comment on the MJ-12 memo, and there is still no proof of its origin. But if this document and the other accounts from 1947 are true, then the question remains: Does the government have evidence of alien life?

Many years have passed since that hot summer night when a violent thunderstorm swept over the Brazel ranch. The military declared that the remnants found in that remote field came from a downed weather balloon. But the people who actually saw and held the wreckage disagree. Perhaps it was an experimental aircraft that the military wanted to keep top-secret. But perhaps, just perhaps, it was something else.

UPDATE

For almost fifty years, the events that took place at Roswell and the official explanation that followed fueled suspicion of a cover-up. The Air Force has always insisted that rumors of alien contact were just that—rumors. But new witnesses have continued to come forward claiming that the Roswell story was true. Of all the new accounts, the statement provided by a man named Glenn Dennis is too compelling to be ignored.

In 1947, Glenn Dennis was 22-years-old and just out of college. That summer, he was working at a funeral home in Roswell. Two days before the UFO story broke, Glenn received a strange phone call from the Roswell Air Base:

“He was wanting to know what size hermetically sealed baby caskets do we have, did we have specifically three feet six inches, or did we have, maybe no larger than a four-foot, hermetically sealed casket.”

That afternoon, Glenn was called to transport an injured airman to the Roswell base. When he arrived, he was surprised to find the base infirmary surrounded by military police. Two ambulances parked at the curb immediately caught Glenn’s attention:

“I looked in through the ambulance, and I saw quite a bit of wreckage of some type. It looked like stainless steel that had come in contact with a high degree of heat. It was a purplish-bluish color. I noticed one large piece of the wreckage did look like there was some Egyptian hieroglyphics. The confusion at that day that I was out there was so great, that I don’t think anyone really knew what the other man was doing. Then I don’t think they even knew each other. I think they were brought in from different military bases or whatever.”

According to Glenn, one of the officers told him not to repeat what he saw:

“Two MPs came up and said, ‘Sir, we have to escort you back to your mortuary.’ And that’s when he said look mister, somebody be picking your bones out of the sand if you go starting a lot of rumors.”

As Glenn was being escorted from the Roswell infirmary by the two MPs, a group of doctors stumbled out of a storeroom overcome by noxious fumes. With them was a nurse, who Glenn recognized. Hoping to find an explanation for the strange events at the base, Glenn Dennis asked the nurse if she would meet with him. The next day, the nurse agreed on the condition that Glenn never reveal her identity. According to Glen, the nurse told him she was ordered to take notes during an alien autopsy:

“She said… they were doing a partial autopsy. There was a crash bag that was open, and there was two very mutilated, very small bodies…. The head was very large, the eyes were set back, they didn’t have the earlobes or anything. There was like two canals, like two ear canals. There was only two orifices… there was no teeth.”

In all, the nurse claimed to have seen three bodies. She was adamant that none of the bodies were earthly in origin. Glenn never saw the nurse again. A few weeks later, rumors circulated that she had died in a plane crash after being transferred out of the country. To this day, Glenn remains convinced that the details of her story are true:

“There had to be some type of a body present. There had to be something there. I don’t think the nurse lied about it because I don’t think she knew how to lie in the first place. And I just think something happened very unusual and… I doubt very seriously if the world will ever know what happened.”

The air force has claimed that the “alien bodies” were actually dummies that were part of a “parachute test”. Perhaps one day we’ll find conclusive evidence of UFO’s. Until that time the events at Roswell, New Mexico, will remain one of the most compelling UFO mysteries ever reported.

Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season two with Robert Stack and season three with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.

Hundreds of people in Mexico City witness the same UFO.

CASE DETAILS

On July 11, 1991, the last total eclipse of the century occurred. For the residents of Mexico City, the eclipse prompted a festive celebration. Thousands took to the streets as one of the world’s largest cities was plunged into total darkness in the middle of broad daylight. No one imagined that the entire country was about to be swept into a wave of UFO hysteria.

That afternoon, a television executive named Guillermo Arragin, was videotaping the eclipse from a rooftop when he noticed an unusual object overhead. Jaime Maussan, a respected television journalist in Mexico, recalled his initial reaction after viewing the footage:

“When I saw it, I said oh my god. This is a UFO, a real UFO. I mean you can look at it. You can look at the video and be absolutely convinced what you are looking at.”

Jaime Maussan produced, directed and hosted Mexico’s edition of “Sixty Minutes” or “Sesenta Minutos”. Eight days after the eclipse, Jaime presented the Arragin footage as part of a special UFO broadcast. According to Jaime, the network was inundated with phone calls:

“The telephone lines blew up. I mean 40,000 calls at the same time. Then the system was completely shut out. We received more than 15 videos and we now know for sure that in at least 7 of them, we can see the same ship that was recorded by Guillermo Arragin.”

Erick Aguilar, a 19-year old student at a university in Mexico sent in one of the many videos. He was setting up to film the eclipse from a rooftop when he spotted something unusual in the sky:

“At first, all we saw was a white dot in the sky, that’s all we could see in the beginning. Later we saw that this dot was shining brightly. It wasn’t a dot anymore. It was a larger object. And it was giving off light. It was shining.”

At about the same time, 60 miles from Mexico City, a businessman named Luis Lara videotaped a similar object:

“As I raised the camera, you could see something in the clouds. And it was a metal object. You could see clearly it’s not a star. It’s a UFO because it had a shadow underneath. If it were a star or a planet you would see clearly that it would be completely luminous. But this one had a little shadow underneath.”

Another video was shot by the Breton family in Puebla, a city 80 miles east of Mexico City. Magnifying the Breton video revealed an odd, wave-like disturbance behind the pulsating disc, perhaps, some kind of energy trail. Jaime Maussan enhanced the Arragin footage and compared it to the Breton tape. The objects were photographed nearly 100 miles apart, yet according to Jaime, they were amazingly similar:

“The video from Puebla was absolutely identical to the one we had seen with Arragin in Mexico. It was the first time in history that you had a tape of two UFO’s in two different places at exactly the same moment.”

The videos caused a sensation throughout Mexico. But the UFO craze was just beginning. Two months later, an engineer named Vincente Sanchez took his video camera to a military air show in Mexico City:

“I was following one of the planes and I saw a shiny dot in the camera. It didn’t fly like a plane; it was undulating. I didn’t know what it was so I let the planes go off and I focused more on this shiny dot in the sky. What I saw was a bright round object, about 10 meters in diameter. It was made of silver, was shining very brightly and reflected the sunlight a lot. The object appeared, undulated, and moved around quickly.”

A year later, a similar object was videotaped at the same air show. This time the disc descended rapidly and mysteriously disappeared. Alejandro Leal shot amateur video of the flying disc:

“It was traveling against the wind, so much so that, had it been a balloon, considering the force of the helicopter blades, it would’ve crashed. But no, it kept on its path very straight and steady, until it got lost in the sky.”

Since the eclipse in July of 1991, there have been thousands of sightings throughout Mexico. There is no clear pattern, although the majority have occurred in and around Mexico City. The witnesses range from pilots to doctors to bus drivers and even, school children. But are the UFOs real? It’s hard to deny the images captured on videotape. A skeptic would suspect a hoax. But for those who have witnessed the mysterious objects in the skies over Mexico, “seeing is believing.”

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Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season seven with Robert Stack and in season one with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.

Thousands see a UFO in the sky above Kecksburg, Pennsylvania.

CASE DETAILS

On December, 9, 1965, a brilliant light streaked through the sky over Canada. It was also seen over the northeastern United States. Thousands of eyewitnesses reported its trail, which was visible for hundreds of miles in every direction.

In Kecksburg, Pennsylvania, 40 miles southeast of Pittsburgh, Robb Landy and his brother Ray were outside riding their bicycles:

“We were riding up the road and we just happened to look up into the sky and we saw this thing coming over the tops of the trees. It just glided right across the sky, like across the horizon of the trees. We were just, like, in awe, you know, as we watched it. Then it disappeared, and we ran.”–Ray

“You knew what an airplane looked like, you knew what a helicopter looked like, and that didn’t look like anything we had ever seen before. And the angle that was coming in, I mean, you knew that it had to hit the ground.”–Robb

Three miles away, another local boy, Randy Overly, also saw the object:

“I was playing by a creek at the time, and heard a deep hissing noise. And I looked up in the sky and saw an object coming at me from a pretty good distance away. It flew right over the top of me, no higher in the air than 200 feet, and was going no faster than a small airplane would go.”

Nevin and Nadine Kalp were also playing outside when the object flew overhead and crashed in a wooded ravine, half a mile away:

“This ball of, like, fire came through. It’s something that I’ve never seen before. And never seen it since. Seeing the smoke then, at that time, down in the hollow there.”
–Nevin

The Kalp farm is located less than a mile from Kecksburg Village. The object appeared to have crashed a half-mile from the Kalps’ home. Within minutes, Pennsylvania State Troopers descended on the site. By now, there was no smoke and the light was fading. Search teams were called in to locate the actual crash site.

Later, volunteer fireman Jim Mayes located the site from an overlook above the ravine:

“We went up this road and came to the brow of the hill and stopped, and down to the right, in the hollow, were these blue flashing lights. It wasn’t searchers, down in the woods, with flashlights or anything. It was a real bright blue. Real bright. Like a, electric welder. The flashes seemed to be timed, at what intervals, I don’t know. At that point the Troopers decided to close the area off. Close the roads off. So he brought the two of us that was with him back to the fire station.”

A call went out to all the local fire departments and more than 30 volunteer firemen were dispatched from the Kecksburg station. Volunteer fireman, James Romansky, was with a search team that actually found the crash site:

“Here was this humongous metal object, half buried in the ground. About six, seven, eight foot around, and it was every bit of eight, ten, twelve foot long. And to me the object looked like exactly like a fresh acorn that you’d pick off of a tree. There was no wings, there was no motors. There was no propellers. There was no identification whatsoever that would identify it as a aircraft that I would know. There was a bumper on the bottom part of it. On that bumper there was what I call, it looked to me like the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. It was markings like stars, and shapes and figures and circles, and lines, and what it was, I don’t know. To this day I’ve never seen anything like it. So we’re all standing around this thing, wondering what in the heck it could be, and finally here come two men down through the woods. And they took one look at the object, and immediately told us to leave. ‘We are in charge, we’re taking command, get out of here.’ So we left there, and by the time we got back down here to the fire hall, I mean, this place was wall to wall military.”

An hour later, military authorities took over a farmhouse near the ravine owned by Lillian Hayes:

“Well the military was coming in and out of my house all evening. And they were making a lot of phone calls and they were standing around in groups talking. I have no idea who they telephoned. No calls turned up on my bill.”

Nineteen-year-old Bill Weaver was one of many spectators who tried to catch a glimpse:

“I looked down in there myself. I seen there was something down in there, that had bright lights on it. But I couldn’t see the object itself. Some time later, I seen a van type truck pull up there. There was some men dressed in moon suits, we called them at the time, and they had a light colored box, roughly five foot square. They carried it down into the ravine.”

The box seemed too small to hold the object itself. Maybe there was something inside the object that the military wanted to remove.

Back at the Kecksburg fire station, Jim Romansky and the other volunteers waited for orders:

“We looked up and here comes this Jeep down over the hill with its red light on. And right behind the Jeep was a large flatbed truck. And on the back of the flatbed was this covered object. And on down the road they went, and where they went, I have no idea.”

U.F.O. researcher Stan Gordon, believes the government knows what happened:

“Whatever came down in Kecksburg that night, is of high importance to the military agencies. The most mysterious thing about the whole case is the fact that after 25 years, the government still refuses to give us any actual information on what occurred.”

Stan Gordon interviewed dozens of Kecksburg eyewitnesses and has examined several theories:

“Astronomers who looked into the case at the time basically felt that the object in question was a bolides, which was a very bright fire-ball type meteor. But we now know the thing basically was coming down from the tip of Ontario, and appeared to have made about a 25 degree turn to the east, near Cleveland, Ohio. And the interesting thing is, now that the new data suggests that the object made a turn towards the south, and then the object made another turn towards the village of Kecksburg where it was proceeding towards the northeast. Within several miles of the crash site, multiple witnesses tell us that this object was coming in at a very, very slow speed of descent. Meteors do not make controlled turns. They do not come in at a slow speed like this. And they in fact do not glide in, which this thing apparently did.”

Jim Mayes is still baffled by what fell from the sky that night:

“My personal opinion, what landed in Kecksburg that night was a capsule of some kind, from where, whether it was one of ours, or foreign, I have no idea.”

Another theory put forth by Stan Gordon is that the object was space debris. The government has always monitored not only U.S. space activity, but also launches from other countries:

“Going back into the records we have from NASA, and documents we have from other agencies, they apparently have no loggings for any type of space debris on that date and the time of this observation. So we also have to look to the other possibility. Could this indeed have been an extraterrestrial spacecraft?”

Stan Gordon obtained through the Freedom of Information Act the official Air Force record of the Kecksburg incident:

“The report indicated that there was quite a lot of interest by government agencies as to what the object may have been. There were memos there and requests for information from Houston Space Center, from NORAD, from the Air Force Command Post, the Pentagon, even the Chairman of the Office of Emergency Planning requested information. The official Air Force explanation was that it was likely a meteor. And basically what it goes on to say is, the fact that the search was called off around 2:00 A.M. and that nothing was found. But evidence indicates that something indeed was found at the site.”

Bill Weaver was one of the eyewitnesses:

“The military’s idea of finding completely nothing is completely false. There was something down in that ravine that night. There was something that glowed an awful bright light. And they took something out of there that night.”

Many eyewitnesses reported seeing the military convoy coming out of the ravine. John Hays was only ten years old when a flat-bed truck with a large covered object on the back rumbled by his bedroom window:

“What was on the back of it I had no idea. But it was about the size of a Volkswagen Beetle from the distance I was at.”

According to Stan Gordon, eyewitnesses identified the military unit as an Air Force radar squadron based in Pittsburgh. Gordon believes the unit was part of a top-secret operation investigating UFOs:

“There is no entry at all for December 9th of 1965 in the December log of all activities for that squadron. That tells us that somebody apparently wanted to keep all the information associated with the unit’s involvement in that site away from public information. We can see the fact that the government has not told us everything they know about the Kecksburg case.”

James Romansky, a volunteer fireman doesn’t believe the government reports:

“Official reports that the military and the government put out, as far as I’m concerned, are a bunch of bull. If this thing was a meteorite, then why didn’t they just bring it out and say, ‘Here it is,’ let the reporters take pictures of it, let the firemen see it, let the people in this area see it… why the big mystery?”

Stan Gordon, U.F.O. Researcher concludes:

“Either, one, we’re dealing with some highly advanced space probe, probably of a foreign nation, that appears to be very highly technical for what we knew about 1965. Or, the possibility exists that we may indeed be dealing with an extraterrestrial spacecraft.”

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Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season three with Robert Stack and in season one with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.

Were the lights over the Hudson River Valley really UFOs?

CASE DETAILS

The quiet beauty of New York’s Hudson River Valley is home to upscale professionals and retirees. They tend to be well-educated and cosmopolitan, hardly the type of people one would expect to be swept up by UFO fever. Yet, that’s exactly what happened to more than 5,000 residents between 1983 and 1986. Ultimately, the entire episode was largely dismissed as a hoax perpetrated by a group of local stunt pilots. However, to this day, many of the eyewitnesses maintain that what they saw could not have been a handful of airplanes.

Dennis Sant, a husband and father of five, had worked in local government for 17 years. He led a perfectly normal life. Then on March 17, 1983, Dennis’s home in Brewster, New York, was the site of an extraordinary event:

“It was a very large object. The structure of it was very dark gray, metallic, almost girder-type looking… The object seemed to be very silent. The lights were iridescent, bright, they stood out in the sky and three-dimension. It looked like a city of lights. It just hung in the sky, all brilliant colors… We followed the object around to the backyard. And at that point, a feeling of fright came upon me. Thoughts started to flood my mind, thoughts of the craft touching ground, thoughts of an encounter with an alien being. Thoughts of being abducted. All types of fearful thoughts started to enter into my mind.”

But Dennis and his family were not the only ones mesmerized by the extraordinary light formation. A few miles away, traffic screeched to a halt on Interstate 84 as the mysterious object hovered overhead. The Hudson Valley sightings had only just begun.

One week later, Officer Andi Sadoff of the New Castle Police was on routine patrol when he, too, had an encounter:

“I was working a 4 PM to midnight tour and assigned to set up some radar to look for speeding cars and I looked up into the sky and saw a series of lights. And at first I thought it was a plane, it was quite a distance, quite far away, but it was, it was really quite large. As I recall, there were mostly white lights, but there were green lights also. It was alternating green and white lights. It approached my vehicle and it stopped and it seemed to hover. And I’m looking at this thing, thinking what is it? I wasn’t afraid. I was just amazed. I was in awe of it. I didn’t know what it was. The only thing that I recall the most is I was amazed that there was no noise. There was no humming. There was no engine, there was no sound. It was absolutely silent.”

Then just seconds later, the eerie silence was broken by another eyewitness report. At virtually the same time, Ed Burns, a computer engineer and senior manager for IBM, was driving home on the Taconic Parkway, 10 miles north of Officer Sadoff’s location:

“Out of nowhere, I got a lot of static on the radio. I thought maybe I was on the wrong number, and then I went over to turn the dial again and that’s when I looked up and saw this craft. It was a triangular ship. And the back had to be as large as a football field at least. And there was no noise.”

Ed pulled off the highway and joined a group of motorists by the side of the road. According to Ed, they were all staring at the sky, seemingly dumbstruck:

“I’m not into astronomy… but what I had witnessed that night was not from this planet.”

The eyewitness reports indicated the object was slowly moving north over the Hudson River Valley. Officer Sadoff and at least 12 others saw it in New Castle. Ten minutes later, Ed Burns and at least 20 motorists, saw it near Millwood. Ten minutes after that, the phones began ringing off the hook in the police station at Yorktown. Officer William Wolf Jr. was the dispatcher on duty that night:

“Every line kept going, every single line, constantly answer the phone, another line would light up. I’d answer the next line and another one would line up. Got to the point… the county parkway stopped. The people were out in their cars. It was starting to get really crazy. I tried calling the cars to find out if they saw anything. And the only one that called… Kevin, said that he would stop in.”

Officer Kevin Soravilla arrived a few minutes later. He also saw the lights reported by dozens of Yorktown residents:

“The object was extremely large. I estimated it to be close to 300 to 400 yards wide. We stood out in front, facing to the north. And approximately about five minutes later… the object began to appear from the northern horizon.”

Although Officers Wolf and Soravilla were standing side by side in front of the Yorktown Police station, their accounts are entirely contradictory. Officer Soravilla was convinced that he saw a large object with a number of small lights:

“I would say approximately 16, 18 lights, running in a V formation, approximately 200 to 400 yards wide. I was standing between the lights to see any type of a solid structure where he may have basically been staring at the lights himself.”

But Officer Wolf had a completely different impression:

“They looked like airplanes to me, I said Kev… I live near an airport and I see these airplanes every day. So as they were coming over, he said well you can’t hear anything. I said listen, but then we started to hear a drone. It wasn’t one big solid unit. But if you looked at it for like a couple of minutes or even a fraction as it was coming over, I could see where some people would’ve gotten upset.”

Suddenly, the Hudson Valley sightings had taken a dramatic turn. It appeared that the UFOs were a hoax, nothing more than small aircraft flying in precise patterns. Anthony Capaldi was an air traffic control specialist at the time of the sightings. In the summer of 1983, he made an observation that seemed to settle the UFO controversy once and for all:

“The first time I observed the formation, it looked a little peculiar. And from our vantage point in the tower, they just appeared to be just one big light because they were flying in tight formation. I don’t think if this formation flew over an individual’s head at a thousand feet that there’s any way you could mistake it for anything but the formation flying, due to the sound of the aircraft engines. And I imagine that at a thousand feet, you could really determine that it’s aircraft.”

But not everyone agreed. Phillip Imbrogno, an author and UFO expert, spoke to several of the eyewitnesses:

“The UFO was surely seen before these hoaxster pilots began their night flights. After these hoaxsters began their night flights, people would call me up who had seen the UFO on previous dates and said well I saw something strange in the sky but it wasn’t the same thing that I saw a week before.”

A home video showing a light formation above Brewster, New York, was taken on June 10, 1984, by local resident Bob Pozzuoli. Phillip Imbrogno was convinced the footage showed an actual UFO:

“It has been looked at by a number of photographic experts who indicate that the movement of the object on the video seems to be one rigid object not individual objects. Plus there were hundreds and hundreds of witnesses who saw the UFO and said it was something strange. But the night that the airplanes were seen, there were also dozens of witnesses who said, in fact, that they did see airplanes.”

So what is the truth about the fantastic light formations in the sky above the Hudson River Valley? Were they aerial stunts performed by sophisticated pranksters? Or did the flying objects come from somewhere beyond the stars?

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Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season five with Robert Stack and in season one with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.

After a Canadian woman witnesses a UFO landing near her home, a mysterious video tape of the event is sent to investigators.

CASE DETAILS

On August 18, 1991, at around 10 PM, Diane Labenek of West Carleton, Ontario, Canada, had just put her children to bed, and her husband was out running an errand, when the dogs began to howl. When Diane investigated, she witnessed a scene that she couldn’t explain:

“I looked out the window and I saw flames out on the field, extremely red flames and lots of smoke. It didn’t look like a fire. I know what a fire looks like when you start a fire out there when the grass is very dry. If you start a fire, you will see it moving either this way, or closer to the woods. And the fire was on one spot only. I saw a ship coming down close to the flames. Right on top of the ship, I saw a blue flashing light and another light was on the bottom, very bright. I didn’t know what to do. I was looking at it for about 10 minutes or so. And then the ship went a little bit back over the trees and it disappeared and I saw all the flames turn out at the same time. I don’t think I’d like to see it again. It’s very scary. I’ve lived here for many, many years and I have never been so scared in my life.

Diane said it entered her mind to call the police, but she worried what they would think:

“What am I going to tell them? I’m going to tell them I saw flares out there past 10 o’clock at night and there was a ship up there. And they were going to say, ‘Okay Diane, that’s fine, we’re coming over.’ So that’s why I didn’t call.”

According to Diane, ten minutes after the lights blinked out, a helicopter appeared. It flew low to the ground over the field where Diane had seen the unexplained lights. After criss-crossing the area, it passed over Diane’s house and disappeared into the night. The next morning, Diane explored the empty fields around her house, searching for evidence of the previous night’s events:

“I searched everything. There were no marks. There were no spots. There were no matches, there was just nothing. The only person I told was my mom and my husband. It kind of bothered me inside for a long, long time, not to tell anybody. But when I went out on the field and I could not find anything, who is going to believe me that this really happened? So I kept it to myself.”

In February of 1992, six months after Diane’s encounter, a package from Canada arrived at the office of Bob Oechsler, one of the foremost UFO researchers at the time. The package had no return address. Inside were secret military documents, pictures, a map, and a videotape of the incident at West Carleton. According to Bob Oechsler:

“On the label was the name “Guardian.” And it was accompanied by a fingerprint. Guardian to me was an enigma, certainly nothing I had heard about in the UFO literature. So it was a mystery starting from scratch.”

At the time, Oechsler was unaware of Diane’s sighting, but he later discovered that the video accurately showed what she had reported seeing. The tape showed a cluster of brightly burning red flames, similar to flares. To their right hovered a dark, disk-like object emitting a bright glow from its underside. The object was capped by a rapidly strobbing blue light. To Bob Oechsler, the tape looked real:

“I got a sense, initially, that this was a real event occurring in a field as opposed to some prop set up in a room somewhere. I kind of had a sense I might be dealing with something that was potentially authentic here.”

The map that was included in the package directed Oechsler to West Carleton, Ontario. He went there with UFO researcher Graham Lightfoot. When they interviewed Diane, she described exactly what was in the videotape sent by Guardian:

“She had not seen a tape. She had no idea what we knew. And yet she was able to describe things that we already knew from the tape.

Dr. Bruce Maccabee, a U.S. Navy physicist and photo analyst, has studied UFOs for years:

“It’s one of the clearest videos I’ve seen that shows a structured object. There’s the beacon light, blue light evidently, reflecting down on the body of the craft, the outline of the object itself. You can see some sort of dark lines that appear, some brightness structure, indicating something generating light is hanging down below the object. It’s generating green light as well as blue light.”

Dr. Maccabee believes the tape is not a fraud:

“The section of the video which shows the object as sort of appearing over a rise is quite convincing to me as what you would expect if somebody were in the field trying to get closer to it and not knowing how close he could get. And so he turns on his camera while he’s walking. He knows he’s going to come up over a rise and see it and you can see in the video he moves further and further down until you see the whole device. Suddenly, the light coming towards him gets brighter and brighter and you get a great big diffuse reflection or image in the camera, which suggests to me that this object shined a beam, a blue beam right at him.”

Dr. Maccabee estimates the object to be 20 to 30 feet in diameter. According to Bob Oechsler, that’s too big to be a hoax:

“It appeared to be so large that it would not be logical to try to set all this up at night, under darkness. There would’ve been evidence during the day of movement of generators, of somebody hauling cables, maybe a big apparatus or something that they would’ve had to bring in there for that night. Clearly, if there was a hoax involved, Diane would’ve seen evidence of it in advance.”

Audio analysis of the tape revealed only the distant barking of dogs, probably Diane’s.
The craft itself seemed to be silent. There was no audible trace of power generators which, if the object was staged, would be necessary to run its massive lights.

Dr. Robert Nathan of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory reviewed the tape in a non-official capacity. He could not explain the images or dismiss the tape as a hoax:

After the incident, low-flying helicopters cruised over West Carleton on a regular basis. The helicopters were black, green, or maroon in color. They were unmarked and had darkly tinted windows. The Canadian military denies any involvement. Where the helicopters came from and what they were searching for remains a mystery. According to Maj. N.J. Patterson of the Canadian Forces:

“The helicopters that are used in this area of Canada do not fly low in that area. There are no requirements for our military helicopters to go and fly near private citizen’s property like that.”

Bob Oechsler says the key to the entire incident lies with the person using the name Guardian:

“I think Guardian has to be connected to the event in some way. I don’t see any way Guardian could’ve just happened on to this. I don’t see Guardian as a UFO investigator. Guardian is much more involved in this than the evidence even suggests, in my opinion.”

But supposed military documents that arrived with the videotape raise serious questions about Guardian’s credibility. The papers allege far-reaching conspiracies involving UFOs, Red China, and nuclear weapons. Bob Oechsler was skeptical:

“There’s some question, immediately, with regard to the authenticity of the documentation, that it didn’t look like it was a typical government document.”

Maj. Patterson reviewed one of the documents:

“This document is clearly a fabrication. There are way too many errors in the document to make it authentic. Someone with very little effort could have come a lot closer than this.”

Included on the videotape are images which Guardian claimed show an alien being. Again, Bob Oechsler wasn’t convinced:

“Clearly, this could’ve have been someone dressed up in a costume. But that posed a major question: if, in fact, the video images of the disk were authentic, why would anyone contaminate such an extraordinary event with fake images of alien creatures?”

Although the video arrived with questionable material, many experts believe that the event shown on the tape did indeed take place. But was it a staged event or an actual craft of some sort? Bob Oechsler says that only one person can answer that question:

“This is either an extraordinary top secret flying vehicle of somebody’s government or it is of a non-human origin. Having no contact with Guardian is probably the biggest frustration to an investigation like this. We don’t know who Guardian is, what Guardian represents. We don’t know if Guardian was sent or went on his own. We have no idea what the solution to many of these mysteries are going to be. We may never know.”

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Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season five with Robert Stack and in season four with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.

Mysterious crop circles appear in Canada.

CASE DETAILS

Crop circles have become a well known phenomena all across the globe. Of the 10,000 documented cases, 80% have been proven to be hoaxes. But what about the other 20 percent?

Two farmers from outside of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, Rusty Manuel and Thelley
Whitman, woke up one day to find a crop circle formation on their land — seven precise circles pressed into a field of thistle and barley. Thelley was stunned:

“The grain was all flattened down. It almost looked liked a pattern, like petals, the way the grain came out and then the heads turned back in towards the center again. It was just amazing.”

The Canadian Crop Circle Research Network, a volunteer organization that documents such cases, wasted no time getting to the site. Judy Arndt is one of the group’s field researchers:

“It looked like the place had been electrocuted. It was just amazing. Looked like there had been a huge force of some sort.”

Skeptics dismissed the Edmonton crop circle as a hoax. As shown in a documentary, pranksters can make a crop circle using a piece of wood and some rope. They call their creations, “human land art.” Paul Anderson, Director of the CCCRN, has studied many of the circles in western Canada:

“Anybody can go out with a board and flatten down wheat. And yet something you have to take into account is, it’s not just the formation itself, but it’s the complexity of how it’s actually constructed, like multiple layers going in different directions, one on top of the other, and so on.”

At the Edmonton site, Judy Arndt documented each of the circles within the formation and gathered up crop and soil samples for scientific analysis. The samples were sent to Nancy Talbott, director of B.L.T Research Team, Inc., in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Nancy worked with a network of scientists who have studied more than 350 crop circle cases from eight different countries:

“The three major changes in plants in the real McCoy, as opposed to man-made crop circles, are node elongation, expulsion cavities at the nodes, and germination abnormalities.”

Each of these conditions was present in the Edmonton samples. That means that the characteristics of the crops were profoundly altered in ways that could not be induced by humans using ropes and boards. Colin Anderews is a researcher and author:

“The geometry is precise. There are no tracks in or out. The plants are not damaged, they’re bent over. They’re not knuckled or broken. The plants are changed in their internal structure at the cellular level. You don’t find that in a hoax.”

The soil samples from Edmonton were sent to Dr. Sampath Iyengar in California. Dr. Iyengar specializes in materials analysis:

“We went ahead and looked at the mineralogy of the clays, using a technique called x-ray powder diffraction.”

The results showed a dramatic difference between soil samples taken from inside the crop circle compared to those taken from outside the circle:

“This has been seen by geologists before, but this is in a geologic time over several millions of years. And this has to be some kind of a fantastic energy that’s causing this change. And I don’t have any idea what it is.”

Theories on what’s creating the circles ranges from geothermal and magnetic forces, to some kind of cosmic energy. Colin Andrews has explored many of the theories:

“We looked at meteorology. We looked at Earth energies. We looked at chemical application of the farmers, and all of them led to a blank. It just did not fit. What we now know is we have a solid mystery. This cannot be explained in the terms of people making them. We have many hundreds that are absolutely certainly not man made. And that is a solid fact.”

Judy Arndt has one final theory that connects crop circles to UFOs:

“I was contacted by a young couple who had been driving along in late evening. He looked out the window and saw some lights and rolled down the window to make sure it wasn’t just a reflection on his passenger side window. And the lights were still there and he got quite excited about it and asked his wife to pull over. There were two small lights, brilliant bluish. Then they said these two lights were playing tag with each other. This sighting occurred about a week before the crop circle formation was found.”

Around the same time, Edmonton farmers Rusty Manuel and Thelley Whitman had a similar experience:

“First, you thought it was a helicopter, ‘cause it moved like a helicopter. But still, there was no other lights on it. It was just bright and would just hover over the field and sort of move off and then come back again. And it just seemed like it passed over the back end of the pickup. And it just disappeared. It just was so fast.” –Thelley

“I tried to picture it as being an aircraft but it was much too big for an aircraft.”--Rusty

Was there a connection between the strange lights and the sudden appearance of the Edmonton crop circles? Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, had this to say:

“I believe that the aliens are out there, but I don’t think they’re visiting here. The fact that so many people feel that there may be something unusual going on here, I think bespeaks a psychological need that we all have to believe that there’s some powers that we don’t understand. And after all, it’s much more interesting to think that this pattern in the wheat here was graffiti from beings from another world than to think that it was students from the local university. That’s not a terribly interesting story.”

However, there are crop circles that simply defy logic, formations that show no sign of human intervention. One, a giant ‘Star of David’, literally appeared overnight in Red Deer, Alberta, not far from Edmonton. It measured 422 feet across. But Seth Shostak is not convinced:

“I don’t understand how they’re all done. But to say that they are something other than humans is a radical or revolutionary claim. And consequently, I’m not going to be swayed by what amounts to very anecdotal evidence. It’s got to be better than that.”

Colin Andrews says:

“I don’t think we need, necessarily to be talking or trying to prove that it is or isn’t extra-terrestrial. I don’t know that either. What I know is what I’m looking at that has arrived in our fields. Something knows what it’s doing here. There is intelligence of some sort. And I know they’re not made by people.”

Over the past decades, more than 10,000 crop circles have been reported from around the world. Assuming that 8,000 were made by pranksters, that still leaves 2,000 that are unexplained, and remain unsolved mysteries.

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Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season twelve with Robert Stack and in season one with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.

More than 3,000 people report sightings of a UFO over Belgium.

CASE DETAILS

Since 1989, thousands of people have reported mysterious lights and shapes in the skies over Brussels, Belgium. Almost all the witnesses describe the same object:

“Basically, what we saw was this big triangle object with three bright white lightings in the corners.”

“In the middle was a flashing red light. It passed by, approaching the roofs, since it was flying so low.”

“You could see three white lights which formed an equilateral triangle.”

The mystery of the Belgian UFOs began on November 29, 1989, near the small town of Eupen, less than seven miles from the German border. Gendarmes Heinrich Nicoll and Hubert Von Montigny were on a routine patrol. Heinrich described what he and his partner witnessed that night:

“As we approached the crossroads at Nuevos Road, our attention was drawn to an unusual sight. We saw a field near the road that was all lit up. It was like lights on a huge football field. We thought it was strange, and we wanted to know what was causing those lights. There was a huge triangular platform, and underneath it were strong headlights. And in the middle was this blinking, pulsating orange light. The whole thing was floating in the air.”

The gendarmes immediately called Albert Creutz, their dispatcher in Eupen:

“Suddenly, they told me they were seeing a strange object in the sky. It made no noise. We joked about it and said it might be Santa Claus trying to land.”

Creutz noted the unusual report in his log, but was skeptical. According to Heinrich, he and his partner followed the object as it flew across the Belgian countryside toward Eupen:

“We could see it clearly because the headlights were very strong. We could also see the flickering orange ball underneath. We were driving very slowly because it seemed like there was someone in that object and that somebody was trying to observe what was happening on Earth.”

Then a strange light flashed across the window of Albert Creutz’ office:

“Off in the distance, I could see something bright, but I didn’t know what it was. Suddenly, I saw something that looked like a laser beam shoot out of the light and then come back to the light.”

Heinrich and his partner followed the silent object:

“We continued to observe the object as it circled over the city of Eupen. It appeared to be heading toward the forest. On each side of the object there was a kind of laser beam and a ball that was leaving the object and coming back as if the ball were to measure something, so it was easy for us to keep track of it in the sky.”

Creutz contacted four local airports. Each reported no unusual activity. For at least 30 minutes, the gendarmes watched as the object hovered in the distance. And then, according to Heinrich:

“All of a sudden it came out of nowhere, another spacecraft. We were a little frightened. The one we had been following was still over there, and now a second one was rising up into the sky. At a given moment, it tilted slightly. We could see again the shape of a triangle with bright headlights. We could see some kind of dome on the top of two or three small windows and there was a light inside the object. By the time we realized what it was, the object flew away.”

Moments later, Albert Creutz became a believer himself:

“Through the open window I saw a strange machine floating about 500 feet away from me. It looked like a large ship floating in the air. It drifted in front of me for a few seconds, then flew away in the direction of La Calamine. It was a beautiful thing to see.”

Within minutes, two other gendarmes reported a similar object over the village of La Calamine, eight miles to the north. One of them, Deiter Plumanns, had no doubts about what he saw:

“We had heard our colleagues talking about this flying object. In the beginning we thought it was some sort of joke, but then we saw something. It wasn’t funny anymore. Both of us had a strange feeling. It was impossible to explain what the object was. We thought it was an American airplane or something. We had no other explanation for what it might be, but it was real, and it was above us.”

All four of the sightings occurred in one hour, within 20 miles of each other. That same day, 11 other gendarmes and more than 100 private citizens came forward with similar reports of UFOs over the Belgium.

Then, in April of 1990, an amazing photograph was taken. It showed the same array of lights described by the eyewitnesses. By using a computer to enhance the film’s contrast, the triangular shape was clearly visible. This amazing image was the first photographic evidence that UFOs had invaded the skies above Belgium.

Overwhelmed by the number of sightings, Belgian authorities brought in an organization called SOBEPS to coordinate reports and set up procedures for dealing with future close encounters. They didn’t have to wait very long.

According to Captain Jacques Pinson of the Gendarmerie, he was called to a home outside of Brussels when dinner guests reported seeing strange lights in the sky:

“These points of light were very different than the other stars. They were much bigger and much brighter and not the color of stars. The main colors were reddish or yellow, and the others were green. Later, they began to travel short distances in an erratic manner.”

At the same time, radar at a NATO tracking station detected an unknown object at that exact location. Lieutenant Colonel Pierre Billen reported that the object showed up as a small circle with a tail in the lower-left quadrant of the radar screen:

“We phoned to other civilian and military radar sights like Semozag, Virton, Saint-Hubert, and they had precisely the same echo at the same place. We were unable to identify this echo as being either enemy or friendly. It was not very clear for us that there was an aircraft.”

With confirmations from four radar stations, two F-16s from the Belgian Air Force were immediately deployed. Their mission was to locate and identify the object. The pilots soon locked onto it with their on-board radar. But after just five seconds, the object bolted out of range at an incredible rate of speed. Belgian Air Force Major General W.J.L. De Brouwer was at a loss to explain the encounter:

“We measured some exceptional accelerations which cannot be related to conventional aircraft. That is clear.”

For the next hour, the object seemed to play a high-tech game of cat and mouse. According to Lieutenant Colonel Billen, each time pilots achieved lock-on, the object darted out of range:

“The pilots confirmed that it was impossible for them to accelerate as quick as the target was doing.”

When the jet’s on board radar footage from that night was analyzed, the UFO could be seen climbing from 7,000 feet to 10,000 feet in a matter of seconds. Then, incredibly, the object plummeted to just 500 feet in only five seconds and accelerated to more than 1,000 miles per hour; that’s 1 1/2 times the speed of sound. This extraordinary combination of acceleration and descent would be fatal to a human pilot.

And another peculiar fact: even though the craft exceeded the speed of sound, no one on the ground reported hearing a sonic boom. According to Major General De Brouwer, no known aircraft was capable of such acrobatics:

“The data, then, on all these performances which were registered during the lock-on of the radar, it was totally outside of the normal performance envelope of any airplane.”

The Belgium UFOs have been observed by thousands of eyewitnesses. They have been recorded on military radar. And one unknown object evaded sophisticated fighter jets. Yet skeptics dismiss the sightings as nothing more than UFO hysteria. They believe that the radar reports are the result of false echoes or changes in atmospheric conditions. But Gendarme Heinrich Nicoll said he knows what he witnessed:

“Some people don’t believe us and the things we have seen. Well, they’re afraid to believe us. It doesn’t matter to me. But I have seen something, and what else can I say? It was not some invention of my mind. I saw it, and it was very real, and it happened just as I have said.”

Based on the radar data, Major General De Brouwer concluded that conventional aircraft were no match for the advanced technology his jet fighters encountered:

“I think it’s our job to try to find out if there is really something in the air, where it comes from, what the origin is, and what the intentions are. Indeed, there is something going on in Belgium which is beyond our control.”

Despite thousands of sightings in Belgium, there have been just a few reports in the neighboring countries of France, Germany, and the Netherlands. For skeptics, this is more proof that the sightings are the result of overactive imaginations.

Some people however, speculate that UFOs may be attracted to Belgium’s highway system. It is so brightly lit at night that it was visible even to the astronauts on the moon.

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Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season four with Robert Stack and in season two with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.

Four men camping in Maine believe they were abducted by aliens.

CASE DETAILS

Four men — Jack Weiner, Jim Weiner, Chuck Rak, and Charlie Foltz — say they experienced a terrifying encounter with aliens while camping in the Maine wilderness. It’s taken the men years to go public. Each has been polygraphed and hypnotized, and their stories hold up.

For years, Jack Weiner was disturbed by reoccurring nightmares. He told no one about them except for his wife, Mary:

“I was starting to have nightmares, really terrible nightmares that I could not explain. I found myself in a very brightly lit room. I had no idea where I was or why I was there. To my left, I could see my brother Jim, Chuck Rak, and Charlie Foltz sitting on some type of bench, and they were all naked. I was wondering why they weren’t helping me, because I felt like I was in danger, and while I’m trying to figure this out, I notice this figure or a dark, shadowy-type figure emerging from this light– this bright light in front of me. I would wake up, uh, uh, sweating and breathing heavily and just in a– in a state of terror and shock.”

In 1988, Jack’s twin brother Jim confessed that he, too, was haunted by exactly the same nightmares:

“There were always certain elements of the dream that were the same– some type of creature, being helpless, being violated was a feeling I often woke up with.”

In every dream, the twins were with Charlie Foltz and Chuck Rak, two friends they had met in school. They wondered if these nightmares could be connected to a camping trip 12 years earlier in Maine. In August, 1976, the four men had spent two weeks in Maine’s Allagash wilderness. The Allagash covers thousands of acres in the northernmost part of the state. On the second night out, Jim noticed a bright object in the sky:

“It was just floating above the treetops, didn’t seem to be moving in any direction. And I looked at it through the binoculars for maybe 15 seconds, 30 seconds, and it suddenly just winked out from the outside edges inward. I mean, it literally just went whooht, like that, and it was gone. There was something about this thing that left me with an odd feeling that wasn’t quite right, but I really didn’t dwell on it.”

The men continued through the Allagash wilderness. On the fourth day, they decided to try some night fishing. They built a bonfire to mark their campsite. Once out on the water, Chuck Rak was the first to realize they weren’t alone:

“I had a feeling there was someone staring at me from behind me. I turned over my right shoulder like that, and I saw this large, round globe of light that looked exactly like what we had seen two nights previously.”

“It had this roiling effect to it, like a miniature sun, very, very bright. It lit the treetops up like daylight, and it was absolutely silent.”—Jim Weiner

“After looking at it for what seemed like several moments, we decided to signal this thing. That’s when Charlie picked up the flashlight and squeezed off a message–s.o.s.”
–Chuck Rak

The response was instantaneous:

“Well, when the light started coming toward us, my curiosity was satisfied. And I just dropped the flashlight. The only thought in my mind was to get to shore. I never looked back.”—Charlie Foltz

The men began paddeling back to shore:

“I remember looking over my shoulder, trying to keep an eye on this object as it was coming up behind us. It was getting very close. It was almost on top of us at this point. I remember thinking that we’re not going to outrun this thing.”—Jack Weiner

Their next memory was being back on shore, just staring up at the bright object:

“I remember thinking, ‘I could pick up a stone and bounce it off this thing’s side.’ That’s how close it was. And then, all of a sudden, it just streaked away very, very fast, and within a few seconds, it was like a star, just another light in the sky.”—Jim Weiner

“I remember stepping out of the canoe, and going up to the campsite… And I remember there was no panic. People seemed to be very relaxed.”—Chuck Rak

All four men agree they were out on the lake for less than 20 minutes. The huge bonfire should have burned for hours. And yet only coals remained, indicating a longer passage of time. Jack Weiner recalls:

“The unusual thing is that we didn’t stay up for hours and discuss this thing, which is what you’d think four young guys on a camping trip would do. We just seemed very fatigued and wanted to go to bed. The next morning, we got up and got our camp together and paddled to the next campsite.”

The men spent another 10 days in the Allagash wilderness but never again saw the bizarre light.

As the years went by, they told friends and family about the UFO sighting, but no one really believed them. The men hardly believed it themselves. Then the nightmares began for Jim and Jack Weiner. Finally, Jim contacted UFO researcher Ray Fowler for help.

Fowler suggested the Allagash four undergo hypnosis with a trained hypnotherapist to recover details of the sighting. Under hypnosis, each of the men experienced terrifying repressed memories of being abducted. They were almost exactly alike.

Independent of one another, each of them drew illustrations of their incredible recollections. All four said they were taken aboard the craft. The aliens forced them to strip naked and seemed to be conducting medical examinations. The aliens took samples of the men’s skin and body fluids, their blood, urine, and semen.

What follows are excerpts from the actual sessions:

“They’re–they’re– they don’t know what to do. I think they think I’m going to come after them. I feel like I want to. I feel like I want to– the first one that comes near me, I’m going to throttle him. I don’t like these things. I don’t care where they come from. They shouldn’t be doing this to people.”—Jim Weiner

“They’re right there. Their face is right in my face. I don’t know why. I don’t want to know. I don’t want to know what they want. They’re saying things. In my head they’re saying, ‘Don’t be afraid. They say, ‘Do what we say. Just do what we say.”
—Jack Weiner

“It’s like a doctor’s office. I get that, it’s cold like a doctor’s office is cold. They put the panel over your chest. Then they scrape your arms and your chest, your legs and thighs. We shouldn’t be here. I just—I just keep thinking, “I want to be back in the canoe.”
–Charlie Foltz

Chuck Rak could see what the aliens were doing to Charlie:

“I see some sort of device on him. They’ve got a–this looks like a silvery, it looks like the– like it’s got curves on it. It’s almost like– like it sucks something. He’s got his head tipped way back. It’s almost like he’s in pain. We’re–we can’t help him. All we can do is watch him.”

It was not until after the hypnosis sessions that the Allagash four discovered that each of them had recalled the same horrifying events. The each took polygraph tests and passed.

For skeptics, however, stories of alien abduction do not stand up to scrutiny. Some suggest, including clinical psychologist Dr. William Cohn, that images from popular culture or horror movies may have triggered inspiration for memories of alien abduction:

“This movement is media driven. It’s cyclical. People hear about good cases on TV. They think they may have had the same thing happen. It sort of feeds upon itself.”

Dr. John Mack is a psychiatrist and author:

“Usually, these are people who have no interest in abductions, have not read about it, are unfamiliar with the beings, and are shocked and astounded when they hear someone else has had these experiences as well, or that there is material in the media about it.”

“The investigators have a very clear-cut agenda about what they’re looking for. So if you get somebody that’s doing UFO abduction research, this is a person that has already decided that UFO abductions are real, that thousands of people are having them. They have a symptom list. And if you come in the door with those symptoms, then you must have been abducted.”—Dr. Cohn

“It really doesn’t work like that. The person comes because they’ve heard that I’m open to listen to something which other therapists or, uh, other mental health professionals have not been able to listen to. This is not a club anyone wants to belong to.”—Dr. Mack

The four men have never backed down:

“This happened. If you believe it, that’s all right. If you don’t believe it, I don’t care. I don’t care, ’cause it did.”—Charlie Foltz

American military men encounter multiple UFOs near an air force base in Bentwaters, England.

CASE DETAILS

Rendlesham Forest, England, is home to America’s Woodridge Air Force base. On December 26, 1980, at around 2 AM, Airman First Class John Burroughs, and his partner, were on routine patrol along the base perimeter. The base was nearly empty. But, according to Sgt. Burroughs, something bright was lighting up the nearby woods:

“There was definitely something out in the woods. It seemed to me like a massive light show. I was nervous, he was nervous. We didn’t know what to expect, and we decided at that point that we better get back and let somebody know what’s going on in case something did happen.”

Burroughs quickly notified his immediate superior. In minutes, another security patrol arrived. They had also seen the strange lights. Burroughs and the second security team went off base to investigate. Sgt. Burroughs said they were ordered to leave their weapons behind because they were moving out of American jurisdiction:

“We didn’t know what we were getting into. We started in on foot towards the lights. At the same time, we could hear the animals. They were very upset because you could hear a lot of ruckus. At that point we had a radio transmission. They’d just gotten contact from Heathrow tower in London that an object had been seen over our base and that it had disappeared on radar. All of a sudden, in the clearing, there was an object. It had a bank of blue lights on it. And it was sitting there strobing. It was unbelievable. We all hit the ground and it went up into the trees. When it was happening, everything seemed to go slower. We seemed to be in, like, I wouldn’t say a time warp, but like everything was happening slower to us and everything felt different. But when it disappeared, it was like everything was normal again, the perception of the ground, the air, the sky, the stars, the whole nine yards, were different.”

For more than two hours, Sgt. Burroughs said he and the two other men played a game of cat and mouse with the mysterious craft:

“It was off the ground and near the horizon above the trees. And it always stayed out in the distance at the horizon, and sometimes it appeared to get close, as if we were going to get close to it again, and then we never did.”

When Sgt. Burroughs and his men filed their report, they assumed no one would believe their account. Yet the events of that night resulted in one of the most well-documented sightings of a UFO in history. The next morning, Sgt. Burroughs nervously reported the sighting to his shift commander:

“He basically said, ‘Gentlemen, you saw something. Heathrow tower confirms that you saw something. And now, let’s go out into the area and see if we can find any physical proof of what happened.’ I was hoping when I got out there that basically I would see nothing. There would be no telltale evidence that possibly something happened. That would make it easier for me because, if there’s nothing proving that something happened to me, you can just kind of check it off. But when you get out there and you find damage to the trees, depressions in the ground and stuff, that makes it even more unexplainable.”

Later that same day, Burroughs and a British police officer explored the site where Burroughs saw the strange object. According to Burroughs, there were circular impressions in the earth directly below the spot where the craft appeared to hover:

“It was more of a mystery because when I first saw it, I didn’t perceive it as something sitting on the ground with a tripod type thing. Now, all of a sudden, there’s physical proof showing that something sat down in that area.”

The British police officer dismissed the circles as the marks of animals that had been digging there. But he did order his men to measure the distance between the circles.
They were exactly the same distance apart and formed a perfect equilateral triangle.

Rumors of the UFO sighting had spread like wildfire. Later that morning, Col. Charles Halt, deputy base commander, arrived at Woodbridge security headquarters:

“I was very skeptical. I found what had allegedly taken place hard to believe and I was really going to debunk it, quite frankly. And as events unfolded, I became more and more concerned that there may be something to this. I kept telling myself that there had to be some type of an explanation for it. But I certainly couldn’t find one and even to this day I, I can’t explain what happened.”

That evening, unusual lights were once again spotted in the forest. This time, the base commander ordered large floodlights, devices commonly known as light-alls, to be set up in the woods. At 9:30 PM, Col. Halt received word the lights had mysteriously stopped working. Base security was immediately ordered to set up more floodlights. Col. Halt put together a special investigative team:

“I called the on-duty, or stand-by, man of disaster preparedness and had him get his camera — he was a professional photographer — and calibrate several radiac instruments to take along. We were going to go debunk this.”

When Col. Halt arrived at the site, he said the second set of light-alls had also stopped working. And that’s not all:

“Some of the vehicles weren’t working properly and radio transmissions were limited at best.”

Armed with a Geiger counter, a starlight scope to enhance night vision, and a tape recorder to record his first impressions, Col. Halt led his team into the woods. Suddenly, a strange, glowing object appeared. As the object began to move away, Col. Halt said he and his men followed:

“As we were pursuing this glowing object through the woods, we noticed a farmhouse directly in front of us.”

The farmhouse appeared to be glowing very brightly, as though it was on fire. Then, according to Col. Halt:

“The object broke into five white objects and disappeared. And it was a very strange feeling in the air. It made your hair bristle, sort of like static electricity, you just had a very unusual feeling. And I don’t think it was all psychological. I think there was something physiological about it. I think there was some type of guiding force behind these objects. Whether it was trying to communicate with us, whether it was trying to warn us, or whether it was trying to do something to us, I don’t know.”

One of the members of Col. Halt’s team was Sgt. Robert Ball
“To me, it looked like a grid search, like they were boxing off an area and looking for something. And that was the thought that hit me right away, and it stayed with me over the years. It looked like a search pattern.”

Col. Halt said as the object moved about, it emitted laser-like beams of light:

“We could very clearly see it. It sort of danced about in the sky and it sent down beams of light. I noticed other beams of light coming down from the same object, following different places on the base. My boss was standing in his front yard at Woodbridge and he could see the beams of light falling down. And the people in that weapons storage area and several other places on the base also reported the lights.”

Staff Sgt. John Burroughs wasn’t on patrol the second night:

“I woke up about 3:30, 4 in the morning and for whatever reason, I felt like maybe something had happened again. I don’t know why. I just woke up and felt like something had came back, don’t ask me why, it just was a gut feeling. So I went ahead and got up and went up to the base. All of a sudden, a couple of blue transparent type lights appeared in the sky. They were all of a sudden on the horizon and one of them broke towards us. The only time the light-alls were working as far as coming on and off when I saw them, were when the blue light passed by. And I have no idea what caused the light-alls to come on and off, other than the fact that the blue light as it passed, the light-alls came on .”

At about the same time, just 300 yards away, Col. Halt and his team also had a remarkable close encounter:

“The object was coming at us at a very high rate of speed. One of these beams of light fell very, very close to us, sort of a pencil beam of light.”

Once the object took off, it never returned. The next day, Col. Halt drafted a memo about the incident. It was submitted to British military authorities, who never acted on it. The United States Air Force would not acknowledge the episode either. Then, in 1983, a private citizen used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain Halt’s memo. But not everybody was convinced by what it reported. James McGaha is a noted UFO skeptic and director of two private observatories:

“The burden of proof for any event that is extraordinary is upon those making the claim, not upon those who look at it from a skeptical perspective. Where is the evidence? Show me the evidence? And that’s what science is all about. On the first night, at about 3 o’clock that morning, a bright fireball, which is a very bright meteor came into the earth’s atmosphere. And this is unquestionably what John Burroughs saw that night.”

Sgt. Burroughs says, not so:

“I’ve seen meteor showers come down before. It wasn’t a meteor falling out of the sky. And it went up, not down. Meteors fall from the sky. They don’t go back up into the sky.”

Col. Halt said what he saw was not a meteor:

“Meteor’s not going to go up, go back and forth and maintain position in the sky for a long period of time. A meteor’s not going to send beams of light down.”

James McGaha believes both men were mistaken:

“I think both of them are being honest as to what their perceptions are. But human perception is very, very easily fooled. And I think when they went out there to the woods, everybody was out there expecting to see a UFO. With a pre-conceived notion, the way you view things can be greatly influenced.”

McGaha believes that the glowing red light Col. Halt saw that night was simply a reflection from the revolving beam of a nearby lighthouse. Col. Halt doesn’t think so:

“There are too many unrelated things. If it were just a reflection, how does one explain two different sightings in two different places in the sky? How does one explain the object moving through the forest? How does one explain the sighting in the forest by the three airmen? There were just too many things. I have a lot of unresolved questions I’m not sure I’ll ever have answered. I’ve had people suggest all sorts of things, everything from, I’ve seen the second coming of Christ, to the devil’s after us. I can’t explain it, I really can’t. I know it was beyond the realm of anything that we experience in ordinary life.”

Around the same time, two other unconfirmed sightings were reported in the vicinity of Woodbridge Air Base. At least 15 men, all of them US Air Force personnel, witnessed the strange lights and objects first-hand. The Air Force continues to have no official comment on the entire series of events.

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Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season four with Robert Stack and in season four with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.

A man is left with mysterious burns after witnessing a UFO.

CASE DETAILS

People who claimed to have seen UFOs do not typically return with any evidence to verify their stories. But in this instance, the person involved came back with more than a tall tale. The evidence of his encounter was actually burned into his body.

Stephen Michalak and his wife came to Manitoba, Canada, from Poland, after World War II. Stephen found work as an industrial mechanic and was also an amateur rock hound. He spent every spare moment in the beautiful natural woodlands of Manitoba:

“I love nature. I love birds, animals. Every weekend I usually travel, go… out in the country and snooping in the… rocks.”

On May 20, 1967, Stephen was prospecting in the hills east of Winnipeg, when he was suddenly distracted by a noisy flock of geese:

“Looking on the tree, I notice two cigarette-like shape things, with the hump in the middle. I said ‘What the hell is that?’ One… in the air and the other one is coming down, down, down. I start looking for marks. NASA or something… Nothing, I didn’t see anything on it.”

Stephen’s son, Stan Michalak, was 10-years-old at the time and recalled what his father witnessed:

“I do remember one description that he gave at the time. He said that the skin of the craft, the outside of the craft was flawless. There was… nothing. It was as though you had milled out of a solid block of steel, this disc, this saucer with the dome on top.”

Stephen told his son that, after a few moments, the door of the craft slowly opened. The light emitted from the door was so bright, he had to snap down the visor on his safety goggles. Then, after a few moments, the door suddenly shut. According to Stephen, the craft rotated counterclockwise, knocking him backwards, and setting his shirt on fire:

“After igniting with the fire, the craft lifts up 30 to 40 feet and vanishes. And then I decide… now is the time for me to buzz off from here. So I start going.”

In shock, Stephen headed back toward his car. He was nauseous and vomited several times. Disoriented, he checked his compass, trying to find his way southeast, to the road. But the needle went haywire. Stephen made his best guess at the right direction. Nine hours later, he finally arrived back home. He was badly burned and still disoriented. According to his son, Stan, Stephen’s burns left doctors baffled:

“At that point in time, the diagnosis, if you can call it that, was burns. And sure they were burns, yes. Heat-caused burns. What they couldn’t diagnose and didn’t have a clue about was what appeared below the chest on the abdomen, the exact same pattern of holes that was on the grid on the side of the craft in the same order, in the same rows in the same number appeared as red spots on his lower abdomen, red dots.”

Stephen was released from the hospital, but his symptoms worsened. The nausea continued and his body seemed to emit a sulfuric stench. Stephen was tested for radiation poisoning, but the results were negative. No one could explain the source of the strange burns on his torso.

Six weeks after the encounter, Stephen and a friend went looking for the site. After several hours they found a burned-out circle the same size as the craft Stephen had seen. It was more then 30 feet across. Within days, a team of experts from the United States, working with the Royal Canadian Air Force, converged on the site. They took measurements, catalogued soil samples, and checked for radiation. The levels appeared quite high, and the Health Department considered quarantining the area. Later, however, they discovered that the high levels were caused by an unrelated vein of radium which ran under the entire region.

Meanwhile, Stephen’s burns, which had appeared to be healing, suddenly flared up again. According to Stephen, his doctors remained mystified:

“After every three months, my burns from legs and here were coming back, showing up again and burning.”

Nearly 30 years after his encounter, Stephen died with the burn marks still emblazoned on his torso. For the remainder of his life, Stephen Michalak never lost faith that on May 20, 1967, he had a remarkable encounter with something not of this Earth.

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Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season five with Robert Stack and in season three with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.