On January 7, 1970, two men by the names of Aarno Heinonen and Esko Viljo were out for a leisurely day of cross-country skiing at a quaint forest near Imjarvi Finland, training for an upcoming competition. The day had been calm and relaxing, and the two of them had chatted about their lives, and when dusk came, they stopped to admire the clear night sky and its stars. They watched the sun dipping beyond the horizon even as it grew very cold, and as they watched the darkening sky there was something rather bizarre that demanded their attention. It started as a strange buzzing sound that filled their ears and heads, and as they looked about trying to ascertain where it was coming from, they allegedly saw a bright light in the sky rapidly moving towards them, which seemed to be a metallic craft of some sort. This would mark the beginning of a rather bizarre ordeal, which has gone on to become one of the most famous and weirdest UFO cases Finland has ever seen.

As the mystery light approached, that alien buzzing sensation became more acute, until it was nearly deafening, and the object seemed to be rounded and disc-shaped, around 10 feet in diameter. It came in to hover over the ground, and they could see that is seemed to be surrounded by a strange reddish gray mist. It was all a very unusual sight, and Heinonen would say of it:

The huge disk began to descend as it was enveloped with the red gray fog, which became more thin and transparent. It began to hover at a height of 10 to 13 ft, so near I could have touched it with my ski stick. The craft was completely round. When it came down obliquely towards us we saw it had a dome on the upper side. Along the lower edge was a kind of raised part on which were three spheres or domes spaced equidistantly.

Just when things couldn’t have possibly been any weirder, an opening suddenly appeared in the bottom of the craft, from which extended a tube that burst forth an intense bright light, which created a delineated circle of black-tinged light on the snow. The bright was so bright as to be almost blinding, with the men squinting and trying to get their bearings. It was about then that Heinonen felt as if he had been yanked backwards by some invisible force, and he then saw some sort of being ahead. He would explain of this:

I don’t think we said anything to each other at all. We were completely amazed. We saw the light move a couple of times before stopping and intensely illuminating a patch of snow about a meter in diameter, with round it a dark edge, almost coal-black and 1 cm wide. I was standing completely still. Suddenly I felt as if somebody had seized my waist from behind and pulled me backwards. I think I took a step backwards, and in the same second I caught sight of the creature. It was standing in the middle of the light beam with a black box in its hands. Out of a round opening in the box there came a yellow light, pulsating. It was about 3 ft tall, with very thin arms and legs. Its face was like pale wax. The nose was a hook rather than a nose. The ears were very small and narrowed toward the head. The creature wore some kind of overall in a light green material and a conical helmet shining like metal. The creature stood in the middle of the bright light and was luminous like phosphorus, but its face was very pale. Its shoulders were very thin and slanting, with thin arms like a child’s. There were also white gauntlets going up to the elbows, and the fingers were bent like claws around the black box.

This mysterious being stood there in the light with its black box, which was illuminated by an eerie yellow glow, and the red mist was suddenly everywhere again, obscuring their view of it and becoming so thick that they could barely see each other anymore. Throughout the mist could be seen dancing purple sparks, and the whole scene was at the same time frightening, surreal, and beautiful. The entity then whipped the box upward to point it right at the startled men, and both mist and sparks flew in their direction, which caused them to feel nauseous and for their legs to go numb. Heinonen would say:

The pulsating light was very bright, almost blinding. It was very silent in the forest. Suddenly a red-grey mist came flowing down from the object and large sparks started to fly from the illuminated circle of snow. The sparks were like tapers, about 10 cm long, red, green and violet. They floated out in long curves, rather slowly; many of them hit me, but though I expected them to burn me, At first I did not feel anything. My right leg had been nearest the light. The whole leg was stiff and aching. My foot was as if anaesthetized.

The strange fog got thicker and thicker until suddenly both the humanoid and its bizarre craft just seemed to disappear. The two men managed to stumble out of there, feeling nauseous, numb, and vomiting the whole way. They would later be plagued by health problems afterwards, including what they describe as black urine like ‘black coffee,” facial swelling, headaches and vision and memory problems. A doctor who examined them, a Dr Pauli Kajanoja, would say:

l think the men have suffered a great shock. Viljo was very red in the face and seemed a little swollen. Both seemed absent-minded. They talked quickly and incoherently. I could not find anything clinically wrong with Heinonen. He did not feel well, but that could have been his stomach reacting to the shock. The symptoms he described are like those after being exposed to radioactivity. Unfortunately, I had no instrument to measure that. As to the black urine, it seems inexplicable. Possibly it could have been blood in it, but this cannot go on for several months. If blood samples had been taken, they might have revealed changes in his blood. Both men seemed sincere, and I don’t think they had made the thing up. I’m sure they were in a state of shock when they came to me; something must have frightened them.

It is all very harrowing and inexplicable, indeed, and since both men were known as being honest and reliable the case was treated as very promising by ufologists at the time. Yet, Heinonen would muddy the waters in later years, when he claimed that between 1970 and 1972 he had over two dozen further UFO experiences, sometimes involving a beautiful blonde alien who would appear and talk to him. This humanoid was described as possessing some sort of spherical object and claimed to be over 180 years old, and was sometimes accompanied by a dwarfish creature about 3 feet tall and wearing a grey suit with white stripes. He also claimed that he had received a green pen from her at some point, but would say that it had gone missing, and he also complained that every time he tried to take a picture of the creatures his camera would vanish into thin air or be knocked out of his hand by an unseen force. Convenient.

The case is so orbited by bizarreness that it is really rather hard to know what to make of it. Heinonen’s later oddball comments would certainly shed skepticism on what was originally taken to be a possibly genuine report, leaving us to wonder what is going on here. What happened out there in that frigid wilderness? Was this a real alien encounter or just delusional ranting? It remains unknown.

It was the summer of 1975, and Air Force Sergeant Charles L. Moody was at the time stationed at Holloman air force base near Alamogordo, New Mexico. On August 13th, Moody took a drive out into the surrounding desert on his day off, planning to watch a meteor shower that he had been reading about and which was scheduled to hit that night. He drove out to a secluded area that he had never been to before, far away from the lights of the base and surrounded by the sounds of the desert night, where the sky was clear and black, the stars spread out like diamond dust upon a swath of black velvet and stopped his car to wait for the celestial show to start. Little did he know at the time that he was about to see far more than just meteors out there in that wasteland moonscape. And so we delve into a strange case with a very reliable witness, which has managed to evade all rational explanations.

Charles L. Moody

At around 1:15 AM, Moody’s attention was drawn from the sea of stars to rest on a rather strange sight above. Travelling across the sky was what appeared to be a metallic craft of some sort, disc-shaped, faintly illuminated, and measuring around 50 feet in diameter and 18 feet thick at the center. He was familiar with all types of aircraft but this was not something he recognized, and as he stared on in puzzlement the object began to rapidly descend to around 15 to 20 feet off of the ground, where it hovered silently for a moment before approaching the awestruck Moody. As it came closer, Moody could then make out that it wasn’t silent at all, but rather emanated a bizarre high-pitched buzzing whine or hum, that reverberated through his body and spread out to stoke a deep and irrational fear within him. As the mysterious craft approached, he recoiled away and scrambled into his car in a dazed panic, further fueled by the fact that he could see dark humanoid shapes moving around in the glow of a window on the craft’s side. Who were they and what did they want? Moody did not intend to stick around to find out.

As he fumbled with starting the car, Moody could sense that his limbs were becoming heavy and somewhat numb, which only further alarmed him, and then that high pitched buzzing abruptly stopped to bring total silence crashing down upon him. He frantically tried to start the car, but it would not turn over, as if something had rendered it in operational. As all of this was happening, the mystery craft had drawn so close that it was practically right in front of the vehicle, where it hovered ominously, but Moody now found that he could barely move. He felt his mind go numb as well, and just as he felt he might lose consciousness the craft was gone and there was nothing but the darkened desert sprawled out around him. It was as if it had just vanished into thin air, and he found his car started normally now. It was all very strange and surreal, and he might have almost been able to think that he had hallucinated it all. However, his ordeal was far from over, and in fact things were about to get even more bizarre.

Moody quickly realized that he had lost about an hour of time that he could not account for, and things got even odder when the next day his back hurt him for no reason he could understand. After this a rash began to break out all over his body, and it was apparent that this likely had something to do with that lost hour of missing time and his experience in the desert. He tried self-hypnosis and other means of trying to dig up any repressed memories he had, which caused things to float up to the surface of his mind in dream-like fragments.

Moody recalled that the UFO had not in fact vanished, but that two tall humanoid beings in skintight black suits had approached his car as he sat there helpless and immobile. The entities had oversized hairless heads, round eyes, small ears and noses, and very thin lips, human-like, yet not quite. As they pulled him out of his car, he felt a surge of panic, and was able to briefly wrest back control of his limbs, ferociously fighting back to punch one of the entities and slam another against the car before his paralysis returned and he was captured. His memory would then jump forward to him lying on some sort of slab, with another being standing next to him, this one shorter than the others and dressed in a white suit of some sort.

He sensed somehow that this was the leader, and it began to communicate with him telepathically, first asking if he was going to behave himself. Moody agreed to not fight anymore, and the creature then used a device to turn down the level of Moody’s paralysis, giving him some control of his body back. He found he was able to walk, after which the being then took him on a tour of the ship. Moody would claim that he was shown a strange machine powered by crystals that was called a “drive unit,” and was told that there was a much larger mothership out above Earth’s orbit, as well as the fact that Earth radar apparently interfered with their navigation equipment. After all of this, the alien explained that there would be no further contact with humans for 20 years and that they would be in touch, before rendering Moody unconscious simply by placing both hands at the sides of his head.

And that is pretty much it, and we are left with a lot of questions. Was any of this true? If so, then why did the aliens even bother? After all, it doesn’t seem like they really did anything other than show him around and tell him some stuff, so why go through all of the effort? It has become a case that has been discussed and debated to this day, despite all of its weirdness, and serves to tantalize the imagination.

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It started as a hunting trip with a couple of friends. On September 4, 1964, 28-year-old Donald Shrum went on a bow hunting excursion to a place called Cisco Grove, in Placer County, California, along with a group of friends. They had gone out hunting in the area many times before, so there was at first no reason to suspect that this would be any different from any of their other trips, yet there would be a series of events that would play out that would end in one of the most bizarre alien encounters on record.

Curiosity got the better of him, and so he dismounted from his safe perch up in the tree to try and go get a closer look. He suspected that it might be a search party out looking for him after he failed to return to camp, and so he launched a flare to let them know where he was, after which the light rapidly came right towards him, coming to within 50 feet and showing itself to be no normal helicopter. In fact, Shrum would describe it as a glowing, cigar-shaped object that was immense, around 14 stories tall. From this object a smaller one detached and supposedly came to rest not far away, which was enough to send Shrum scurrying back up into his tree for safety. He allegedly cowered there in the shadows in hiding for some time until he heard the sound of what sounded like people walking through the brush below, yet when he peeked down, he could see that these were no normal people at all.

Shrum would claim that he saw three entities, two of them humanoids standing about 5 feet tall and wearing silver coveralls and goggles of some sort, while the third was a hulking robotic creature with glowing orange eyes. These entities approached the tree and much to Shrum’s horror the robot began shaking it violently with incredible strength, in an apparent effort to get Shrum out of it. The terrified man hung on for dear life as these otherworldly beings continued their siege of his tree, and at some point during this ordeal he claims that the robotic entity emitted some kind of white vapor from its mouth, which had a strange odor and caused him to black out. He woke up some time later feeling nauseous and lethargic, but still up in his tree. Unfortunately, his aggressors were still there as well, and Shrum threw some lit matches and other items at them in a pathetic attempt to scare them off, before finally remembering his bow and using that to fire on them, hitting the robot three times to send sparks flying, but doing very little actual damage.

In the end, Shrum’s bow and arrow assault did not dissuade the outlandish beings, and indeed a second robot much like the first soon joined them. Once again, the robots released that toxic gas to render him unconscious, and once again he awoke feeling sick, only this time the aliens had gotten bolder and were actually climbing up the tree. Shrum managed to pelt them with various objects he had on him and they climbed back down to circle and shake the tree. This would go on all night, until the coming of dawn, when they apparently sent nearly a dozen of those robotic things at him and caused him to black out once more with a volumous cloud of that smoke. However, this time when he woke he was oddly hanging from a branch by his belt and they were all gone as if they had never been there at all.

In the light of day Shrum was able to make his way back to camp, where he learned one of his friends had also seen the UFO the previous night. Shrum would come forward with his bizarre tale and even talk to Air Force personnel about it, who were very eager to write it off as either fantasy or someone playing a prank on him. We are left to wonder what it really was he saw, what those creatures were, and perhaps most importantly, why they weren’t able to get him out of that tree despite having vapor spewing robot goons. One interesting point was made by The Iron Skeptic, who says:

Another thing is the way that the aliens are reported to have acted. Think about this for a moment: They could conquer the non-trivial challenge of interstellar travel, but they can’t get a guy out of a tree? That’s ridiculous. That’s like Andre the Giant not being able to open a jar of pickles. One way or another, those pickles are coming out of there. Either these aliens were the absolute stupidest, most bumbling, least competent abductors ever to grace the good green earth, or they had a reason for leaving the terrified man up that tree.

Their actions do, to some extent, appear similar to the actions of the Hopkinsville Goblins or the tiny, wrinkled little men that scared the hell out of some drunkards in Ririe, Idaho in the sixties: the aliens don’t seem to really want anything other than to scare the hell out of some people. The UFO enthusiasts claim that sometimes, aliens just like to screw around with people they abduct, apparently to gauge their reactions. For instance, sometimes they’ll show abductees apocalyptic images of the world being destroyed, just to see how the human will react. Could this just be some evil, alien psychology experiment?

It is an intriguing point to consider, and makes one wonder. How indeed did these forces not manage to get this one guy down from a tree, and was there some mysterious motive for it all?  The case is certainly one of the stranger out there, and has remained amazingly under the radar for the most part. Whatever one may think of such far out reports, a case of a guy hiding in a tree while robot aliens attack him certainly is not something you see every day, and it is a truly outlandish case that will most likely remain confined to the outer fringe.

Before the night of December 6, 1978, Pier Zanfretta was just a normal, unremarkable guy living out in the rural village of Torriglia, Italy, where he worked as an unassuming private security guard. Up until that evening there had never been anything particularly remarkable about him, and he likely would have been forgotten by history if it weren’t for a sequence of strange events that would unfold. And so begins a weird odyssey concerning UFOs, high strangeness, and lizard humanoids from outer space.

On this evening, Zanfretta was in his car on his usual night patrol, and as he peered into the gloom ahead trying to navigate the frigid icy roads, he noticed what appeared to be four mysterious lights emanating from a nearby home. At this very moment his car apparently sputtered and died, but he did not connect this to the lights he was seeing just yet. Indeed, he assumed the lights he was seeing to be flashlights from burglars trespassing on the property of the home, which he recognized as belonging to the wealthy doctor Ettore Righi. He estimated that there were four trespassers, and so when he left his vehicle to investigate, he did so with his weapon drawn and at the ready. He stealthily made his way onto the property, creeping around to the back were the light seemed to be coming from, and he had no idea that as he peaked around a corner his life was about to be changed forever.

There in the backyard of the estate there sat a glowing red, oval object with a diameter of over 33 feet, which was enough for him to start backing away and call it in to his supervisor. As he backpedaled out of there he claims that he had then turned around to be confronted with the astonishing sight of an immensely large being standing at around 10 feet in height looming over him, which he said was “An enormous green, ugly and frightful creature, with undulating skin… as though he were very fat or dressed in a loose, gray tunic.” Over its face it wore a mechanical mouthpiece of some sort, the creature’s skin was mottled and covered with scales like a reptile, its hands and feet bore wicked talons, and spikes protruded from its head, and it soon became apparent that there were several more of the same entities standing not far away. He would say “They are green, with triangular yellow eyes, with big thorns, they have green flesh and their skin is full of wrinkles as if they were old. Their mouths look like they’re made of iron, they have red veins on their heads, pointed ears and arms with fingernails.” In fact, they were so grotesque, savage, and frightening in appearance that Zanfretta started to run away, the reptilian creatures hitting him with some sort of “heat beam” as he did.

He would later be found unconscious after other guards responded to his screaming, panicked calls for help over the radio, and even after waking he was in an obvious daze and state of shock, even dangerously waving around his gun as if he were going to shoot them. Oddly, his clothes were found to be almost hot to the touch, despite the fact that he had been lying out there for who knew how long on the frozen ground. As soon as Zanfretta explained what had happened to him the police supposedly contacted the Italian military police, the Carabinieri, who arrived on the scene for a full investigation. They would apparently find some amount of physical evidence left behind from the encounter, such as large, anomalous footprints, scorched trees, and strange deep imprints shaped like horseshoes in the earth where the supposed UFO had rested. It was also uncovered that many other residents in the area had seen unusual aerial phenomena at around the same time that Zanfretta had had his bizarre encounter. Strangely enough, the gun that Zanfretta used was found to have been fired five times. Before long, word was out on the whole thing, and it was being splashed all over the news and on TV programs across Italy. It was all intriguing enough that a reporter by the name of Rino Di Stefano, with the newspaper Il Corriere Mercantile took it upon himself to look more deeply into what was at the time being treated as a sort of tabloid oddity.

Stefano would find Zanfretta to be very sincere in his tale, and would deem him to at least truly believe what he was saying. So convinced was Stefano that there was perhaps something to all of this that he had Zanfretta undergo hypnotic regression to try and uncover any lost memories from the missing time, which would unearth many new details. Under hypnosis, Zanfetta claimed that he had actually been taken aboard the reptilian aliens’ ship, where he had been examined and interrogated using some sort of translator device. The aliens had supposedly told him that they were from the planet “Teetonia,” located in the “Third Galaxy,” and that they were preparing to visit Earth in greater numbers. Making things even more bizarre is that this would apparently not be the last brush Zanfretta would have with these enigmatic beings.

On December 26, 1978, Zanfretta was driving on patrol when his car seemed to stop responding to him, steering itself and acting of its own accord, as if under some sort on intelligent control. The vehicle proceeded to go careening towards a remote area in the countryside, whereupon it suddenly stopped by itself and was bathed in a blindingly bright light. The aliens would then apparently take him aboard their ship again and examine him, as well as fit him with some sort of uncomfortable communications helmet, and this time one of the beings took his gun and fired it into one of the craft’s walls, seemingly out of curiosity. They also offered to take him with them, but he refused, so they let him go. However, they allegedly then abducted him yet again in July of the next year, on this occasion taking him to some sort of mothership in space, where they showed him a repulsive, frog-like alien in suspended animation that they claimed was of an enemy species. There were also a bird-like creature and a being like a caveman similarly ensconced within tubes. They also apparently gave him a transparent sphere containing a golden tetrahedron that would rotate in suspension, its purpose unknown. Zanfretta would later claim that he had hidden this sphere away in a safe place, and has always refused to show it to anyone, leaving its existence questionable.

Zanfretta would eventually admit to having been abducted no fewer than 11 times from between the years of 1978 and 1981, and on one occasion several security personnel would also see the UFO, even firing at it to no effect. Some of these encounters were truly strange, including one in which he stopped at a service station and was met by a being with an egg-shaped head wearing a checkered with a chest plate made of metal. Zanfretta has since appeared in numerous interviews and TV shows in Italy, he insists it is all true, and his case has become perhaps one of the more well-known and strangest alien encounter stories Italy has ever seen. What is going on here and is any of it true or not? It is certainly one of the more bizarre alien reports out there, and it will probably always remain just another very weird report that we will never have answers for.