It’s pretty inevitable that if you have been involved in subjects like UFOs, Cryptozoology and conspiracy-theorizing for a long time, your thoughts, beliefs and conclusions are going to alter – whether to a mild degree or to a significant degree. For example, had someone said to me when I was twenty that by the time I was in my thirties I would have totally dismissed the theory that aliens crashed outside of Roswell, New Mexico in early July 1947, I would have laughed. Or, just outright dismissed them. But, the fact is that I did change my mind. Very much the same goes for me and the Rendlesham Forest “UFO landing” of December 1980. Earlier this year I wrote a book titled The Rendlesham Forest UFO Conspiracy. It presented a controversial scenario. Namely, that nothing of an extraterrestrial nature occurred. Rather, that it was a series of secret, military experiments. With all of that in mind, I thought today I would show you what I think is the ultimate example of mind-changing in the world of UFOs. It’s a story that revolves around a man named Gordon Creighton.

For years, Creighton was the editor of the once-very-popular magazine, Flying Saucer Review. When he passed away in 2003, none other than the U.K.’s Times newspaper ran an obituary on the man himself. An extract from that same obituary reveals the following: “Government service occupied most of the working life of Gordon Creighton, but he perhaps made his greatest mark as an authority on unidentified flying objects. His conviction that extraterrestrials were visiting Earth seemed oddly at variance with the more orthodox worlds of diplomacy and Whitehall. His expertise took him into government research on maps in oriental and other languages with the Permanent Committee on Geographical Names, and he spent eight years as an intelligence officer on Russian and Chinese affairs at the Ministry of Defense. It is said that in the intelligence post he worked directly below the secret Whitehall department where the Air Ministry and the RAF were studying information on UFOs.”

Like so many people who got into the UFO subject in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Creighton strongly believed that the Flying Saucer phenomenon was the result of visitations to the Earth by extraterrestrials from faraway worlds. It should be noted, however, that over time Creighton’s views on the overall mystery began to change. By the latter part of the 1970s, it was very clear to his colleagues that Creighton was edging away from the extraterrestrial theory and towards something very different. And, what might that “something” be? Well, I’ll tell you. None other than the Middle Eastern Djinn. The late Rosemary Ellen Guiley was an acknowledged expert in the field of the Djinn. Rosemary said: “In Arabian lore, djinn (also spelled jinn) are a race of supernaturally empowered beings who have the ability to intervene in the affairs of people. Like the Greek daimones, djinn are self-propagating and can be either good or evil. They can be conjured in magical rites to perform various tasks and services. A djinni (singular) appears as a wish-granting ‘genie’ in folk tales such as in The Book of 1001 Nights collection of folk tales.”

Nick Redfern and Rosemary Ellen Guiley (Nick Redfern, 2017)

Rosemary added: “In Western lore djinn are sometimes equated with demons, but they are not the same. They are often portrayed as having a demonic-like appearance, but they can also appear in beautiful, seductive forms. The djinn are masterful shape-shifters, and their favored forms are snakes and black dogs. They also can masquerade as anything: humans, animals, ghosts, cryptids, and other entities such as extraterrestrials, demons, shadow people, fairies, angels and more.” Rosemary offered more on the Djinn: “They are born of smokeless fire (which in modern terms could be plasma). They live very long lives but they are not immortal. According to some accounts, they live with other supernatural beings in the Kaf, a mythical range of emerald mountains that encircles the Earth. In modern terms, they live in a parallel dimension.”

For Creighton, all of that amounted to a major change of mind: from aliens to Djinn. And no looking back.

UFO accounts come to us from around the world, from every corner of the globe. They largely serve to incite wonder and discussion, but rarely provide any real answers. The point is that UFO sightings are a global phenomenon, and one place that is not really covered so much in the lore is the country of New Zealand. Yet, here we have plenty of UFO cases just like anywhere else, and one of the strangest flaps of sightings unfolded here back in the 1970s, and it is a case steeped in strange encounters, pilot reports, and talk of ominous government cover ups.

What would go on to become perhaps New Zealand’s most famous UFO event began on December 21, 1978, when the crew of a Safe Air Ltd cargo aircraft was traveling from Woodbourne bound for Christchurch aboard their Armstrong Whitworth AW.660 Argosy aircraft. As they approached the Clarence River area, near the remote Kaikoura mountain ranges at around 2 AM, they began to pick up a series of inexplicable radar signatures that did not fit any aircraft they knew of and which they could not explain. As pilots Vern Powell and Ian Pirie stared at the radar screen trying to figure out just what they were looking at, visual confirmation was made, and it came in the form of a group of mysterious lights that began to flicker and dance around the plane almost as if toying with them. One of the UFOs was described as being very large, with five white flashing lights, while others seemed to be smaller, with one of them being “pear-shaped with a reddish tinge that then turned white.” Some of the crew were sure that some of the smaller objects had dropped off the larger one.

The Kaikoura region

On December 30, 1978, an Australian television crew was flying in another Argosy when they saw a cluster of four or five lights near the Kaikoura Peninsula, dominated by one especially bright, flashing white light. At this time the objects were tracked by Wellington Air Traffic Controllers, and the crew even used their camera to take color footage of the mysterious objects. The objects seemed to be following the plane, and when they came in for a landing at Christchurch the crew was unsettled to realize that one was still on their tail, only breaking off right as they were about to land. When the plane later took off again, they would encounter an immense orb of light, which proceeded to follow them for nearly a half an hour as they gawked at and filmed it. One journalist aboard, a Quentin Fogarty, would say of the surreal situation:

On the flight down, what we basically saw were pinpricks of light that turned into great globes of light, and they were airborne, and they were between us and the coast because we could see the coast and we could see the sea, and we could see these things shining down.

An Air Force Orion on a reconnaissance flight to Kaikoura on January 2 would also report encountering strange lights in the sky in the region, and this was enough to convince the New Zealand Air Force, as well as the Civil Aviation Authority and the Defence Ministry, that an investigation was needed. And so it was that the Prime Minister of the time, Robert Muldoon, would launch one of the first serious investigations into the UFO phenomenon that New Zealand had ever seen. The results were perhaps for UFO enthusiasts, disappointing. The Air Force seemed hellbent on fitting and stuffing it all of it into conventional explanations, writing it all off as the lights of trains, cars, or even squid boats refracted off of clouds, “freak propagation” of radio and light waves, large aircraft or a meteorological balloon catching the sunlight at high altitude, unburnt meteors, and of course the planet Venus, all helped along by “spurious” radar returns. Wing Commander J B Clements would state:

Almost all the sightings can be explained by natural but unusual phenomena. Defence should issue a PR statement fairly soon in order to tone down much of the wild speculation that has existed over recent weeks. Perhaps the most difficult aspect to explain away is the apparent concern – even apprehension – of the aircrew involved in the sightings. At present they do not seem to be prepared to accept the fact that they might have observed Venus. Thankfully, however neither do they believe that they saw a visitor from outer space.

Alleged photo of the UFO

These explanations have not gone down well with some of those who were actually involved. after all, these were trained pilots who should know what any of those natural phenomena would look like, and one of the witnesses has blown off the official prognosis, saying of the explanations given by the Air Force:

None of them to my knowledge or satisfaction have coordinated the visual sighting with the radar sighting. They’ve said the visual sighting was squid boats, it was Venus, it was Jupiter, it was the harbour lights. You name it, they can come up with all sorts of reasons for what it was. But they haven’t explained why I can see Jupiter, Venus and the harbour lights doing 140 knots on my radar.

It is all very odd, and has never been adequately explained. The New Zealand government has stuck to its guns that this is nothing more than mundane, explainable phenomena, and we are left to wonder. Is all of this just misunderstandings, Venus, and other aerial phenomena that can be explained away? Or is there something else going on here? We might not ever truly know the answers to these questions, and the Kaikoura Lights remain one of the most well-known and strangest UFO cases New Zealand has ever seen.

When you’re a big pop star, you can say whatever you want these days and it will make the news. Demi Lovato just said she’s seen UFOs and communicated with aliens and the former Barney & Friends cast member is getting more attention than she ever received singing along with the annoying, over-stuffed purple dinosaur. But … is her close encounter overstuffed as well due to our celebrity-worshiping media and culture?

ddlovato
The past few days I’ve spent in Joshua Tree with a small group of loved ones and @dr.steven.greer and his CE5 team. Over the past couple months I have dug deep into the science of consciousness and experienced not only peace and serenity like I’ve never known but I also have witnessed the most incredibly profound sightings both in the sky as well as feet away from me.

If you want to see UFOs, Joshua Tree National Park is a well-known place to spot them, with sightings dating back to the 1950s. Keith Richards went there in the 1970s with fellow musician Gram Parsons and some LSD to look for UFOs. (They didn’t see any that he remembers, but who knows – it’s Keith Richards!) Lovato didn’t go to Joshua Tree with LSD – she took a more reliable aid … Dr. Steven Greer, the well-known ufologist, disclosure-seeker, meditator and ET communicator. Lovato obviously paid for the privilege to be accompanied by Greer and she shows the fruits of her investment – photos and videos on Instagram.

“This is just some of the evidence from under the stars in the desert sky that can no longer be ignored and must be shared immediately.”

OK, we did the sharing part. Lovato also says we should download Greer’s CE5 app which she claims “will teach you the protocols to connect to life form beyond our planet!!” (her exclamations). Will you see (for a fee) the same orbs and lights she did out in the desert? Well, it seems that’s up to you.

“Ps, if it doesn’t happen on the first try – keep trying – it took me several sessions to tap into a deep enough level of meditation to make contact!”

Yes, just like Keith and Gram, Demi needed an altered form of consciousness to communicate with the ETs allegedly controlling her sighting. Lovato plugs meditation (as does Greer) and uses this as an opportunity to rally her followers to pressure government leaders to disclose their UFO and ET files and to “change our destructive habits destroying our planet”  — both noble causes that the people (at least in the U.S.) are having frustratingly difficult times accomplishing. Her advice on meditation and ET communications applies here – keep trying on both counts.

Is Demi Lovato trying to get over her breakup with Max Ehrich, promote her latest recordings and acting gigs, advertise for Steven Greer, encourage meditation, reveal her UFO sightings and alien contacts, or all of the above? With the amount of criticism Tom DeLonge gets for the money-making side of his UFO and disclosure projects, it’s a fair question to ask Lovato and any other celebrities in similar situations. In Lovato’s defense, she has a lifetime of commitments to many good causes and meditation – both personal and mass – is deemed beneficial to many by many.

As for the other side of the experience she had with Steven Greer in Joshua Tree National Park, this is not Lovato’s first UFO revelation – in 2016, she told Elle magazine she had seen a “worm UFO” and in 2014 she admitted on a late night show that she believes aliens are real. Those are all interesting, but do they and the images and experiences she shared on Instagram convince you that she finally had a CE5 with real ETs?

Let’s hope Demi Lovato has more of these encounters, collects better evidence and uses her celebrity status to reveal it and push for disclosure.

If you heard that the British government was holding photographs of a UFO taken in 1990 in Scotland that were scheduled to be released to the public in 2021, would you be interested? If you then heard that the British government decided for some undisclosed reason to ignore the rules and lock the photos up for another 50 years, would you be suspicious? Both of those happened a few weeks ago and ufologist Straiph Wilson was curious, then suspicious. Now he’s decided to take action.

A colourised image of the alleged UFO sighting in 1990

“That speaks volumes when the government does that. They’re trying to hide something. It’s one of the most important sightings in Britain, if not in the world. The pictures must be quite significant if we could get the two hillwalkers to come forward.”

Wilson, a former technician at Glasgow University and now an artist, told The Courier he’s been interested in the so-called Calvine incident ever since August 4, 1990, when two men claim to have seen a diamond-shaped UFO and watched it hover for 10 minutes before flying away at a high speed … with a number of military aircraft passing underneath it. One of the witnesses got the holy grail of UFO evidence – six color photographs of the craft in broad daylight – then did his duty as a good British citizen and turned them over to the Ministry of Defense. That was the last anyone ever saw of them … publicly.

“The analysis was nothing short of sensational. The photos hadn’t been faked. They showed a structured craft of unknown origin, unlike any conventional aircraft. There was no fuselage, no wings, no tail, no engines and no markings of any sort.”

Nick Pope saw them while he worked for the MoD and claimed he had a Fox Mulder-style poster of one on his wall … before a superior removed it. Pope is out of the MoD and has long been a proponent of disclosure, but sticks to his code of silence on classified information – even after the government announced last week that the six photos – scheduled to be made public in 2021 – would instead be kept super-classified until 2072. While Pope may be afraid to go against the government, Wilson isn’t … and he hopes the witnesses aren’t either.

“Back then people might have been scared of the government but I don’t think they’re scared now.”

In his interview with The Courier, he reached out to the still unnamed witnesses to come forward once again – assuming they’re still alive. If they are, they may not want to come forward for the same reason the government may not want to release the photos. It could be something personal or embarrassing to them or their families, or it could be something more sinister and dangerous. A threat from the enemy government that owned the UFO? A threat from the ETs that owned it? A fear of mass chaos?

Straiph Wilson took action. He’s hoping the witnesses do the same. Tom Delonge took action. He’s hoping his fans do the same. The only way to gain disclosure is through action. Demand answers from government officials by contacting them directly … again and again. Vote for candidates who support disclosure. Go out and look for UFOs yourself … and be prepared with a charged phone (or a good camera) and a steady grip on a wall (for support) and your nerves (for the courage).

You can’t find the holy grail by watching UFO shows on cable.

If you are one of the Calvine withnesses or know them, Straiph Wilson asks to contact him at info@straiph.co.uk.

By far the most spectacular and intriguing of UFO reports are those cases in which one of these mysterious crafts has fallen from the heavens to come crashing down to earth. Of course the most well-known incident of this kind is the supposed UFO crash at Roswell, New Mexico, which is so famous that even people who have no knowledge of the UFO field have heard of it. Yet, it is by far not the only such case, and indeed UFO lore is littered with more obscure cases of alien spacecraft crashing in remote locations, the government coming in to whisk it all away, often alien bodies thrown into the mix as well, and of course government cover-ups. One such case that is perhaps even more obscure than most is the time fighter jets allegedly shot down a UFO over South Africa, after which it crashed into the Kalahari desert and was confiscated to disappear into the mists of history.

On May 7, 1989, at around 2 PM in the afternoon, a South African naval frigate off the coast of Cape Town allegedly radioed in a rather odd report to the Cape Town Naval headquarters. They claimed that they had picked up an unidentified object on their radar that was moving very rapidly towards the mainland at an approximate speed of 5746 nautical miles per hour, and other radar installations, including NORAD installations and D.F. Malan international airport at Cape Town were allegedly picking up the same thing. There were apparently efforts made to establish communications with the incoming object, but there was no response, and it then suddenly and abruptly changed course to shoot out over a remote area. In the meantime, visual confirmation was made, and it was described as looking like a silver disc.

Considering the course change, it was now assumed to be some sort of aircraft, but orders made over radio to cease its approach continued to go unanswered, and in response the South African military purportedly began making preparations to engage. Two Mirage fighter jets were scrambled, armed with what was referred to as “experimental aircraft mounted THOR 2 laser canons” supposedly designed to disrupt electrical systems, and as they approached the speeding object, warnings were ignored and so they were given permission to engage. Both fighters then fired upon it, and according to a report given by an “insider” to the UFO research group Quest International, which would later become UFO Truth Magazine, they made direct hits. The report reads of the incident:

At 13.59 GMT, the pilot of the fighter reported that they had radar and visual confirmation of the object. The order was given to arm and fire the experimental aircraft-mounted Thor 2 laser cannon. This was done. Squadron leader reported that several blinding flashes emitted from the object which had started wavering whilst heading in a northerly direction. At 14.02 is was reported that the object was decreasing altitude at a rate of 3000 feet per minute. Then at speed it dived at an angle of 25 degrees and impacted in desert terrain 80 miles north of the South African border with Botswana, identified as the central Kalahari desert. Squadron leader was instructed to circle the area until a retrieval team arrived.

A team of Air Force Intelligence Officers and technical specialists were supposedly soon on the scene in what was called “Operation Silver Diamond,” and the whole story gets even more bizarre from there. A crater was found to have been pounded into the earth, measuring approximately 150 meters in diameter and around 12 meters deep, within which sat a silver, saucer shaped object half buried at a 45-degree angle. All around it was scorched earth and rocks and sand fused together from an intense heat, and when the team approached, they reported that electronics failed in the vicinity of the object, to the point that one approaching helicopter flying over had severe technical malfunctions that caused it to make an emergency landing, and yet another went down to kill all aboard. The surface of the anomalous object was found to be completely smooth and undamaged, and was devoid of any markings or discernible seams, windows, or hatches, although they apparently did find one strange insignia etched into it ringed by odd hieroglyphics. On the bottom of the craft was found what appeared to be some sort of hydraulic landing gear, that had been fully extended, leading to speculation that a landing malfunction possibly caused by the fighter jet attack had caused it to go down. Yet, this was not the end of the weirdness.

As the team warily circled the apparently alien craft, there was reportedly a loud noise that issued forth from the craft, and a hatch of some sort cracked open on the side of it. A team was sent in to pry it all the way open, and from within allegedly climbed two humanoid entities, around 4 feet in height, with three fingered clawed hands, grayish-blue hairless and scaly skin, and dressed in tight-fitting grey suits. The creatures had oversized heads with large oval eyes and prominent cheekbones, and with slit-like mouths and no noticeable ears. Besides these two, one of the creatures would be found dead inside. The two entities who had emerged were dazed but alive, and they were reportedly quickly apprehended, although they were apparently very vicious and not easily subdued, with one of them supposedly inflicting deep gashes on one of the team with its formidable claws.

The craft was then supposedly whisked off to an Air Force base and the aliens detained in a cooled unit, which reportedly made them lethargic and more complacent, after which plans were purportedly made to have them moved to Wright Patterson Air Force Base in the United States for further tests and analyses. And that is pretty much where the story ends, with no further information on what became of the alleged spacecraft or its outlandish alien crew. The intelligence officer who blew the lid off of it, a Captain James Van Greunen, allegedly provided reams of top-secret documentation on the incident, as well as alleged recorded telephone conversations on the matter between top officials, before moving to Germany and going into hiding. It is all completely spectacular and like something out of a movie, an amazing case that has been referred to as “The African Roswell,” but of course there has been much skepticism aimed at it, even from within the UFO field.

One of the problems is that, although the case has been covered in various magazines and articles over the years, almost all of the information comes from the research done by Quest International, who were the first to be approached by the alleged informant. This does not necessarily mean that is all false, just that it is hard to independently verify their information. Also rather suspicious is that many of the supposed documents provided by Captain Van Greunen, while looking very official, on closer inspection were found to be riddled with spelling errors, inconsistencies, and discrepancies. The African UFO researcher and author Cynthia Hind examined some of the supposed documents and came to the conclusion that it was all just too sloppy for something so top-secret and official. Although it was all very elaborate and in depth, she came to the conclusion that it was all a complicated and well-thought out hoax, and she would write an article on it in UFO Times called Anatomy of a hoax. The UFO crash on the South African/Botswana border. Gruenen would deny these accusations. Perhaps even more damning than all of this is that there is just no evidence at all that such a crash off any kind happened in the area, let alone an alien spacecraft, and there are only reports from alleged military officials that cannot be confirmed or proven. This could all be due to a cover-up and suppression of the truth, but the UFO crash in the Kalahari is just not very extensively documented or supported by tangible evidence. However, Quest International director Graham W. Birdsall has remained convinced that something very strange happened out there in that desert, so we are left to wonder.

In the end there is no way to know just what happened on that day out in the middle of nowhere, if anything. There are few additional details, and anything beyond what I have mentioned here has not been forthcoming. If this was a cover-up, then they did a pretty good job of making sure it was pushed into the closet of obscure, forgotten cases, and we will frustratingly probably never know what truth it holds. Was this a hoax, scam, or disinformation, or did something really truly odd happen on that day? We can only speculate, and wonder if that ship isn’t sitting in some military warehouse somewhere.

Back in 2005 I wrote a book titled Body Snatchers in the Desert. There was a sequel from me in 2017: The Roswell UFO Conspiracy. Both books focused on the failure of a number of top secret balloon-based experiments in the summer of 1947 – and all in New Mexico. Some of those balloons were huge and based on Japanese plans. Not only that, some of the Japanese scientists involved were secretly brought to the United States (in a similar fashion to Operation Paperclip that secretly brought Nazi scientists to the United States in the post-Second World War period). Most of the experiments failed miserably. One of those same failed experiments became known – decades later – as “the Roswell incident.” Prisoners and handicapped people were used in the grim, nightmarish tests. And not a single extraterrestrial was ever to be seen. With that all said, let’s take a close and careful look at what was really going on in New Mexico in ’47 and how it all became intertwined with the legend of a certain, famous “crashed UFO.”

Nick Redfern’s well-worn edition of the U.S. Air Force’s “The Roswell Report”

During the latter stages of the Second World War, the Japanese military was working to perfect highly advanced balloons as weapons of war – to the extent that on 4 June 1945, a Japanese military spokesman states that the launches of its “Balloon Bombs” of the previous few months were merely precursors for something far more dangerous, including large-scale attacks with Japanese personnel manning the balloons. The new balloons, American experts estimated, would be at least sixty feet in diameter and would be able to carry a pressurized gondola containing four relatively small men to a significant height, as the balloons traveled upon their stratospheric flights across the Pacific to the United States. Similarly, declassified FBI, CIA, Air Force and British Government papers reveal that in the same time frame, the Germans were actively pursuing several new and novel aviation-based projects, including the construction of circular and elliptical shaped aircraft – a number of which are based upon the work of the Horten brothers. One of the most revealing document is a U.K. government file titled “Unconventional Aircraft.”

Out at the crash-site (Nick Redfern, 2010)

In addition, extensive wartime research was conducted by (A) the Japanese Government’s utterly deranged, evil Unit 731 and (B) Nazi scum involved in the extremely controversial area of human medical experimentation. A large body of that same experimentation was devoted to better understanding the effects of high-altitude exposure on human beings. At the close of hostilities, scientific, aviation and medical experts from Japan and Germany were secretly brought to the United States – where human experimentation and advanced aircraft research continues unabated and under the strictest security. As President Clinton’s Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments noted: At least 1,600 scientists and their dependents were recruited and brought to the United States by Paperclip and its successor projects through the early 1970s. The ACHRE also noted with respect to the time period in question that a number of potentially important collections could not be located and were evidently lost or destroyed. Similarly, the Committee revealed, a number of those same document collections related to experiments undertaken in the fields of biomedicine, defense and space exploration; and in the great majority of these cases only fragmentary data remained. Where programs were legitimately kept secret for national security reasons, states the Committee, the government often did not create or maintain adequate records, thereby preventing the public, and those most at risk, from learning the facts in a timely and complete fashion.

In the aftermath of the War, a number of military research sites recruited Paperclip scientists with backgrounds in aero-medicine, radiobiology and ophthalmology, including the Air Force’s School of Aviation Medicine, from where experiments into total-body irradiation, space medicine, space biology and flash-blindness were undertaken; and the White Sands Proving Ground became home to the V2 rockets developed by – and captured from – Nazi Germany during the War. In addition, at the same time that the Paperclip personnel were actively being brought to the United States, the Air Force’s Aero Medical Center gave its top priority to the translation of manuscripts providing a complete picture of German aviation medicine. Further advances were made in the field of aviation in post-war America: on 26 May 1946, the Air Force awards to the Fairchild Engine and Airplane Corporation a contract that establishes Fairchild as the responsible agency of the NEPA nuclear aircraft project; and the Holloman Balloon Branch, Holloman AFB, New Mexico, eventually went on to become a recognized component of the space-race, via its involvement in the Discoverer program. Crucially, the National Archives and Records Administration at Maryland made available a document concerning the early years of research at White Sands and Holloman: Little information was available on specific events with regard to range safety during this period, it was revealed. And on 1 July 1947, Major Curtis E. LeMay, Major General, U.S. Army, Deputy Chief of Air Staff for Research and Development, ordered that research into the biological effects of radiation on Japanese individuals should begin.

In the summer of 1947 and against this backdrop of (A) nuclear and biological tests on human subjects; (B) revolutionary aircraft and balloon programs; and (C) an influx of scientific, medical and aviation experts into the United States from Japan and Germany, a series of events and accidents occurred in New Mexico that collectively become known as the Roswell incident. Witnesses at several crash sites reported seeing the remains of unusual-looking aircraft and small bodies, some with enlarged, bald heads and that could have “passed for Chinese.” On 19 August 1947, FBI Special Agent S. W. Reynolds informs Bureau director, J. Edgar Hoover, that in a meeting with an Air Force colonel, the colonel expressed his firm belief that the flying discs originated with a highly classified experiment of the Army or Navy. In the immediate wake of the Roswell affair, Dr. Lincoln La Paz of the University of New Mexico – and a wartime expert on Japanese balloons – became deeply embroiled in the Roswell controversy; the ramifications of the Nuremberg Code begin to reverberate and rumble within the United States; and, as the 3 November 1947 issue of the Biology Division Bulletin of the Clinton National Laboratory reveals, staff at Oak Ridge (home of the nuclear aircraft program) took an active interest in experimentation undertaken to determine the effect of radioactive iodine on dwarfs and those with Progeria – a condition that results in a small stature and an enlarged, bald head.

And, as a result of all the above combined, the now-famous legend of a crashed UFO was born in New Mexico in the summer of 1947.

In a little more than two months from now, I predict, there will be a great deal of controversy surrounding the infamous Rendlesham Forest “UFO landing” of December 1980. The reason? It will be the 40th anniversary of the notorious affair. And, I’m sure that while most people in Ufology will be flying the flag of E.T., I’ll be explaining why the real story is one of highly-classified, military experiments of a down to earth nature. With that said, there may be a very good reason that prompted the people behind the experiments to choose that particular area of woods for their tests. Rendlesham Forest has a long history of ghostly encounters. Witchcraft and occult-based rites and rituals have been performed late at night in those dark woods. So-called “Alien Big Cats,” or “black panthers,” as they are mostly named, have been seen roaming through the woods on more than a few times. One of the earliest, credible cases on record is that of Jimmy Freeman, whose close encounter with a big cat occurred while driving past Rendlesham Forest late one night in the mid-1970s. While the precise date has been lost to the inevitable fog of time, the details are as fresh in the mind of Freeman today as they were on the night the incident occurred.

Given the fact that the encounter had occurred around 11:15 to 11:30 on what was a dark, cloudy and slightly misty night, Freeman was driving slowly and had his lights on full-beam as he negotiated the dark and winding roads. As a result, when something large and shadowy charged across the road in front of him, Freeman could not fail to see the creature for what it was. Long, sleek and black in color, Freeman is in no doubt that for a split second or two he had a brief sighting of a huge cat. Today, he says firmly: “If I live to be a hundred, I will tell the same: Rendlesham Forest has big cats.” Moving on…

On a cold winter’s afternoon in 1983, the then-soon-to-be-married Paul and Jane Jennings were blissfully strolling through those woods when they were terrified by the sudden manifestation in front of them of what Jane would describe succinctly as “a big black dog.” She elaborated that the pair had been walking along a pathway when, on rounding a bend, they came face to face with the phantom beast – something that prompted Jane to intriguingly add: “It was almost like it was waiting for us.” Far more shocking, however, was what happened next. Suddenly, the beast began to flicker on and off for four or five times, then finally vanished, literally, before the Jennings’ eyes amid an overwhelming smell that reminded the pair of burning metal. Not surprisingly, the terrified couple fled for the safety of their car and fled the area. The U.K.’s “phantom black dogs,” as they are popularly known, prompted none other than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – the creator of Sherlock Holmes – to write his classic novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles.

Rendlesham Forest, as well as the Suffolk locales of West Wratting and Balsham, is reportedly home to an even more diabolical beast than the phantom black dog. It is a creature that has come to be known locally as the Shug-Monkey. Described as being a bizarre combination of giant dog and large ape, the creature is said to strike deep terror into the hearts of those souls unfortunate enough to cross its path. And you thought that UFOs were the strangest things to be found in Rendlesham Forest, right? Wrong. It’s a magnet for strange phenomena – and it has been for a long, long time. It is, however, Rendlesham Forest’s UFO connection that has made those woods world-famous. In many respects, it doesn’t really matter if you are a believer or a disbeliever in supernatural phenomena, such as large and mysterious cats, ghostly hounds and a weird ape-like beast. The most important thing to note is this:

Rendlesham Forest has a reputation of being distinctly creepy for reasons that go far beyond UFOs and aliens, as you have just seen. If you wanted to run a secret military project in an area of English woodland, then what better place could there be than Rendlesham Forest? The answer is simple: there is no better location. Here’s why: Those who do believe in the paranormal will likely say that tales of mysterious creatures seen in the woods only serve to reinforce the idea that aliens landed at Rendlesham – which is almost certainly what the people that concocted the experiments were counting on. Using an area of woods – for nefarious reasons – that already had a reputation for being drenched in unearthly phenomena, would amount to perfect planning. When the “UFOs” put in their appearances at Christmas 1980, it was just another addition to the already-bulging collection of tales of the unknown that came from within Rendlesham Forest. And, because of the eerie reputation that the woods had (and still have), no-one was thinking about secret experiments of government agencies. But, they should have been.

There is a surprising number of cases in which UFOs seem to have fallen from the sky to crash to earth. It would seem that sometimes these supposed aliens have their own technical difficulties or incidents, which for whatever reasons serve to bring them down to us in our realm. One very strange case of this supposedly played out in the country of Brazil, where a strange craft supposedly smashed down into the sea to leave wreckage behind, pieces of which have gone on to become some of the most extensively analyzed and most heatedly discussed alien evidence there is. Yet the story of how these fragments of a UFO came to our attention is almost as strange.

It started with a strange piece of mail. In September of 1957, Ibrahim Sued, society columnist for the Rio de Janeiro newspaper El Globo, received a letter that was quite bizarre and enigmatic to say the least. The sender claimed that he was a simple fisherman, who while out with some friends at Toninha’s Beach, at Ubatuba, in Sao Paulo Province, Brazil, had had an outlandish experience with a UFO that crashed into the sea. The sender describes himself as having been a skeptic about such things in the past, but now a believer after what he had seen, and as proof he even offered physical evidence, which was right there in the envelope with the letter. The name on the letter was illegible and impossible to make out, but this anonymous witness would write:

Dear Mr. Ibrahim Sued. As a faithful reader of your column, and an admirer of yours, I wish to give you, as a newspaperman, a “scoop” concerning flying discs. If you believe that they are real, of course. I didn’t believe anything said or published about them. But just a few days ago I was forced to change my mind. I was fishing together with various friends, at a place close to the town of Ubatuba, Sao Paulo, when I sighted a flying disc! It approached the beach at unbelievable speed and an accident, in other words, a crash into the sea, seemed imminent. At the last moment, however, when it seemed it was almost striking the waters, it made a sharp turn upward and climbed rapidly on a fantastic impulse.

Astonished, we followed the spectacle with our eyes, when we saw the disc explode in flames. It disintegrated into thousands of fiery fragments, which fell sparkling with magnificent brightness. They looked like fireworks, despite the time of the accident, at noon, that is, at midday. Most of the fragments, almost all, fell into the sea. But a number of small pieces fell close to the beach and we picked up a large amount of this material—which was light as paper. I am enclosing a sample of it. I don’t know anyone that could be trusted to whom I could send it for analysis. I never read about a flying disk being found, or about fragments or parts of a disk that had been picked up. Unless the finding was made by military authorities and the whole thing kept as a top-secret subject. I am certain the matter will be of great interest to the brilliant columnist and I am sending two copies of this letter—to the newspaper and to your home address.

Ubatuba, Brazil

There in the envelope were several strips of a dull gray metallic material which seemed to be scorched or oxidized somewhat, smooth but with a noticeable amount of wear and tear, and which were all dusted with a fine film of a powdered substance that somewhat resembled burnt charcoal residue. Not knowing what to do with the letter and its mysterious samples, Sued merely printed the letter in the newspaper out of curiosity, then put the mysterious pieces of weird metal aside and sort of ignored them until he was contacted by a Olavo T. Fontes, a Rio physician and Brazilian representative of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (A.P.R.O), who had heard of the letter through its publication in the paper. Fontes came out to Brazil and took a closer look at the samples, coming to the initial conclusion that one was cracked and had fissures suggesting that it had been forcefully blown off of a larger object, and it was surmised that the whitish substance was the result of the pieces being subjected to an intense heat. Sued offered to release the strange pieces to Fontes, who took them off to be analyzed further at the Mineral Production Laboratory. Fontes himself would say of the objects in a report to the Aerial Phenomenon Research Organization (APRO) in Tucson, Arizona:

I saw the samples sent by the unidentified correspondent—three small pieces of a dull-gray solid substance that appeared to be a metal of some sort. Their surfaces were not smooth and polished, but quite irregular and apparently strongly oxidized. The surface of one of the samples was shot through with almost microscopic cracks. The surfaces of all samples were covered in scattered areas with a whitish material. These whitish smears of a powdered substance appeared as a thin layer. The fine, dry powder was adherent but could be displaced easily with the nail. Mr. Sued said the material appeared to be lead at first sight—because of the gray color—but I could see that it could not be lead … the material was light … almost as light as paper.

It was found through a battery of different tests that the metal in the samples contained only the element magnesium, incredibly pure, which with our metallurgy techniques should have been impossible, as we simply don’t have the means to create a metal that is absolutely spectrographically pure. Two further spectrographic analyses turned up the same results, and X-ray diffraction work conducted at the Laboratory of Crystallography at the department’s Geology and Mineralogy Division also found that the samples were extremely pure magnesium of a type not found in nature and beyond our capacity to create, all of which caused Fontes to come to the conclusion that the samples were “fragments’ of an extraterrestrial vehicle which met with disaster in the earth’s atmosphere.” A.P.R.O. director Coral Lorenzen was so excited about the findings that she wrote to the Pentagon’s UFO spokesman, Air Force Maj. Lawrence J. Tacker dramatically telling him:

Our organization has in its possession the physical evidence which the United States Air Force denies having been able to acquire. It is, in fact, a portion of an extraterrestrial vehicle which met with disaster in the earth’s atmosphere. The catastrophe was witnessed by numerous human beings. The gratifying aspect of this case, however, is that we do not have to depend on the testimony of witnesses to establish the reality of the incident for THE MOST ADVANCED LABORATORY TESTS INDICATE THAT THE RESIDUAL MATERIAL COULD NOT HAVE BEEN PRODUCED THROUGH THE APPLICATION OF ANY KNOWN TERRESTRIAL TECHNIQUES.

All caps, very excited, indeed. The Air Force received one of the samples, but it was unfortunately accidentally destroyed as it was being prepped for analysis. They requested another sample, but since one of the other pieces had also been destroyed by the testing done on it there was only one fragment left and they were unwilling to part with it, instead locking it away in a safe. In 1967, the A.P.R.O. grudgingly allowed the piece to be taken in for analysis, but this would prove to be inconclusive and produce conflicting results, with one lab saying that the magnesium was not as pure as originally claimed and “not as pure as magnesium specimens readily available in the 1950s,” whereas another stated that the piece was produced through a “process that was unknown when the fragments were recovered.” Ultimately the sample was just too small to really tell much, and it created more questions than answers, leaving it as an anomalous mystery. University of Arizona metallurgical engineer Walter W. Walker would say of the fragment:

All chemical analyses to date have not verified the extraterrestriality of the Ubatuba magnesium…. Considering the poor pedigree of the Ubatuba physical evidence, a hoax cannot be ruled out… [though] nothing unequivocally identifying the material as terrestrial was found either. If one accepts that it is possible that a flying saucer has a soft, weak, technically pure, unalloyed, cast magnesium fuselage, then the metallographic evidence is consistent. The surface scale, the oxide intrusion into the grain boundaries and, particularly, the subscale from internal oxidation all suggest that the magnesium was exposed to the Earth’s atmosphere at elevated temperatures. The white Mg(OH)2 coating is consistent with the burning fragments falling into the ocean…. In summary, after all these years, I consider the Ubatuba magnesium fragment as unusual material of still unknown origin.

It all seems very exciting, in that these supposed pieces of a starship were so carefully analyzed and seemed so promising, but the fact is that they were never proven as one thing or another. Also, although there are more pieces said to exist somewhere, they seem to have mostly disappeared, and have become sort of a holy grail within the UFO community. We must also face the hard truth that the whole story rests on an anonymous letter with no way to verify who the sender was, what he really saw, or even if he is who he said he was. The whole case is built on this letter and its mysterious contents, but we don’t even know where it came from and there are no real first-hand witnesses to speak to. We are left to wonder how much veracity the case has, and just what exactly those mysterious fragments were, if anything. What do the results mean? There is no way to really know, because there is nothing left to test that we know of. Who sent the letter and was he for real? Again, a mystery. This is a case that will no doubt serve to fuel debate and speculation for some time to come, and it is one of those frustrating cases in which we seemed so close to proof, but ended up with merely another conundrum that will probably never find a concrete answer.

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