Among the most amazing cases of the UFO phenomenon are those that involve crashed objects seemingly from another world. By far the most famous of these is the one that supposedly happened in Roswell, New Mexico, to the point that most other crashes are compared to it. And what a number of such crashes there are, from every corner of the globe, to the point that it seems that operating a spacecraft here is rather dangerous business. One of these cases comes to us from the wilderness of Mexico, where a UFO supposedly crashed into a plane, sending them both crashing to earth and setting off a race between governments to recover the wreckage.

The incident begins on August 25, 1974, when an American Air Defense radar installation picked up an object moving in from the Gulf of Mexico on a predicted trajectory towards the state of Texas. Whatever it was it was moving extremely fast, at an estimated speed of around 2,530 miles per hour, and it was at an altitude of around 75,000 feet. It was rather alarming, as it was headed straight towards U.S. airspace and no one had a clue what it was. It was thought that it was perhaps a meteor, but then it slowed down. Considering that it was slowing down and about to violate U.S. airspace, an alert was issued and fighters were scrambled for possible interception of an enemy craft, yet it would then surprise everyone again.

The object was tracked to the area of Corpus Christi, Texas, where is suddenly dropped to an altitude of 45,000 feet and slowed down considerably to 1,955 miles per hour, before changing course to take it towards Mexican airspace before any defense could be mounted. It then shot out over Brownsville, Texas, and gently descended once again to about 20,000 feet before suddenly and inexplicably vanishing from radar in the general vicinity of a place called Coyame, in the state of Chihuahua, Mexico, just across the U.S. border. Considering that the object had slowed down, changed course, and descended in smooth, measured steps, it was clear that this was no meteor, and it was also no equipment malfunction, because another military radar installation would report that they had tracked it as well. When the object did not appear on screens again, it was assumed that it must have come down in the desert wasteland near the town, but no one had any idea of what it could have been.

Strangely, civilian radar had apparently not picked this particular event up, but it was found that they had picked up a private aircraft that seemed to have crashed in the same area. However, the flight path of the civilian aircraft did not match that of the mystery object, making any connection between the two murky and differentiating them as two separate phenomena. The only thing anyone knew was that the object the military had tracked and the civilian aircraft seemed to have gone down in precisely the same area at just around the same time. It was all rather odd, but it was apparent that at least an aircraft had crashed, and so the Mexican authorities launched a search for the wreckage, soon finding it out among the rugged parched scrubland. That was when the weirdness would continue. In addition to the wreckage of the aircraft, it was soon reported that there was another crash site not far away, and that this one seemed to be oddly circular in shape and mostly in one piece. After that, radio silence was put into effect and there was no further word on what was going on.

The original reports and communications between the rescue crews had been intercepted by the CIA, who started putting together their own team to go and check it out, and the Mexican government was asked for permission to enter and do their own recovery mission or assist with the operation. These requests would allegedly be either ignored and met with silence or outright denied, but according to eyewitness reports the Americans didn’t really care, and went ahead anyway, mobilizing a group of helicopters at Fort Bliss, which were all painted in light brown colors and without markings. In the meantime, the CIA had apparently picked up satellite imagery showing that there had indeed been two crash sites, and furthermore there were very large flatbed trucks that had been brought in to move the wreckage, one piece very disk-like in nature, with the trucks stopping in a very remote area away from habitation and then assuming complete radio silence. Alarmed that something weird was going on, the U.S. government ordered a flyby to check it out.

A low altitude, high speed flyby purportedly showed trucks and jeeps stopped in the area and two bodies lying on the ground, and it was decided to send the helicopters in. Four military helicopters were then sent out across the border to the site, where they supposedly found the entire Mexican convoy still and the personnel all dead for reasons unknown, most of them still sitting lifelessly in their vehicles. On one of the flatbed trucks was found a large, disc-shaped craft that measured about 16 feet in diameter, and was composed of smooth silver metal, with no apparent markings, doors, windows, or visible means of propulsion anywhere on it. The disc was also surprisingly only lightly damaged, with merely a small hole and some dents to show for what was seen as an obvious collision with the civilian aircraft. In fact, the wreckage from that aircraft was also carried by the Mexican convoy, and that plane had been completely obliterated, nothing but twisted pieces.

With great caution this object was allegedly whisked away by the helicopters. According to the story, before leaving the military also made sure to destroy the remains of the convoy, the plane wreckage, and all of the bodies with high explosives, in what appears to have been some sort of nefarious attempt to get rid of the evidence. The disk was apparently taken to a secure facility in the Davis Mountains, after which it was decontaminated and moved to a covered truck and brought by back roads to an unknown location somewhere near Atlanta, Georgia. The movements of the object are unknown from there, with some reports saying it was put in an underground facility, while others say it was moved yet again. No one really knows. Also mysteries are why the entire recovery team and convoy sent by the Mexican government was dead, made even more confusing in that none of the American team reportedly had any problem or illness.

It is all a lot to take in, and considering the talk of crashed alien craft in the desert, secretive coverups, and the possession of the UFO wreckage it has drawn comparisons to the more famous Roswell, New Mexico crash, to the point that it is often even referred to as “The Mexican Roswell.” Indeed, by far the most complete source and record of the case can be found in the book titled Mexico’s Roswell: The Chihuahua UFO Crash, by Noe Torres and Ruben Uriarte, who have been researching the case for years. Yet the answers remain vague. Was this a crashed extraterrestrial craft or not? There have of course been mundane theories put out to explain all of this, such as that it was not a UFO at all, but rather a drug running plane that had collided with a civilian aircraft. There is also the fact that very few people remain in the area who directly witnessed any of this, and the sources for these rumors are difficult to corroborate, with most of the information gleaned from 2nd or 3rd hand accounts and solid documentation scarce. With so little to go on, it is just a fantastic story relegated to the realm of speculation and debate. What happened out there in those desert badlands, if anything? We may never know for sure, but it is an intriguing case that is sure to capture the imagination for some time to come.

That is a question that has surfaced in  the last few days, as a result of the controversy surrounding my new book, The Rendlesham Forest UFO Conspiracy. On the issue of how Ufology discovered the story, there’s no doubt at all that it was the team of Brenda Butler, Dot Street and Jenny Randles that got the ball rolling. They were the authors of the very first book on the mystery, Sky Crash, which was published in 1984. There is also no doubt that without their combined investigations, our knowledge of the incidents would be nowhere compared to where we are today. Possibly, even, without those three persistent investigators the truth behind those incidents would have remained hidden and locked away. Forever? I would not bet against it. That gives you some idea of the depth and determination of Dot, Jenny and Brenda to get the answers.

A bit of background for you on how the story began to surface: Brenda lived not at all far from the forest and had more than a few contacts in the region. Notably, that included friends who were employees of the U.S. military. It wasn’t one hundred percent inevitable that Brenda would hear tales of something strange having taken place just outside the confines of RAF Woodbridge. It was, however, highly likely that such a thing would eventually occur. And as the history books have shown, such a thing did occur. Dot and Brenda were friends and decided to take a deep and careful look at the story. Jenny Randles joined their team soon after, in early 1981. The three were soon hot on the trail of the story – and barely a month after Lieutenant Colonel Halt had put his memo on the incidents together for the U.K.’s Ministry of Defense. And, the three women never looked back. It was a story that suggested, just maybe, a spacecraft from a faraway world had come down in the woods. In the world of Ufology, this was a development that could not have been envisaged just a short period earlier. One of the key sources for the story who the three women relied on – and whose unforgettable words galvanized the trio to look ever deeper into the story – was the pseudonymous “Steve Roberts.” Such was the sensitivity surrounding the man and his story of a UFO event in the woods, he was careful to mask his real name.

It was, to a large degree, the words of their source that caught the attention of Street, Butler and Randles. They did a very good, solid job of pursuing the story. It was soon published. Sky Crash makes for fascinating reading. Shadowy characters, Ministry of Defense chicanery, sinister goings-on in the woods, tales of extraterrestrial visitation, and military figures hiding their real names for fear of what might happen to them, were just the start of things. In the weeks and months that followed, the Ministry of Defense proved to be highly close-mouthed when it came to discussing the December incidents with members of the public and the media. No surprise. They were even more cautious about chatting with an energized team of UFO sleuths who weren’t going to give up. That’s Jenny, Dot and Brenda, of course.

In some ways, the MoD was unable to do very much about it, as wild rumors of the startling events were already seeping out. Eventually matters would develop into a chaotic torrent. To demonstrate how incredibly careful and determined the MoD was to try and keep matters under wraps, it was not until April 13, 1983 that an official admission was made to Jenny Randles that a handful of “lights” had been seen in the vicinity of Rendlesham Forest and that remained “unexplained.” That’s right: two years passed before the rumors of something very strange and non-human having been seen in Rendlesham Forest began to unravel in the world of intelligence and the military. Those who were hiding the truth were now in the dangerous position of losing control of the situation.

Almost two months later to the day, a copy of Lieutenant Colonel Halt’s memo was declassified in accordance with the laws of the U.S. Freedom of Information Act. It was provided to a now-deceased American UFO investigator, Robert Todd. In a June 14, 1983 letter to Todd, Colonel Peter Bent – who, at the time, was the Commander of the 513^th Combat Support Group (CSG) – made an amazement statement. He said: “It might interest you to know that the U.S. Air Force had no longer retained a copy of the 13 January 1981 letter written by Lt. Col. Charles I. Halt. The Air Force file copy had been properly disposed of in accordance with Air Force regulations. Fortunately, through diligent inquiry and the gracious consent of Her Majesty’s government, the British Ministry of Defense and the Royal Air Force, the U.S. Air Force was provided with a copy for you.”

It wasn’t long at all before Brenda, Dot and Jenny found themselves in a runaround. Curiously, during the course of an interview with MoD spokeswoman Pam Titchmarsh on August 18, 1983, Randles was told that – contrary to the statement made by Colonel Bent – the Ministry of Defense had not supplied the Americans with a copy of Halt’s memorandum. Notably, Titchmarsh was very wary about discussing the case with Randles, who had made a trip down to London with Street and Butler. “I wouldn’t know,” was Titchmarsh’s uneasy and succinct reply when Randles asked her if the MoD’s “operational staff” had built up their own files on the case. Nevertheless, since a copy of the Halt memo had been released to Robert Todd by U.S. authorities, Titchmarsh was – at the very least – obliged to admit that her department in the MoD (Defense Secretariat 8) did have a copy of Halt’s report on file. Despite that, the Ministry of Defense denied that the events of December 1980 were of any kind of defense significance. That denial of anything strange having occurred continues.

For as many people out there who believe in UFOs and that they are something beyond our current ability to understand, there are probably just as many skeptics who seek to debunk it all and explain it away. This might be because they really believe there are mundane answers, or in some cases it may be because they are trying to hide something and keep it from public scrutiny, but whatever the reasons, what happens when one of these skeptics sees something themselves that changes their mind? What if that person was an official with the government charged with being a skeptic and debunker as his profession? Here we have a wild story of an alleged former military official, whose job it was to create cover-ups and sweep away the truth, only to admit years later that the truth was not that clear or easy to dismiss.

Back in the 1950s the main driving force behind the U.S. government’s efforts to investigate the UFO phenomenon and one of the most well-known of a series of such projects was a little something called Project Blue Book. Started in 1952, it was conducted by the United States Air Force with the aim of scientifically analyzing UFO data and determining if UFOs posed any sort of threat to national security. Up until its closure in 1969, the project would investigate thousands of reports of unidentified flying objects, and while they were ostensibly set up to try and figure out what was going on, mostly it seemed that their job was to find whatever mundane explanation they could find to stuff any given report into. At times they seem to have been almost damage control with the public, to sweep it all away in order to avoid panic, and they would officially claim to have never found any evidence at all of these objects representing a national threat or of consisting of any sort of extraterrestrial vehicles or proof of some anomalous advanced technology. They spent a lot of time debunking, in other words, and one of their chief debunkers was supposedly a man by the name of Lieutenant Colonel Richard French.

Lieutenant Colonel Richard French

French’s main job with Project Blue Book was to allegedly explain away any and all UFO reports in digestible ways that the public could handle. He not only shot down fakes, but also managed to sweep away any reports that were not convenient or were annoyingly difficult to explain, and you can bet that Venus, Jupiter, and swamp gas were in his bag of tricks. What makes French’s story so interesting is that while his job was to downplay or outright dismiss these reports, he at one point had his own astounding experience that was not so easy to explain away, and wouldn’t be uncovered until long after he had retired.

In 2013, French was part of a Citizen Hearing on Disclosure in Washington D.C. where he testified on his experiences in Project Blue Book, along with a panel of six former members of Congress, and he had some interesting things to say. His own experience apparently happened in the early 1950s, when he was a young man out off the coast of St. John’s, in Newfoundland. At the time he had been called to investigate what was being called a “UFO crash,” and made his way to the location to find a crowd of people bunched up together on a wharf looking out over the grey water. French would explain of the situation:

They said, ‘We have a UFO report and we want you to investigate it,’ and that was standard for what I was doing. They told me there were two of them involved and that they were deep under the water, after entering the water doing roughly 100 miles an hour. There were a lot of people assembled on the wharf, at least 100 standing around just looking in amazement at the water, including several local policemen.

Considering he had spent his career up to that point debunking such reports and had been very good at it, French didn’t really expect to see much. Yet, when he looked out across the relatively clear waters, he said he could notice that there was definitely something weird going on. There under the surface about 20 feet from shore he says he could see two disc-shaped craft about 18 feet in diameter and approximately 3 feet thick, both of which seemed to just be hovering there as the gawking bystanders watched on in bafflement. In addition to the two objects, he also says that he then noticed that there were two diminutive humanoid beings also there in that frigid water, who seemed to be in the process of trying to repair the downed craft. French would say of these creatures and the scene playing out before him:

They were about 2 or 3 feet tall, light grey in color, very thin, long arms with either two or three fingers. The top of their heads was much wider than their jaw line, their eyes were very slanted and you couldn’t see pupils in them. They looked the way [aliens] have been depicted in motion pictures. The first thing I saw was the UFOs, and it was apparent to me that they were doing something to the craft, and I couldn’t really tell what because they were on the bottom side of it and not visible to me except when they would occasionally get over to the side where I could see them. The water was fairly clear and I could see without any trouble. They weren’t down at the bottom of the [seabed] — they were about half way down.

When it hit the [surface], it was going about 100 miles an hour. It then accelerated to somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,500 to 3,000 miles an hour and disappeared. It returned about 20 minutes later, slowed down to nearly a stop before it entered the water, then went down, and the two [beings] worked together. It took them about 20 minutes and then the two ships departed together, again slow when they exited the water, and immediately they sped up to a very high speed. I believe they were repairing [the ship] and tested that the repairs had been adequate, and then away they went.

He says that despite what he saw he would keep it to himself and even tried to downplay the whole even that he himself had witnessed. According to him, he used evasive terminology and sort of brushed it off, even though he knows what he saw, and he says of what he was told to tell the public:

If someone had a UFO sighting, I and another agent would try to come up with some logical explanation for this strange aerial appearance. We gave our analysis and tried to debunk [sightings] by saying it was swamp fog or that the thing they saw was actually hanging on wires. Needless to say, it was a fictitious report, as all of them were. I didn’t really say that they were UFOs — I said that there was something we didn’t know — some type of foreign or unrecognizable vehicle there. In other words, I weasel-worded it. But Oh, I think without a doubt it (the Newfoundland object) was a UFO and I think there were aliens aboard it. There’s no question in my mind that was exactly what it was, and my duty was to debunk the story, so I did my best to do so.

Venus

Is any of this for real? It must be noted that French has a bit of a history of making bold UFO claims. He is also on the record as claiming that the famed 1947 UFO crash in Roswell, New Mexico, was actually way weirder than even most people think. According to him, there was not one alien spacecraft crash, but two, with one apparently shot down by a U.S. plane using experimental technology a few days after the first crash. French has said of this to the Huffington Post:

There were actually two crashes at Roswell, which most people don’t know The first one was shot down by an experimental US airplane that was flying out of White Sands… and it shot what was effectively an electronic pulse-type weapon that disabled and took away all the controls of the UFO, and that’s why it crashed. When they hit it with that electromagnetic pulse– bingo!– there goes all their electronics and, consequently, the UFO was uncontrollable. It was within a few miles of where the original crash was. We think that the reason they were in there… was to try and recover parts and any survivors of the first crash. I’m [referring to] the people from outer space– the guys whose UFO it was. It had inscriptions on it that looked like it was in an Arabic language– it was like a part number on each one of them.

Of course, the Roswell crash is famous for having been explained away as a downed weather balloon after the military backtracked from initially stating that it was a crashed disc, but it has been debated and picked apart ad nauseum ever since. How does French’s own testimony on all of this fit in, if at all? Is he telling the truth or is this just another delusional supposed witness coming forward with tall tales and fictitious ramblings? It certainly seems that his credentials are impressive so what are we to think of all of this? Why would someone go from a professional skeptic and debunker to a believer unless there was a very good reason? Is he the real deal or a loon? Whatever side of the fence you fall on and whatever one may think, it certainly is at the very least a very strange and wild ride.

Throughout science fiction books, comics, and movies we have been treated to a never ending menagerie of alien beings taking a vast number of forms. In the old days budget constraints for TV and films meant that usually aliens looked at least a little, well, human. In more modern times computer effects have made things a little more bizarre, but still mostly aliens are portrayed as at least something we can understand or relate to at least on a basic level. It is all indicative of our intense curiosity as to what alien life, and in this case intelligent spacefaring life, would actually look like. If a spaceship came down tomorrow and opened up a door, what would step out? Would it be something like us, or something beyond anything we have ever imagined? It is a question we have no way to answer, but there has been quite a lot of speculation on the appearance of aliens, and here we will take a look.

So, if we were to meet aliens what could we realistically expect them to physically look like? What form would they take and how would they interact with the world around them? The answers to this seem to be as varied as the people who ponder the question, and there are several ways that the discussion can head. On one side we have the idea that since they have evolved from a different lifeform and on a completely different alien world, they would look nothing like us, and could be beyond what we can even imagine. There have been all manner of ideas on this, ranging from that they might not be even carbon based to that they don’t have DNA, live in an invisible wavelength we can’t see, or that we might not even recognize them as life within our own definition of the term at all. One science fiction author by the name of Aaron Rosenberg explains of this idea:

Living beings evolve in response to their environment. We grew opposable thumbs so we could better grasp objects. Monkeys developed prehensile tails for the same reason. We have eyes because light breaks down into the visible end of the electromagnetic spectrum here. But if we had occurred on a completely different world, with different temperatures and topography and flora and fauna, we would have evolved differently. And if that other world had a completely different chemical composition, so would we. All life on Earth is carbon-based, but that wouldn’t be the case elsewhere. Life forms could be silicon-based or iron-based or anything else at all. They could have any number of arms and legs—or none at all.

Perhaps life on other planets evolved without physical form or with no fixed form—perhaps there are aliens who are nothing more than sentient clouds, or who have mutable bodies that can alter to suit the needs of the moment. Maybe they can sail through space unaided, and use stellar radiation for a food source and a sensory array, detecting changes in the radiation the same way bats detect sound waves. Who needs eyes and ears when your entire being resonates? Who needs a distinct brain when your consciousness is spread throughout just like our nerve endings are with us? Why have skin when your form is held together by electrostatic shock and mental control, and can condense or expand at will?

There are plenty of creatures here on Earth that are so astoundingly different from us that we can barely comprehend them. Try watching an octopus pull itself through a tiny crack in a glass tank sometime, or examine a tobacco hornworm, or look at a praying mantis up close. Then think about how small our planet is compared with the universe as a whole—it’s like finding the weirdest shaped M&M in the bag, and then realizing that you’re in an entire candy store filled with literally thousands of other kinds of candy, most of which you’ve never even heard of before. A real alien would be so far from anything we’ve ever imagined that we would barely be able to comprehend its existence. And we would seem just as completely, bafflingly bizarre to it.

The thrust of the idea here is that aliens would be, well, completely alien to us, perhaps even incomprehensibly so, and that all bets are off when trying to expect how they would appear to us. One only needs to look at some of the incredibly different and even seemingly alien forms of life on our own planet to know that something from another world could be vastly different from us. However, we are talking about intelligent life here that has created a civilization and reached out across the stars to meet us, and so the opposite side of this argument is that, although they would certainly be quite different from us, there are certain constants that we could expect that would match up with us as well, and we can perhaps make an educated guess as to what they might be like.

There have been many suggestions for certain criteria that any intelligent, space-faring race would likely conform to, boxes to tick, so to speak. For one, although they would be coming from far, far away, they would nevertheless follow the same laws of physics and chemistry as us, as that is a constant across the universe, at least this one. Prof Peter Ward, a paleontologist at the University of Washington, explains of this, “On any planet in the Universe the laws of physics and chemistry will still be the same as here. There’s only a limited number of ways to beat physics.” One of the other very basic things we could expect from an alien being is that it would likely be bilaterally symmetrical, that is with one half mirroring the other to at least some extent. Every form of life on Earth is this way, and even inanimate objects such as crystals, and even whole galaxies, so following this seemingly universal constant they would probably be at least symmetrical to a degree.

Because of the universal physics involved, there would also probably be some broad rules of ecology in place that they would have to have overcome in specific ways. For instance, they would need a way of gaining energy, of hunting and eating, as well as sensory organs to perceive the world around them, and they would have to obey the rules of gravity, ambient density, and having a source of energy. They would need some way to reproduce and propagate their species and they would have to out compete other species in the same environment to last long. In other words, no matter where the aliens are from, they would basically have to overcome the same basic physical and evolutionary constraints as us. There are only so many ways to move around or get food, look at how similar some swimming or flying species are on Earth, no matter how genetically different, think bats and birds or sharks and dolphins. Some ways just work better, and evolution would have weeded out the inefficient ones in the face of competition from other species. In many opinions, these hypothetical aliens also would have probably evolved from predators, meaning they would probably have stereoscopic vision, which allows the judgement of distance, meaning more than one eye on the front of the head, and they would likely be mobile rather than a sedentary plant-like species. They would have also likely would have had to become the dominant lifeform on their world, so probably not microscopic or unduly frail. The renowned theoretical physicist Michio Kaku has said of this:

In all likelihood, intelligent aliens in space will have descended from predators that hunted for their food. This does not necessarily mean that they will be aggressive, but it does mean that their ancestors long ago might have been predators. We may be well served to be cautious.

Another constant they would probably exhibit is that they would have something that passes for a brain, and that it would be encased in some sort of protective shell, be that a skull, exoskeleton, or whatever, and this brain would also probably be held high off the ground. The aliens would need some way to breathe, and some form of locomotion that would have to have at least been fast enough to have allowed them to hunt and survive on their own planet to become an evolved species. These would probably come in the form of some sort of legs if the alien is land-based, and there would be some sort of covering over the body that we could recognize as “skin” of a sort. Harry E. Keller, a chemistry professor at Northeastern University has spoken of these two points with Popular Mechanics, saying:

Legs? Most certainly. Other means of locomotion will be relatively slow and be relegated to armored animals and of those living in holes. Neither of these lifestyles will lead naturally to greater intelligence. How many legs? In our case, we adapted the forelegs for manipulation from animals with four legs. No land animals with endoskeletons have more legs. The implication is that aliens with two legs are more likely than those with four.

Fur? Hair? Feathers? Scales? Something else truly alien? The skin covering could be anything that makes sense. Real feathers are not so likely. Because feathers are used for flight, brains will be small. Scales are unlikely because they are particularly well-adapted for ectotherms, although a scaly sort of skin might be possible. Fur versus hair is hard to sort out because of my inherent bias. Fur has good reasons for being that are not related to intelligence. If furry, our aliens probably have short fur.

In order to make tools and manipulate their technology, they would have to have evolved some sort of appendages with fine movement control. This doesn’t necessarily have to be fingers and a thumb like we have, but some grasping appendages of some sort, something akin to what we would recognize as their version of digits. These appendages would also likely be freed up for use, meaning they might be recognizably bipedal. They would also need some sort of analog of sensory organs to perceive their surroundings, such as eyes, nose, and ears, as well as some way to procure energy, in short, a mouth, probably near the eyes where they can see what they are trying to eat. As for these eyes, there would probably be at least two eyes facing forward, for that stereoscopic vision we talked about earlier, and there aren’t a whole lot of other viable ways to achieve that. The eyes would likely be recessed, and there would likely be some way to cover and protect them. These eyes would also probably be close to the brain, so as to minimize the time of signal transmission. They would be attuned to the spectrum of their own sun, and may look very different from our own eyes, but they would likely be at least recognizable as such. In addition to all of this, they would need a way to produce sounds or signals for some form of communication and crucially, language, as any spacefaring society would need a way to convey complex information to each other, although that potentially holds therein its own problems. Some other theories of what intelligent civilizations of aliens would need even go so far as to say that they would likely not have evolved underwater because they would need to have developed a mastery of fireto progress to that stage.

To sum it all up, when faced with the same physics, physical requirements for survival, evolutionary constraints, and criteria for developing tools and technology, in this idea, with any aliens who flew starcraft to Earth we could probably expect to see land based, symmetrical beings with recognizable sensory organs, limbs, and other features with some analog to what we know of, and so would not be as completely, absurdly outlandish as others would have us believe. They would most certainly not look like humans, and of course depending on the gravity and specifics of their atmosphere and world at large they would look very different in various ways, but the point here is that they perhaps they would not be so mind-bogglingly, impossibly and vastly different from life as we know it and understand it to be. However, this is all assuming they are even from this dimension at all, because if they were from a completely different universe, possibly even with different laws of physics, then we can probably throw all of this out the window.

Of course, this is all assuming that the aliens are even organic lifeforms at all. There has in recent years been increasing speculation that space-going aliens that make it to Earth might not be biological organisms at all, but rather very advanced robots. These machines might have been sent here by their creators or might even be a self-replicating race of robots that usurped their biological makers, with their originators perhaps even distant, long gone prehistoric faded memories for them. It makes sense, as it would be the next step up in evolution from the confines of biology, and robots would be perfect for the rigors of space and the vast distances involved with travelling to other worlds. However, if they were robotic, then all bets would probably be off as far as appearances go, and they might display design choices that truly are beyond comprehension, although they would still have to follow our same laws of physics. Professor Susan Schneider from the University of Connecticut and the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton thinks that such robotic alien civilizations could feasibly be billions of years old, and has said:

I do not believe that most advanced alien civilizations will be biological. The most sophisticated civilizations will be post-biological, forms of artificial intelligence or alien superintelligence. Other civilizations may be vastly older than us – earthlings are galactic babies. All lines of evidence converge on the conclusion that the maximum age of extraterrestrial intelligence would be billions of years, specifically ranges from 1.7 billion to 8 billion years.

In the end, it is hard to really get a handle on how intelligent spacefaring aliens would look, as we really only have one example to compare them to- us. All of our ideas on extraterrestrial life and how to find it revolves around our basic presumption that they would meet the criteria for life as we know it, but there is of course the possibility that this is not true at all. Indeed, there is a vocal contingent that thinks the reason we have not found alien life out in the universe despite all of our efforts is that we are looking in the wrong places and in the wrong way. Maybe our own definition of life is the rarity rather than the norm, and perhaps we have to change our perceptions. Only time will tell.

In the meantime, we are left to speculate. What will intelligent alien life from another planet look like if we ever make that first contact? Would they look in some way like us and life as we know it, or would it be incomprehensibly and unfathomably alien? Would we even be able to recognize it as life at all? We can guess, extrapolate, speculate, and debate it all we want, but the only way it seems we are ever going to get the real answer is when that ship lands and they step, slither, or float out into the light.

Many UFO encounters leave the witnesses in profound states of wonder and amazement. Others provoke terror and paranoia. Just occasionally, however, the UFO phenomenon becomes downright deadly. Take, for example, the encounter of a Brazilian man named Joao Prestes Filho, a farmer from the village of Aracariguama. On the night in question, and quite out of the blue, Filho found himself bathed in a powerful glowing light, which emanated from something unknown in the skies directly above. Whatever it was, it ensured a horrific death for Filho. The heat coming from the object was so hot that Filho fell to his knees. Worse was to come: his skin suddenly began to heat up. Then, it began to bubble. In mere minutes, he was exhibiting the physical effects of someone suffering from severe burns. Filho’s family, utterly terrified, raced him to a nearby hospital. It was all to no avail. During the journey, Folho grew progressively, and quickly, worse. His skin began to fall off his bones. One of the medics at the hospital – Aracy Gomide – confirmed poor Filho literally melted before the horrified eyes of the medical staff. Proof that not all close encounters are positive ones.

The so-called “Kinross Case” focuses upon the strange – and still-unresolved – disappearance of a US Air Force F-89C jet fighter that was scrambled late on the night of November 23, 1953, on an “active air defense mission” to intercept an “unknown aircraft” over Lake Superior. Kinross Air Force Base, which was closest to the scene where the “unknown” was initially tracked, quickly alerted the 433^rd Fighter Interception Squadron at Truax Field, Madison, Wisconsin, and the F-89C gave immediate chase. Available USAF records demonstrate that the F-89 was vectored west-northwest, then west, climbing to 30,000 feet. While on its westerly course, the crew received permission to descend to 7,000 feet, turning east-northeast and coming steeply down on the target from above. Alarmingly, as the aircraft closed-in on the “unknown” it subsequently vanished into oblivion, along with its two crew-members. The last radar contact placed the interceptor at 8,000 feet, 70 miles from Keeweenaw Point, and about 150 miles northwest of Kinross AFB, which, today, is called Kincheloe AFB.

An extract from the official USAF Aircraft Accident Report outlines further details of the story: “Aircraft took off at 2322 Zebra 23 Nov 53 on an active Air Defense Mission to intercept an unknown aircraft approximately 160 miles Northwest of Kinross Air Force Base. The aircraft was under radar control throughout the interception. At approximately 2352 Zebra the last radio contact was made by the radar station controlling the interception. At approximately 2355 Zebra the unknown aircraft and the F-89 merged together on the radar scope. Shortly thereafter the IFF signal disappeared from the radar scope. No further contact was established with the F-89. An extensive aerial search has revealed no trace of the aircraft. The aircraft and its crew are still missing.” For both ufologists and the Air Force the matter of the Kinross affair remains wide open.

All was normal – on November 28, 1954 – for Jose Ponce and Gustavo Gonzalez, as they traveled along a small road on the fringes of Caracas, Venezuela. Or, to be absolutely correct, all was normal for a while. The dark road was suddenly lit up by what the astonished pair could only describe as a bright ball of light, with a circumference of around three feet. It swayed slightly in the air, not unlike a small boat bobbing along on the water.

The two slowed down their vehicle as they approached it, eventually coming to a complete halt. It was then, suddenly, that astonishment was replaced by outright terror. While Ponce stayed inside the van, Gonzalez cautiously exited the vehicle; he began to slowly and tentatively walk towards the hovering globe. Suddenly, Gonzalez found himself thrown to the ground by an unseen force. The reason why the attacker was unseen – for a few seconds, at least – was because of its size. Or, rather, its profound lack of size. Gonzalez, to his shock and fear, was finally able to see what had assaulted him: a small, hair-covered creature that was built like a man, but which was only around three feet in height. Acting on impulse and adrenaline, Gonzalez attempted to plunge his knife into the body of the creature, only for the knife to bounce off it.

In mere seconds, another hairy dwarf was on the scene, and temporarily blinded Gonzalez with a bright light that emitted from a powerful, flashlight-type device. Shocked to the core, Ponce gathered his wits together and jumped out of the van to help his friend, who was stumbling around, his eyesight still affected by the powerful beam that hit him with full force. To Ponce’s growing concern, two more of the hairy creatures surfaced out of the shadows, and both making their way towards the men – and armed, no less, with large rocks. Although the presence of the rocks suggested to the men that the hairy things were ready to kill them, with hindsight it seems they were only a defensive measure, in the event a last resort-style situation developed. Fortunately, it did not. The small things raced to the ball of light and, somehow, launched themselves inside it, despite its equally small size and vanished in the blink of an eye!

As the cases above demonstrate, it may be wise to be very careful if you have an encounter of the close type.

Without a doubt that is a controversial question! The fact is, though, that some alleged extraterrestrials do seem to be trying to move among us and without being noticed for what they really are. In fact, it may have been going on for not just years, but decades. We’ll begin with the Men in Black. Not the Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones type. Rather, the real Men in Black: the pale, scrawny, weird-looking Men in Black who surfaced in the early 1950s and who have never gone away. There is strong evidence to show that the Men in Black realize there are certain differences between us and them. As a result of this, they do their best to make them look like us. Those who have unfortunately crossed paths with the MIB state that their black-suited visitors wore make-up and lipstick. In some cases, they even had what were clearly painted-on eyebrows – as bizarre as it all sounds. On occasion, the MIB will wear large, wraparound sunglasses. This is clearly done for camouflage: in some cases the MIB are described as having large, abnormal eyes that they hide behind those glasses. Often, though, they don’t do a good job of hiding those bulging eyes – which is why we sometimes get to see those creepy eyes.

Very much the same can be said about the Women in Black – who also terrorize witnesses to UFOs. The WIB are described as wearing long black wigs and sunglasses. Like the MIB, the WIB mask their milk-white skin with make-up. While there is no evidence that the Black Eyed Children are connected to the UFO subject, it is a fact that there are some similarities. For example, the BEC very often wear hoodies, which they pull down to hide their large, completely black, eyes. In many occasions, the Black Eyed Children keep their eyes firmly aimed at the ground – clearly to try and prevent people from seeing those eerie eyes. In issue 187 of Fortean Times magazine, writer Mark Pilkington did a review of the FortNite 2004 gig. Pilkington highlighted certain material that was disclosed at the gig by Budd Hopkins, the author of Missing Time: “…in order to better blend in with us humans, the greys have taken to wearing wigs and sunglasses…the aliens are also experimenting with growing hair on the heads of their genetic hybrid grey-human creations…they’re also developing pupils to get around those giveaway wraparound black eyes.”

Eris Andys had an encounter with one of these human-appearing things in the later part of the 1980s. She detailed it in a 2004 feature for Fortean Times, which was appropriately titled “A Quiet Invasion.” While walking down one particular street (location not stated) Andys encountered a humanoid creature with “waxy, grey” skin, “…with no pores and no hair. It looked damp. The mouth was small, the nose tiny, and the chin pointed.” She added: “The most amazing thing was the pair of glasses ‘he’ wore – made of some yellow reflective stuff, they wrapped around the sides of the head like some futuristic ski-wear.”

This all reminds me of Mac Tonnies’ “Cryptotererstrials.” In his theory, Tonnies suggested that ancient humans lurk among us, and do so in ways that will ensure we don’t get to see the subtle differences between them and us. Tonnies said: “I envision the cryptoterrestrials engaged in a process of subterfuge, bending our belief systems to their own ends. And I suggest that this has been occurring, in form or another, for an extraordinarily long time. I think there’s a good deal of folkloric and mythological evidence pointing in this direction, and I find it most interesting that so many descriptions of ostensible ‘aliens’ seem to reflect staged events designed to misdirect witnesses and muddle their perceptions.” Tonnies suggested that the Cryptoterrestrials – like our aliens – may employ the likes of wigs, make-up, sunglasses and hats, in an effort to try and deflect attention away from their slight differences. A creepy thought, to be sure.

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Aliens and encounters with strange humanoids are one thing, but quite another is when these creatures are found dead or dying, leaving behind riddles that we may never solve. Such cases are rare, but they seem to happen all over the world, and never cease to amaze with the potential for what they mean and what could have been. A very bizarre and obscure report of a dead humanoid alien comes to us from the country of Sweden, and it is truly one of the weirdest.

The whole strange affair revolves around an intriguing report dug up by UFO researcher Ed Komarek, and originally made by a man named John Fontaine, supposedly published in the publication UFO Universe Magazine under the title Humanoid Dies In Sweden. Fontaine would claim to have met the witness at a UFO conference in Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, Sweden, in a lecture hall full of UFO and alien enthusiasts, and that the two had struck up a friendly conversation that made its way to the topic of alien humanoids. The man would then choose to launch into a very curious encounter and brush with the unexplained that he himself had had back in 1955, which would leave Fontaine awestruck and baffled.

The man said that at the time he had been working as a lumberjack in the town of Vestra Norrland, at the Gulf of Bothnia, along with his two brothers, where they toiled away shipping out lumber. On a calm morning in July, their attention was captured by a noise in the remote wilderness that sounded like “a big animal thrashing its way through the forest,” which was so insistent that the men were immediately on alert. As they gazed off into the murky trees, they caught a glimpse of what seemed to be a cigar-shaped object that was flying through the treetops to rain down branches and debris all over the place. At first, they thought that this was merely a small aircraft that had flown too low and had perhaps lost its wings, now in danger of crashing, and indeed they were sure that at any second it would come down in a fiery collision with the earth. However, things were about to get much more bizarre than that.

Gulf of Bothnia, Sweden

The craft seemed to come down at a nearby river that meandered through the area, after which there was no sound, but rather a sudden bright flash of light “like a vast flashbulb,” that was absolutely blinding in its sheer intensity. The witness would even claim that such was the incredible brightness of it all that they could actually see through the trees, as if through an X-ray machine, and all of this was followed by a kind of vacuum that seemed to pull them towards it. As they were sucked towards the source of the light they could see that leaves, branches, and everything else not nailed down was also flying towards whatever it was, and such was this inexorable pull that the men found themselves holding on to whatever they could to keep from being drawn towards that mysterious light, during which time the forest was bathed in complete, surreal silence.

Although the whole incident at the time seemed to last far longer, it was estimated that it was all over within a split second, after which the forest returned to normal as if nothing had happened. The men looked about them and crept forward through the brush towards that forbiding unknown, but they did not notice anything unusual, nor anything at all that would even suggest that anything odd had happened at all. Just as the puzzled crew were about to head back, one of them then noticed what he described as a “dwarf dressed in uniform” sprawled out on the ground in some bushes. As the three of them warily stepped closer they could see that there was indeed some sort of humanoid being lying there, and their first thoughts were that whatever had come down had crashed into the water and that this was an occupant who had been hurled out to safety.

The “dwarf” was described as being only around 4 feet in height, surrounded by “white light that vibrated like a halo,” and totally unmoving. They assumed it to be dead, but when they got closer still it snapped awake and recoiled from their touch, saying in perfect Swedish, “Do not touch me! It will only bring you difficulties! Now you know who I am!” The group were not sure what to make of this, and during the whole surreal incident they felt as if an unnatural calm had washed over them and they could now make out various details about this mysterious stranger. Fontaine would quote the witness as saying:

Suddenly I became quite calm and studied him closely. He was no dwarf. He was very well-built with broad shoulders and normal features. His skin was yellowish like that of an Asian. The eyes were deep socketed and black, without any white around. His face was badly bruised with a couple of big wounds on the chin and on the forehead. It did not bleed but the skin watered around the wounds. The top of his head was slightly downy and the hair almost white. The earlobes were one with the neck and resembled a shark’s fin. The lips were wrinkled, narrow and colorless. When he smiled reassuringly, which he did a lot, he revealed a row of small teeth in the upper as well as the lower part of his mouth. I especially noticed that his canine teeth were flat and as broad as two of our front teeth.

His hands were small with five slender fingers without nails and when he moved his hand it looked as if the ring finger had grown together to the little finger, if not they moved synchronized. His uniform was of a reddish metal and appeared glued to his body closely. Head and hands were free, but at the feet the clothing continued into a couple of closed shoes, size 35-37. The foot-soles were ribbed and vibrated, and for a moment I thought of caterpillars on a tank. The stranger looked at me and nodded slightly. There was no doubt that he knew what I was thinking. With those shoes he could roll forwards and backwards without moving his feet. Around the waist he had a broad silvery metal belt with an unusually large buckle, which shone slightly in a light-blue shade, which later when he was dead, turned dark blue. In the middle of the buckle was a sign in yellow — UV — it looked like a V which was incorporated in a U.

It was all a lot to take in, but as amazing as this all was there was a tragic air to it all, as the humanoid then let them know that he was gravely wounded and dying. He then produced a rectangular device with a pencil slate attached to it from his pocket, upon which he wrote something and tossed it out into the wilderness, telling the men that they should not touch it, and that it was meant to be a beacon to draw other of his kind to his location. The witness then claimed that he had talked with the creature for a full 2 hours as he lie there dying, although he seemed loathe to reveal what they had actually talked about. All he would reveal were certain details, such as that the entity claimed to have been from the constellation we call “The Eagle,” that several alien races had routinely visited humans over the centuries, and that many of them had been keenly observing us. He then jumped to the part where the mysterious stranger seemed to be dying, and before so instructed them to place his corpse inside a bag he gave them, saying that it would expedite the destruction of his remains to keep his existence secret. The witness says of the creature’s death:

Just before the stranger died, he gave me folded bag from the invisible pocket and said: “When I am dead, the light will disappear from my body and with the help of the other two men you shall put me in this bag and carry me out into the river where I shall disappear. Then you shall rinse yourself thoroughly in the water, so that you don’t get ill.” He was now breathing heavily, and I could see the end was near. The halo around him became weaker and gradually disappeared. His light blue buckle gradually got darker. He looked at me for a moment and smiled. The he said something in a language I have never heard before or since. Suddenly he switched into Swedish, and I got the last couple of sentences… “You have come without any wish to and depart against your own wish. Our life is like vapor.” He said a few more worlds, but his voice was so weak that I did not catch them. I am convinced he prayed to some deity before dying. I was very moved.

The witness and his brothers then gathered up the being’s corpse, stuffed it into the bag as instructed, and carried him off towards the roaring river, noticing how the body smelled intensely of Sulfur, the skin irritating their flesh. He would claim that the water began bubbling as they lowered the body into it, and that after 5 minutes the corpse had completely dissolved away into nothing. They would apparently go years without discussing the incident, and the witness claimed to Fontaine that that was the first time he had discussed it in decades. He then left in a rather mysterious fashion, showing him the pencil slate from that rectangular device, which he had kept as evidence of the encounter. Fontaine would say of this:

The witness produced a piece of metal and held it to my nose. “Look” he said. I looked bewildered. It resembled a bit crochet hook. “What is it?” He laughed knowingly. “A couple of days after the incident I wandered around where he had been lying. The rectangular object was gone, but the pencil slate was lying in the grass shining. I have kept it as a proof that I was not dreaming.” He left. And while I gazed astonished after him, he disappeared in the crowd. An anonymous, who with his story and pencil slate could hit the front page on the world’s newspapers.

What are we to make of all of this? This is a relatively obscure case, translated into English from Swedish and given by a stranger to a UFO researcher and told third hand, without anything in the way of evidence. Of course, there could be something to it all, but whatever truth there is to it all seems to have left with that enigmatic stranger at that UFO conference long ago, and we are left to merely speculate. Did this entity crash in his ship? If so, why was he here? Is there any truth to this story at all? There is sadly very little information on this obscure case out there, and whether it was true in any way or not we will probably never know for sure, and the secret to this all is confined to that wood in Sweden.