UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

The Sighisoara wall painting - Possible UFO Depiction Discovered In Old Romanian Painting

Perhaps the most well known supposed UFO crash in history is the one that allegedly happened in Roswell, New Mexico back in 1947. It really set off the boom of interest in flying saucers, and many people mark it as one of the heralds of the modern UFO craze. Yet the UFO phenomenon has been observed since far before this, all the way back to ancient times, and it also seems that aliens have been crashing their spaceships here for just about as long.

Possibly one of the earliest reports of an actual UFO crash comes from all the way back in the 9th century, and is held within the pages of an obscure Latin manuscript called Liber contra insulam vulgi opinionem. In the very brief report, the Archbishop of Lyons is talking about the French peasants when suddenly he sort of makes an offhand mention of what seems to be UFOs and aliens. He says that these French peasants often a speak of a region they called Magonia, “from whence come ships in the clouds.” According to the odd account, the people in this region often traded with these “storm wizards,” and that sometimes these ships would fall from the sky. In one case, he mentions that he had personally seen these ships, and that he had been present when four of these “wizards” fell from their ship to the earth, after which they had been stoned to death. The whole thing is written of matter-of-factly as if it is just a little everyday anecdote, before the manuscript moves on to leave us wondering just what these ships and their “storm wizards” could have been.

In 1211 AD we have another very early report that seems to be of a UFO crash. It supposedly happened in the remote town of Cloera, where a very bizarre series of events seems to have taken place above a church dedicated to St. Kinarus as the people were holding mass there. An English historical chronicler called Gervase of Tilbury would write of what happened thusly:

It befell that an anchor was dropped from the sky, with a rope attached to it, and one of the flukes caught in the arch above the church door. The people rushed out of the church and saw in the sky a ship with men on board, floating before the anchor cable, and they saw a man leap overboard and jump down to the anchor, as if to release it. He looked as if he were swimming in water. The folk rushed up and tried to seize him; but the Bishop forbade the people to hold the man, for it might kill him, he said. The man was freed, and hurried up to the ship, where the crew cut the rope and the ship sailed out of sight. But the anchor is in the church, and has been there ever since, as a testimony.

What was going on here? It sounds very much like this could have been an early UFO account, but it is hard to say for sure. Moving along in years we come to a report that has made the rounds a bit and which allegedly occurred in 1790, in the French town of Alencon, just west of Paris. The report was quoted by the famed UFO researcher Dr Jacques Vallee in 1975, when he claimed that he had heard this from a man named Antonio Fenoglio, who had allegedly uncovered it while perusing the Archives of the French Academy of Sciences, in Paris in 1967. According to this alleged report, in June of 1790 a Paris police inspector by the name of Liabeuf was sent to the rural village to investigate a strange incident that had happened there. Fenoglio claimed that the police inspector’s report read:

At 5 A.M., on June 12th, several farmers caught sight of an enormous globe which seemed surrounded with flames. First they thought it was perhaps a balloon that had caught fire, but the great velocity and the whistling sound which came from that body intrigued them. The globe slowed down, made some oscillations and precipitated itself towards the top of a hill, unearthing plants along the slope. The heat which emanated from it was so intense that soon the grass and the small tree started burning. The peasants succeeded in controlling the fire which threatened to spread to the whole area. In the evening this sphere was still warm and an extraordinary happened, not to say an incredible thing.

The witnesses were; two mayors, a doctor and three other authorities who confirm my report, in addition to the dozens of peasants who were present. This sphere, which would have been large enough to contain a carriage, had not suffered from all that flight. It excited so much curiosity that people came from all parts to see it. Then all of a sudden a kind of door opened and, there is the interesting thing, a person like us came out of it, but this person was dressed in a strange way, wearing a tight-fitting suit and, seeing all that crowd, said some words which were not understood and fled into the woods. Instinctively, the peasants stepped back, in fear, and this saved them because soon after that the sphere exploded in silence, throwing pieces everywhere, and these pieces burned until they were reduced to powder. Researches were initiated to find the mysterious man, but he seemed to have dissolved.

It is a pretty intriguing and spectacular report, and Vallee is a respected researcher, but in the end it doesn’t seem he that he ever saw the supposed original document for himself, and it all comes exclusively from a 1967 claim by Fenoglio. Furthermore, the report seems to be very modern in its depiction and wording, and there is also the fact that the Academy of Sciences has apparently denied that any such document exists, leading one to believe that this may have been a hoax. Still, if it is real, then it is a truly perplexing case of what seems to be an early UFO crash.

Finally, we come to the most recent of these cases, with a more well-known account from 1897, in the small town of Aurora, Texas. At 6 AM on April 17 of that year, it was reported that a great, mechanical airship of some sort had suddenly descended from the sky, sailed over the town square, and smashed into a windmill on the property of a Judge Proctor. This was far from the end of the incident, as it would soon become apparent that this was no normal airship, and its pilot was no normal man. A report by a S.E Haydon in the Dallas Evening News said of the event:

Evidently some of the machinery was out of order, for it was making a speed of only ten or twelve miles an hour and gradually settling toward the Earth. It sailed directly over the public square, and when it reached the north part of town collided with the tower of Judge Proctor’s windmill and went to pieces with a terrific explosion, scattering debris over several acres of ground, wrecking the windmill and water tank and destroying the judge’s flower garden.

The pilot of the ship is supposed to have been the only one on board, and while his remains are badly disfigured, enough of the original has been picked up to show that he was not an inhabitant of this world. Mr. T.J Weems, the United States signal service office at this place and an authority on astronomy, gives it as his opinion that he was a native of the planet Mars. Papers found on his person – evidently the record of his travels – are written in some unknown hieroglyphics, and can not be deciphered.

The ship was too badly wrecked to form any conclusion as to its construction or motive power. It was built of an unknown metal, resembling somewhat a mixture of aluminum and silver, and it must have weighed several tons. The town is full today of people who are viewing the wreck and gathering specimens of the strange metal from the debris. The pilot’s funeral will take place at noon tomorrow.

The wreckage was supposedly disposed of in a well and the alien body buried in a grave at the town cemetery, and from here the story picks up all kinds of strange elements. Some versions say that the military swooped in to whisk away the ship and its pilot. Others say the wreckage contaminated the water supply and led to inexplicable illnesses. The burial plot is said to still be in the town cemetery, which has an official plaque from the Texas Historical Commission that mentions the strange incident. There have been plenty of people who have asked permission to dig the alien’s grave up, but the city has always denied these requests. Considering that at the time Aurora was falling on hard times and this supposed incident drew in huge crowds of people, it has been suggested that this was all a hoax and a publicity stunt, but in the end, who knows what is going on here. Whatever really did happen on that day in 1897, whether it was a hoax or there is any truth to it, the tale of the airship and the alien grave have become a popular local legend.

These reports mostly have an air of myth and mystique about them, partly because they are so lost to the mists of time and shrouded in the shadows of history. There is very little we can do to really know for sure what was seen back in these early times, or how to unwind the truth from possible fabrication. However, if there is any truth to it all, then it appears that UFOs crashing to earth are not a purely modern phenomenon, and such cases serve to really fire up the imagination.

A few days ago I wrote an article here at Mysterious Universe on the possibility that the acclaimed movie director Billy Wilder may have known something about the Roswell affair of July 1947 – and turned that knowledge into a movie: 1970’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. On a similar angle, today I’m going to share with you certain other data that suggests the world of entertainment and UFO conspiracies is nothing new. In 1948, Bernard Newman wrote a book called The Flying Saucer. It told a story of a faked UFO invasion, designed to create a one world government. Newman was an expert in the field and history of espionage and performed a number of secret operations for U.K. Intelligence during the Second World War. Dennis Wheatley was a renowned writer of horror novels. He was also a member of the U.K. government’s Joint Planning Staff, which was a part of the War Cabinet. Such was the level of respect the government had for Wheatley, he received the rank of Wing Commander – something that made him then the first civilian to have been given such a level. Wheatley’s 1952 novel, Star of Ill-Omen, is a story of hostile Martians who are determined to take over our world. Imagine something along the lines of an earlier version of the 1996 blockbuster movie, Independence Day, and you won’t be far off.

Nineteen-Ninety-Nine was the year in which Nick Pope’s Operation Thunder Child novel was published. The basic theme is that of a hostile assault on the U.K. By whom? By dangerous extraterrestrials, that’s who. When the news surfaced on the Ufological grapevine, it was all but guaranteed that some UFO researchers would suggest that Pope had written a story that was based on top secrets he had learned of while working in the MoD. There’s no evidence that there was any truth to those suggestions. Although, it must be said that Pope was not beyond cultivating an air of intrigue and mystery about himself. He did it very well – and I’m sure that Nick, and his publicists at Simon & Schuster’s publishing house, would agree with me. Nevertheless, Pope did make a few comments that are worth noting.

When the news of Operation Thunder Child’s then-looming book surfaced, I asked Nick Pope about his novel. I wanted to know what his response was to the fact-vs.-fiction scenario of his then-soon-to-be-published book that had the UFO field, of that time, buzzing. Pope replied: “Even to you, Nick, I can’t comment on that. But, let’s put it this way: Operation Thunder Child is going to be more controversial than Open Skies, Closed Minds or The Uninvited. And, indeed, the Ministry of Defense may have more of a problem with it. Mainly because it’s going to feature real locations, real weapon systems, real tactics, real doctrine and real crisis management techniques. It’s going to blend my knowledge and experience of UFOs with my knowledge of crisis management – such as my involvement in the Gulf War, where I worked in the Joint Operations Center.” Moving on…

The publishers of Ralph Noyes’ 1985 novel, A Secret Property (Quartet Books, Ltd.) provided their readers with the following background on their author: “Ralph Noyes was born in the tropics and spent most of his childhood in the West Indies. He served in the RAF from 1940 to 1946 and was commissioned as aircrew, engaging in active service in North Africa and the Far East. He entered the civil service in 1949 and served in the Air Ministry and subsequently the unified Ministry of Defense. In 1977 he retired early from the civil service to take up a writing career, leaving in the grade of under Secretary of State. He has since published several pieces of shorter fiction, most of them on speculative themes.”

The publishers added: “For nearly four years, until late 1972, Ralph Noyes headed a division in the central staffs of the Ministry of Defense which brought him in touch with the UFO problem. Since his retirement he has become increasingly interested in this subject, among others which lie on the fringes of present understanding. He sees speculative fiction as the ideal mode for grappling with these unusual areas of experience. But A Secret Property is not only fiction but also ‘faction’–at least to the extent of drawing on Ralph Noyes’s lengthy background in the Royal Air Force and the Ministry of Defense.”

A Secret Property is a thinly-veiled, fictional version of what happened at Rendlesham Forest, Suffolk, U.K. in December 1980. Most important of all, it is not the matter of how much data and material Noyes chose to fictionalize in A Secret Property. Rather, it’s the theme of Noyes’ story that is so important and relevant to us – more than thirty-five years after his book was published. In her 1991 book From Out of the Blue, Jenny Randles said of Noyes’ book that it involved a technology that “produces etheric visions of aliens and spaceships” and that can “effect the real world in various hazardous ways.” This issue of “visions,” in relation to a fictionalized tale of what happened at Rendlesham Forest, eerily mirrors the data provided in my new book, The Rendlesham Forest UFO Conspiracy. Do I think Noyes knew of this “vision”-based top secret experiment? Yes. And did he choose to fictionalize his secret knowledge and insert it into the pages of A Secret Property? Yes. You may be surprised how, sometimes, secret facts surface in the guise of fiction.

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