One aspect of the UFO phenomenon that has tended to remain in the shadows compared to other reports are those of the Unidentified Submerged Object, or alternately, Unidentified Submarine Object, or USO, which entail those strange reports of unidentified craft under water. There have long been reports of strange mystery objects flying about at high speeds under the waves of our oceans, and while they are rarer and not as well known as their above ground brethren, they are perhaps even more inexplicable and just as enigmatic. Additionally, just as the above ground, traditional UFOs have their various stories of alien abduction, so do these inscrutable forces from under the sea.

One very remarkable case of an abduction carried out by an USO is that of a woman named Betty Andreasson Luca back in 1950. A housewife, mother and grandmother, she would claim that this experience had been uncovered through hypnosis, and that the strange incident had happened when she was just a child. She says that she was in her home on a perfectly normal evening when she was whisked away by a “wheel-like vehicle,” and once aboard she claims that it went speeding towards a body of water at dangerously high speeds. She braced for what seemed to be imminent, catastrophic impact as the craft hurtled towards the water’s surface with no sign of slowing down, but instead of the expected crash it smoothly submerged and continued on without issue or even so much as a shudder.

After some time of travelling underwater at great speeds, the sea blurring by outside, the craft then allegedly entered a submerged tunnel system, which had ice and icicles along its walls and was brightly lit through means she could not ascertain. She says the ship eventually reached an enormous underwater dome and base or facility of some kind, where she was shocked to see a collection of people in some sort of suspended animation within glass containers, frozen there like insects stuck in amber. She described hundreds and hundreds of these people, wearing clothing from different periods throughout history and placed in sets that approximated that time period, which made her think of this strange place as a “Museum of Time.” There were people of all ages encased like this, rows upon rows of them, along with animals as well, and it was a chilling sight, She was then sped off back to her home, and would forget the whole incident for decades until she had it uncovered by hypnosis in 1980 after experiencing vivid nightmares of the ordeal.

It is hard to know what to make of this report, and seeing as Andreasson has gone on to report other encounters with aliens she says are angelic servants of Jesus Christ, her tales have been met with some skepticism. Was she really taken deep undersea to this Museum of Time by a USO? Who knows? A similar encounter happened to a man by the name of Filiberto Cardenas back in 1979 in the vicinity of Hialeah, Florida. On January 3 of that year, Cardenas and his wife drove off to buy a pig for a roast the following weekend, but they had trouble finding one. At one point they got lost in their errand, and turned off onto a darkened rural road at night, and after some time the engine inexplicably stopped.

The couple checked the car, but it seemed to be in perfect working order, with them unable to find why it had suddenly just died without warning. It was then that they heard a sound like “a swarm of bees” and the car began to shiver and shake as if an earthquake was happening, and there was the glow of red and violet lights all around them dancing across the trees. Cardenas then explains that he was suddenly paralyzed by some unseen force and lifted into the air as his wife screamed in panic. He then lost consciousness, and when he awoke, he found himself in a strange seat, still paralyzed and within a shiny room, surrounded by humanoid beings with helmets on, who spoke with each other in a language that to him sounded like German. In front of him was a screen on the wall, across which flickered images of various points throughout Earth’s history and also what he assumed was the future, and when this slide show ended he was ushered into a smaller craft, which detached and went speeding towards what he took to be a beach. The ship then buzzed right over the sand and then plunged into the ocean, from which point things would get even more bizarre still.

The ship he was on approached an underwater tunnel that had illumination along it, as if from some sort of bioluminescence, and then they passed through to enter an area that was dry, a sort of cavern in an air pocket, where he saw large symbols of serpents on the walls. He was then taken from the ship and sat on a boulder, after which he was welcomed by a human man who said he was from earth and was employed by the aliens. Cardenas was then taken to a huge underwater city and then brought back to where he had started. Cardenas would claim that he had been shown many prophecies by the aliens, such as the 1980 election of President Ronald Reagan, the 1985 earthquake in Mexico City, the demonstration by Chinese students in Tiananmen Square in 1989, the assassination in 1981 of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and the Gulf War against Saddam Hussein in 1990. Is any of this for real and are there underwater alien bases on our planet as described?

We also have the tale of Orlando Jorge Ferraudi, who in 1965 was out fishing on the northern coast of Argentina when he had an experience he would never forget. He claims that he suddenly felt as if he were being watched, and when he turned around he saw a very tall humanoid entity, standing 7 feet tall, with pale skin, light colored eyes, and wearing some sort of shiny, yellowish one-piece outfit. The being seemed to know that Farraudi was scared, and tried to ease him through telepathic messages. Farraudi would say:

It was a very dark night. This being was telling me mentally ‘Take it easy. Don’t be afraid. You mustn’t be scared.’ Then he turned around, taking my arm, and placed some kind of powder box on top of the wall. When opened, this box gave off a phosphorescent luminosity which enabled me to see more details. The entity’s garb was of a yellow-mustard color, had no wrinkles, zippers, or buttons, and it had a hood at the back of the head. He was repeating ‘Don’t be afraid, you will come with me, we will take a long trip..

The being then fiddled with his box for a moment and a large craft like “an inverted saucer” approached from the water, coming closer until it was hovering right in front of them. A door then opened and a ramp distended to them, upon which the tall entity gestured towards the opening. He found himself almost in a trance as he obediently entered the craft to find a young human woman about 18 years of age within, who also told him not to be afraid and that the alien was their friend. She told him that her name was Elena, and that she too had been whisked away aboard this ship not long before. The being then had them change clothes into a type of jumpsuit, and they were told that they would be going underwater to travel across the ocean to Africa.

Farraudi claims that along the way they stopped off at an immense underwater dome, which housed some sort of base, which he was told was for the purpose of “reconditioning the ships,” and he was also told that there were various experiments carried out here. According to the alien, Earth was a sort of zoo, and that most life on Earth had come from them doing genetic experiments. They were fed some sort of tasteless red, yellow, brown and green eggs, after which they were placed on some sort of stretchers and both fell into a profoundly deep sleep. When they woke up, they were told that the “results of the test” were good. They were informed that their pineal glands had been “reactivated,” and that this would enable them to receive mental messages from the aliens. They were then given loads of information on the alien home planet and how the ship worked, as well as various philosophical musings, and then Farraudi woke up back on the beach where he had started, at first without any memory of what had happened.

Such cases are truly bizarre, and offer us a rare glimpse into an area of the UFO phenomena that had always been more obscure and little-covered. Are there really such USOs operating in our world’s oceans? Do these beings have bases down in the deep sea as described in such accounts, and do they occasionally abduct humans from the surface just as more traditional UFOs do? Or are these just the imaginings and delusions of the witnesses? It is difficult to say, but when looking at the UFO and alien abduction phenomena, perhaps we should not only look up to the sky, but also down into the murky depths of our seas as well.

When it comes to the matter of UFO waves, just about everyone has heard of what went down in 1947, in 1952 (with the Washington, D.C. flap), the multiple encounters across the United States in 1973, and the invasion of the “Flying Triangle”-type UFOs that took place across the skies of Belgium from 1989 to 1990. But, what about the U.K.’s invasion of 1957, which saw countless UFO encounters and reports from Royal Air Force pilots and Air Ministry personnel? It’s a reality that 1957 was a significant year for UFOs in the UK, but due to the fact that most of the data was collected by the UK military – and stayed hidden for decades – the majority of the stories didn’t surface publicly. With that said, let’s now take a look at the story, which was truly amazing and that spanned most of the year. On March 26, 1957, there was an amazing encounter. The UK Air Ministry documentation (now in the public domain) states in part: “A report was received from Royal Air Force Church Lawford on 26th March, 1957 of a sighting of an unusual nature. The object moved at a speed timed at exceeding 1400mph [italics mine]. This in itself was unusual as the object had accelerated to this speed from a stationary position [italics mine]. No explanation has yet been found for this sighting but a supplementary report, including a copy of the radar plot, was requested and has been received from Church Lawford this afternoon.”

On the morning of April 4, 1957 – according to now-declassified British Royal Air Force documents housed at the National Archive, Kew, England – radar operators at Balscalloch, Scotland reported to RAF West Freugh, Wigtownshire that they had detected a number of “unidentified objects on the screens of their radars.” And it quickly became apparent this was no Cold War penetration of British airspace by Soviet spy-planes or bombers. As the mystified radar-operators watched their screens, they were amazed to see a large, stationary object hovering at 50,000 feet that then proceeded to ascend vertically to no less than 70,000 feet. According to the files: “A second radar was switched on and detected the object at the same range and height.” Most significant of all at this stage was the assessment by the radar experts of the incredible proportions of the UFOs: “It was noted by the radar operators that the sizes of the echoes were considerably larger than would be expected from normal aircraft. In fact they considered that the size was nearer that of a ship’s echo [italics mine].” Now, moving on…

At around 10.20 a.m., on the morning of April 29, 1957, two British Royal Air Force Hunter aircraft took to the skies from an RAF base called Odiham, which is located in the English county of Hampshire. The plan was for the aircraft to take part in a mid-air military training exercise. Things didn’t quite turn out as planned, however. When the planes reached a height of roughly 45,000-feet, one of the pilots found himself confronted by what can only be described as an undeniable, unidentified flying object. The official Air Ministry report on the affair states: “…when over Hayling Island Mission 28 No. 2 saw a large white object at 10 o’clock slightly above. The object was circular with a white slightly curving tail hanging below. The time was approx. 1110. Formation leader was informed and both pairs turned east onto a northerly heading to look for the object. At first the object was thought to be a parachute but later it was realized that the object must have been larger and at a greater distance because of the slow passing speed.”

At 8:38 p.m. on the same date the pilot of a Royal Air Force Javelin aircraft – also based at RAF Odiham – was vectored onto a UFO reportedly tracked on radar some twelve miles from his position. No visual contact was made by the pilot and he eventually returned to base. This particular affair received brief coverage in a number of newspapers – after one of the base staff tipped off a local reporter on what had gone down – and, as a result, an Air Ministry spokesman made a very brief statement to the press. It went as follows: “All we can say is that we are investigating the matter. Until inquiries are completed we have nothing further to add.” Also on the same day that the curious events at Odiham were unfolding, another significant UFO-themed event occurred, this one at RAF Ventnor on the Isle of Wight, just off the south coast of England. According to the Air Ministry’s own records, a member of the public, a Mr. L. Humfreys, telephoned RAF Ventnor to report that he could see two metallic-appearing objects to the south-east of Shanklin, at a height of what was estimated to be approximately 30,000 feet.

Mr. Humfreys – whose sighting was backed-up by three additional witnesses – said: “The object appeared as a steady, metallic, very bright pinpoint of light, with a suggestion of a smaller round object immediately behind.” At 8:10 p.m., staff at the nearby radar station at Beachy Head reported to RAF Ventnor that they were tracking two unidentified responses flying at a height of 25,000 feet. Almost one hour later, Beachy Head contacted Ventnor again, this time to report that RAF St. Margaret’s was also plotting two fast-moving targets, but were unable to ascertain their heights. One of the objects was reported to be traveling in a south-westerly direction, at a speed of between 750 and 800 knots.

One of the most fascinating of all UFO encounters – an incident that almost resulted in a mid-air collision between a UFO and a Meteor jet – occurred over Royal Air Force Gaydon, Warwickshire, England, on the night of October 21, 1957. Less than a week later, the UK media was chasing down the story. Describing RAF Gaydon as “one of the RAF’s top V-bomber stations,” the Sunday Express newspaper stated that the Air Ministry (today, the Ministry of Defense) had taken rapid steps to get to the heart of the mystery. Reportedly, the UFO was seen visually by the pilot and tracked by ground-radar personnel – and only a few minutes apart. Questions, unsurprisingly, were quickly being asked: could the UFO actually have been a Soviet spy-plane? It was certainly a scenario that the Air Ministry felt important enough to address. Although – as will become apparent – the description given by the pilot did not sound like that of the average Russian aircraft. Plus, six days after the event occurred, Air Ministry staff were still scratching their heads.

Such was his extremely close proximity to the UFO at one point, Flying Officer Sweeney was forced to take immediate “violent avoiding action” after he approached the unknown craft from the starboard side. As Sweeney got closer to the UFO it quickly extinguished its lights and vanished from view. It was, however, when he was at his closest to the object that Sweeney was able to take a careful, but quick, look at it before it disappeared. Oddly, he described the UFO as having a “blurred” outline. And, rounding off the year there was the encounter of December 2, 1957, which involved an unusual aerial craft that was sighted over Topler’s Hill near Biggleswade in Bedfordshire. One of those who saw the UFO was a Royal Air Force officer, Flight Lieutenant Jack Hunter, who expressed his amazement concerning what he had seen. There were more incidents throughout 1957. It would, however, take several articles to cover the whole wave of that year. What we can say, though, is that clearly something very strange was afoot in the skies of  the U.K. in 1957 – and it involved the nation’s military to a significant degree.

Some of the most exciting UFO encounters on record have to do with large numbers of people seeing the same thing at the same time. These mass sightings always tend to evoke intrigue and curiosity, as they involve so many non-related people, and often very reliable witnesses simultaneously, creating a case that truly serves to inspire wonder. Such mass sightings are relatively rare within the UFO world, but they always serve to give even the skeptics pause, and are some of the more interesting accounts out there. One such case originates in the U.S. state of New Jersey, and it involves many reliable witnesses, a strange, otherworldly craft, and a possible insidious government cover-up.

One of the most intriguing mass UFO sighting flaps in U.S. history started as a normal day like any other in the small suburban town of Wanaque, New Jersey, but as the day came to a close a bizarre series of events would begin to play out. On the crisp and clear evening of January 11, 1966, at around 6:30 PM, calls began to come in from all over the area describing what seemed to be an extremely bright glowing light out over the nearby Wanaque Reservoir. Dozens of calls were coming in from panicked residents and workers at the reservoir describing more or less the same thing, with most reports saying it was a very bright light, larger and brighter than a star, mostly white but sometimes changing to colors such as red, blue and green. The mystery object was described as hovering over the frozen lake surface and roving about in what seemed to be a deliberate pattern at an altitude of between 250 and 1,000 feet, sometimes performing seemingly physics-defying maneuvers and sudden vertical drops and rises. Even weirder were the reports of the object projecting some sort of beam downwards to the reservoir, which was powerful enough to melt holes in the ice.

Wanaque reservoir

Before long, the police who were getting these calls were seeing the strange object for themselves, and one of these was police patrolman Joseph Cisco, who just happened to be near the reservoir when the reports began flooding in. He would then drive out there to investigate and look out over the water to see something very strange for himself, of which he said:

There was a light that looked bigger than any of the stars, about the size of a softball or volleyball. It was a pulsating, white, stationary light changing to red. It stayed in the air; there was no noise. I was trying to figure out what it was.

The object would then swoop in low and begin shooting a beam to the lake surface, and Cisco soon got a call from another officer on the radio saying in a panic, “Something landed in front of the dam. Something’s burning a hole in the ice! Something with a bright light on it, going up and down!” Another policeman who saw the thing was Sgt. Ben Thompson, who said it actually caused the water to rise below it and sucked together treetops, and yet another Officer George Dyckman would say “I’ve never seen anything like it in my life.” Several other police officers being called to the area also saw the otherworldly object, including Patrolmen Edward Nestor and Jack Wardlaw, a Sgt. Bobby Gordon, Reservoir Police and Personnel George Destito, Charles Theodora, Fred Steines, and even Chief of Police Floyd Elson. Chief John Casazza of the Wanaque Reservoir Police would say of his own sighting:

It was a bright white light. As I said: just like on a locomotive. It was funnel-shaped. It seemed to come out of some object, like a funnel. In other words, it spread out as if it were focused through a telescope. It was narrow at one end in the sky and spread out into a very wide beam as it approached our upper gatehouse at the dam. The strangest part of it was that there was no noise attached to this object. None whatsoever. It was absolutely silent. A silent light.

News crews who started to trickle in also reported seeing the strange sight, with one reporter Howard Ball, with the Paterson News, saying:

I was near the junction of Colfax Road and Hamburg Turnpike… I saw a very extremely bright light… The thing that really brought my attention was, as I traveled along, a white starlight seems to come at me… then it stopped and it made a transverse movement to the west. No color, but if I’d give it a color I’d say brilliant blue-white, similar to the ignition of a magnesium and pure oxygen… really bright light.

One of the more prominent witnesses to the outlandish event was the town Mayor Harry T. Wolfe, who had made his way out to the reservoir along with Councilmen Warren Hagstrom and Arthur Barton and the Mayor’s 14-year-old son Billy out of sheer curiosity when the reports kept coming in a deluge. They would witness a light that was “a brilliance, a little brighter than a star” that seemed to emit a reddish or pale green light or yellowish light and which was moving “oddly” over the lake. Closer inspection showed that it was some sort of oval shaped object around 9 feet in diameter, coming in low over the water to shoot down a beam that put a hole in the ice as they looked on in astonishment. Councilman Hagstrom would say of what they saw on that night:

There was something up there that was awful bright. We don’t know what it was. We thought it was a helicopter, but we didn’t hear a motor. It looked like a helicopter with big landing lights on. We got goose bumps all over when we saw where the hole was.

Before long there were throngs of people gathered at the reservoir watching this thing go about its inscrutable business, and the mysterious object would do its strange act over the water for over an hour before finally speeding off into the night at great speed and without warning. Moments later it would be reported as hovering over Lakeland Regional High School and stopping at several other locations in the area before vanishing to leave residents in a state of shock. So many people had seen it, including many policemen and even city officials, and all of them agreed it was no normal aircraft or celestial phenomenon, but rather something truly unexplainable and baffling. To make it all even weirder still is that it would seem as if the strangeness was quite over yet. The object would make another brief appearance over the reservoir the following evening as well before seeming to go away for good, but it would make yet another appearance later that year.

In October of 1966, just as people were starting to try and put the whole bizarre incident at Wanaque reservoir out of their minds, a new spate of sightings emanated from the lake. At 9PM on October 10, the object was seen by several witnesses, including an off-duty police officer by the name of Robert Gordon, who saw it with his wife, Betty, who described it as a bright white light that moved with “a definite pattern” towards the reservoir. This sighting was soon joined by that of a policeman Sgt. Ben Thompson, who had quite a harrowing experience when the UFO allegedly flew right at him. He would say of this:

I saw the object coming at me. There was an extremely bright light. It was a bright white light, bright like when a light bulb is about to blow. It was very low. It appeared to be about 75 feet over the mountain. That would be Windbeam Mountain. It was traveling very quickly and in a definite pattern; first right, then up and down, then repeating the pattern. Distances are deceiving, but it might have covered an area of a half a mile. It went straight over my head, stopped in mid-air and backed right up. It then started zig-zagging from left to right. It was doing tricks. Making acute angular turns instead of gradual curved ones. It looked as big as a parachute. I got out of my car and continued to watch it for almost five minutes. It was about 200 to 250 yards away. It was the shape of a basketball with the center scooped out and a football thrust through it. Sometimes the football appeared to be perpendicular to the basketball and sometimes standing up on end. There were two different gadgets. It didn’t make much noise, but as it was moving, it raised the water beneath it. I watched it maneuver, stirring up brush and water in the reservoir, it was about 150 feet up…I had difficulty seeing because the light was so bright it blinded me.

Once again the police were flooded with dozens of calls of terrified residents seeing the object in the vicinity of the reservoir and it would be seen again on October 15 before finally disappearing again, this time apparently for good. In the wake of the UFO flap over Wanaque reservoir there would be some strange and sometimes ominous stories coming out of the area. It was reported that unknown men posing as military officials from the Air Force were doing the rounds in the area intimidating residents and discouraging people from talking about what they had seen, and some people even claimed that these mysterious men had confiscated photographs taken of the phenomena. The military would deny that these people were with them, or that they had had anyone in the area to investigate at all, and one Air Force Colonel Freeman would state, “We have checked a number of these cases and these men are not connected with the Air Force in any way.” Other witnesses would also insist that they had seen military helicopters and even jets in the area shortly after the initial sightings and in the months after, but the Air Force denied this as well, while at the same time making efforts to explain away the UFO sightings as misidentified aircraft or a weather balloon. What happened here, and did the military have any connection to these events or not? Were they trying to hide something or cover it up? No one knows.

The claims of mysterious officials confiscating photographic evidence is cited as being one of the reasons there is so little such documentation of the incident. Indeed, although the UFO was witnessed by so many people, including police and high-ranking officials, there is oddly only a handful of photographs of the alleged craft known to exist, most of which were later sent in anonymously to make it hard to ascertain who took them in the first place or whether they are real or hoaxes. One photo in particular, showing the object shooting a beam of light downwards, has become intensely debated and analyzed in the years since, with no real conclusion. Since we don’t know who took these photos and have no negatives, it is hard to say. What we do know is that the incident did happen, and so this odd lack of photographic evidence from such a well-documented mass sighting has been seen as proof that someone has tried to suppress the event.

Today there have been many proposed explanations, including helicopters with spotlights, atmospheric phenomena, Venus, weather balloons, or even ball lightning, but there are problems with these explanations in that so many reliable witnesses saw them and insist that what they witnessed was none of these things. One unidentified witness has said of this to researcher Anthony Bragalia, of UFO Explorations, as follows:

I remember the thing very well. I still do not know what it was. I think about it from time to time, but it’s no use because it doesn’t bring me any closer to knowing what it was. Maybe things that aren’t from here aren’t meant to be understood by us here. Ask anyone who will tell you, it was not a helicopter or something astronomical. It was…not…from our military or something we misidentified. It was a UFO, from somewhere else. The beams or ray thing that came out from the bottom of the globe was the thing that got to me. It made the light cut the ice out. It frightened us kids. And I’m sure the adults. Because we don’t have anything like that even today. The adults didn’t really speak much about it after the initial thing that I could tell. I’d talk about it with my friends some time later and one of them told me that people came around to not say anything.

Amazingly, there has apparently been very little follow-up investigation done into the case. It seems that no one ever went back to examine those holes in the ice, nor were there any water or radiation measurements taken, and the proper authorities don’t seem to have ever made any real efforts to interview witnesses. Most of what we know is from independent UFO researchers who pieced together what happened from newspaper articles of the time. We are left to wonder just what happened out over that expanse of frigid ice all of those decades ago and what it all means. Was this all the result of mundane phenomena and misidentification, or something else? Has there been some sort of cover-up put into effect that has managed to keep such a spectacular incident largely buried in history? If this was really an alien craft then what was it doing at that reservoir and what did it want? These are questions that linger, and which may never be satisfactorily answered, and the UFO wave of New Jersey’s Wanaque reservoir remains a very compelling case of a mass UFO sighting that has been largely forgotten.

In May of this year I had a new book published by Lisa Hagan Books. Its title: The Rendlesham Forest UFO Conspiracy. Here’s the publicity information for the book: “In the final days of December 1980, strange encounters and bizarre incidents occurred in the heart of Rendlesham Forest, Suffolk, England. Based upon their personal encounters, many of the military personnel who were present at the time believed that something extraterrestrial came down in those dark woods. What if, however, there was another explanation for what happened four decades ago? What if that explanation, if revealed, proved to be even more controversial than the theory that aliens arrived from a faraway world? The ramifications for the field of Ufology would be immense. In his new, sensational book, Nick Redfern reveals that one of the most famous UFO cases of all time was really a series of top secret experiments using holograms, mind-control programs, deception, disinformation, conspiracies and cover-ups. The shocking truth of a forty-year-old mystery is now revealed.”

There’s a good reason why, today, I’m mentioning the book again. There is some fascinating information that I wasn’t aware of, but which certainly now adds to the “secret experiment” angle of the Rendlesham affair. In my book, I pointed out that the events in the forest occurred over the Christmas period – something that would have ensured most people would not have been out and about at that time. They would be celebrating at home. And that also included significant numbers of military personnel who – on leave for the holidays – worked at the two nearby military bases: Royal Air Force Bentwaters and Royal Air Force Woodbridge. In other words, by running the clandestine program over the Christmas nights, few people would know what happened. One of the other issues I address in my book is the matter of how, in the latter part of 1964, U.K. military personnel were dosed with LSD in a couple of English woods – and without their knowledge of what was going down. It was an experiment coordinated by staff from Porton Down, Wiltshire – a facility that has a long, secret and controversial history of researching the effects of hallucinogens on people. That brings us to the latest bit of the story.

I should stress that it isn’t exactly a new revelation. In fact, it was noted back in the 1960s; however, as a result of what I learned while doing the research for my book, it now places this particular piece of information in a new, eye-opening light. The story can be found in the pages of Arthur Shuttlewood’s 1967 book, The Warminster Mystery: Astounding UFO Sightings. On the book’s jacket, we’re told: “Two years ago the small Wiltshire town of Warminster was suddenly gripped by a series of Flying Saucer sightings, which have persisted right up to the present day. No town in England, or for that matter in the world, has registered so many authentic reports of UFOs.” The publisher continues: “The Warminster Mystery is a dramatic unfolding of these sightings, with eye-witness accounts of strange ‘things’ seen by day and night; of bewildering mushrooms of smoke, crescents of fire, weird, disturbing sounds, and even accounts of conversations with those from Outer Space.”

Now, to the crux of it all. Stationed at a military facility called Knook Camp at Heytesbury (which is only four miles from the town of Warminster) was the 1st Welch Regiment. On Christmas Day, that same regiment found themselves in a very strange situation. As Arthur Shuttlewood wrote: “Over thirty soldiers awoke to a thunderous crescendo at the camp early on Christmas Day, 1964 [when it was still dark, in other words]. A sergeant told me ‘it was as if a huge chimney stack from the main block was ripped from the rooftop, then scattered in solid chunks of masonry across the whole camp area.'” Shuttlewood added: “The guard was alerted, standing by for action, but none developed. Surprised, the soldiers were unable to explain the blasting sounds, beyond asserting that they were decidedly not caused by conventional type aircraft. This aerial thunderclap was the forerunner of an astonishing series of incidents like that which occurred on Christmas Day, 1964.”

So, on Christmas Day, in both 1964 and 1980 – and when most Brits would have been at home celebrating Christmas – military personnel in the U.K. were exposed to strange and unexplained phenomena that was perceived as being UFO-based in nature. And, the LSD experiments run by Porton Down’s scientists took place in the final days of 1964. Not only that: Porton Down is located only twenty-four miles from Warminster. And, as my book on Rendlesham demonstrates, there was a Porton Down presence in Rendlesham Forest the night before the incidents began. There are, without doubt, significant parallels and threads to be unraveled here. For me, this is all beyond coincidence. We’re seeing two different experiments – one in the 1960s and the other in December 1980 – but with identical goals: to fabricate UFO events (both on just about the quietest day of the year in the U.K.) and to see how military personnel responded to amazing and bizarre phenomena (Many thanks to Ray Cox for bring this development to my attention).

In 1966 and 1967 there was a sudden flurry of UFO activity around the United States, especially within the Ohio River Valley, and from here a great many weird cases have sprung up, including the Mothman phenomenon and countless UFO reports. A curious report from the era appeared in the book The Mothman Prophecies, by John Keel, and revolves around a usually nondescript man by the name of Tad Jones, of Dunbar, a suburb of Charleston, West Virginia. He was by all accounts a God-fearing man who did not drink or do drugs, and to was known as an honest, hard-working man not prone to fights of fancy or tall tales. Yet, on one January morning in 1966, Jones was driving to work, an appliance store he managed about 10 miles outside of Charleston. It was a route he took every day, and the rive started just like any other, but things were about to take a turn into the surreal, and it would become  a case that blends all manner of strangeness, odd clues, and inexplicable events that have never really been solved.

As he drove along, at around 9 AM Jones came to something blocking the road up ahead. Since the road he was on, Route 64, was a fairly new multi-lane highway he at first assumed that this must be a road construction crew, and so he dutifully slowed down, yet as he crawled closer, he realized that this was far stranger than that. It appeared to be a large sphere with a luster like dull aluminum, but what was even weirder was that it was not sitting upon the road, as he had first thought, but rather hovering several feet over it. The sphere was described as being around 20 feet in diameter, with two antennae-like protrusions jutting out from the top, and four legs and what looked like a propeller attached at the bottom. Jones would say of the sphere:

There were four legs attached to it, with casterlike wheels on the bottom of each one. And there was a small window about nine inches in diameter on the side facing me, but I couldn’t see anything inside the sphere. On the underside there was something like a propeller. It was idling when I first drove up, then it started spinning faster and the whole object began to rise upward. It disappeared into the sky and I drove to my store. I believe what I saw. It was there. I never saw anything like it before, and I haven’t seen anything like it since, but it was there that morning on I-64.

The incident had left him shaken and afraid, and after some time pondering what he had seen, he decided to contact the police, and before long his bizarre experience was being featured all over the local papers. At around this time, Jones woke one morning to find that a slip of paper had been deposited under his front door. Not really thinking much of it at first, he picked up the paper and a glance at it caused his heart to drop. There scrawled upon it in handwriting was a note that read; “We know what you have seen and we know that you have talked. You better keep your mouth shut.” It was all very sinister, indeed, and there was no indication of who had written the note or where it had come from. Jones became paranoid, and began constantly looking over his shoulder.

A local UFO expert by the name of Ralph Jarett soon became aware of Jones story right after having his own strange experience, when a mysterious unidentified phone call had turned out to be just a few minutes of a low beeping, as if in code. Jarett would reach out to Jones and uncover many extra details about the sighting, including the fact that the UFO appeared to have been hovering directly over a major gas line. During his extensive investigation of Jones’ case, Jones would once again receive an ominous note slipped under his door. This time it was written on a piece of torn cardboard with burnt edges, and simply read: “There won’t be another warning.” All of this attracted the attention of the imminent researcher John Keel, who happened to be in the area investigating a UFO flap in the Ohio River Valley and the infamous Mothman sightings that were going on at the time. When Keel began questioning Jones and looking into the case, he would unearth even more strangeness.

Jones would mention to Keel an incident that he hadn’t really thought much of at the time, but which he had become convinced was somehow connected to his sighting. He said that one week after his UFO incident, he had been driving along the same road at around the same time when he had passed a lone man on the side of the road. He pulled over to see if the man needed help, but got no response, merely a wave. The next day, Jones passed the same man again at the same spot at the same time, and he would tell Keel that there had been something unsettling and “off” about him. Jones would describe the mysterious stranger:

He was very tanned or his face was very flushed. He looked normal and was wearing a blue coat and a blue cap with a visor… something like a uniform, I guess. I noticed he was holding a box in his hand. Some kind of instrument. It had a large dial on it, like a clock, and a wire ran from it to his other hand.

Thinking that it may have been a utilities worker, Keel checked with the gas company, but it would turn out that not only had they not had any personnel out there at the time, but that they did not wear the uniform described by Jones and also did not use such an instrument. What mysterious connection does any of this have with Jones’ experience? No one really knows. It would only get even more curious still when Keel went out to the site himself and found a strange series of footprints that looked like the tracks of a huge dog that he estimated must have weighed upwards of 200 pounds. In addition to the “dog tracks” found at the site of the Jones encounter, Keel turned up among them a human print that in some ways struck him as unusual, as well as some other weird things. He describes this as follows:

Aside from the dog tracks, we found a single footprint of what appeared to be a large, naked human foot. This was planted in the center of a muddy section with no other footprints of any kind around it. But a short distance away I came across some old friends… a type of footprint that has appeared at many UFO sites around the country. They look like the type of prints made by ripple-soled shoes, but their spacing is always peculiar. They don’t start anywhere and they don’t lead anywhere. Ripple soles had been in fashion since the early 1960s and had then faded out. But these phantom prints had a ridge around the edges. Years later, when the first men walked on the moon, I realized that the photos of the prints left by their moon-walking shoes were identical to the footprints I had seen over and over again in my travels.

Plaster casts taken of the dog tracks were sent to be analyzed and were found to not be dog tracks at all, and indeed no local wildlife experts could identify them as any animal known to the area. Oddly, Keel claims that the imminent cryptozoologist Ivan Sanderson had told him that very similar dog-like tracks often appeared in places where paranormal activity had occurred, and also said that he would later encounter similar tracks around the country in completely separate cases. What did all of this footprint weirdness have to do with Jones’ encounter, if anything? No one really knows, but Keel was certain that it was all connected somehow. In the end we are left to wonder, what did Tad Jones encounter out there on that road? What is the meaning of the strange tracks, the mysterious stranger on the road, and the sinister notes he received? It is unclear, and it continues to be a weird case surrounded by oddness that we may never fully understand.

There was not really anything to make people think that the night of October 9, 1973 would be anything other than a normal evening in the sleepy residential area of Delaware County, Indiana. It started out as usual, people went about their business, but this was to be far from a normal night, and it would quickly spiral into one of the most curious and intense UFO waves on record.

The area was not known for its crime or for anything much really happening much of the time at all, but at around 10 p.m. emergency services switchboards began lighting up with numerous calls from scared residents reporting mysterious UFOs in the night skies, and this wasn’t just a few people here and there. Before long police had received 700 calls like this, and officers sent out to investigate also reported seeing the object, described as “blinking a red-white-blue revolving light and often hovering near the ground.” Meanwhile, an airfield in Fort Wayne picked up an anomalous radar signature, and the incident left officials in the area in a state of panic, wondering what to make of it all. Making it all even more mysterious was that this was only the beginning, and the UFO sightings would go on to spread like wildfire throughout the region.

Later that same month, people in the area of Cincinnati, Ohio, and its surrounding communities began to flood emergency services with reports of UFOs as well, with a flurry of hundreds of callers from the region reporting bright lights in the sky. Such reports continued on throughout October, and some encounters really are quite dramatic. In one incident, terrified witnesses described how one of the UFOs even came down to land in the middle of main street in Trenton, and another witness claimed that a UFO had landed on her farm and killed two of her cows, and yet another claimed that a diamond-shaped glowing blue craft had tried to abduct her baby. There is also the account of an off-duty Air National Guard flight controller, who saw a “pulsating blue-ish-white object” fly out over and descend into a soybean field. There were so many reports that it was causing a mass hysteria, and fueling it all was that there were many reported power outages going on in the same areas where the UFOs were being seen.

While some of these might sound a little too bizarre, many of these witnesses to these UFO events were what one would call traditionally reliable, such as police officers, and officials. One policeman, a Sgt. Hugh, claimed to have chased a glowing, humming circular object for a few miles near the town of Greenfield, and sheriffs near Zanesville witnessed three pulsating globes over a local graveyard. Even the Governor of Ohio himself, John J. Gilligan, said he had seen a UFO shoot a “vertical beam of light.” The governor was so shaken that he would say in a press conference, “I saw one (UFO) the other night, so help me. I’m absolutely serious. I saw this. It was not a plane. It was not a bird. It didn’t wear a cape. And I really don’t know what it was.”

Perhaps the most well-known and oft-discussed encounter from the October 1973 “UFO Invasion” of the Midwest is that of a Capt. Lawrence J. Coyne, who on Oct. 18 was flying a U.S. Army Reserve Super Huey helicopter near Mansfield, Ohio, along with a crew of three others. As they flew, they say they saw an unidentified red light approaching directly towards them. The light was coming in so fast, that Coyne made evasive maneuvers, but the mysterious craft matched every movement. When the crew got a good look at the object, they could see that it was a cigar-shaped, windowless metallic craft with a bright red light perched upon its nose. This mysterious object then proceeded to hover in front of the helicopter and then without warning zapped them with a piercing green light like a searchlight, which lit up the entire interior of their aircraft. After a few moments had passed the light stopped and the UFO flew off as their helicopter lost its controls to send them in a spiral towards the ground, and their radio had gone dead as well. They were able to get the aircraft under control again, and were left with an experience none of them would ever forget.

All of these reports over the same general region at the same time was enough to cause a sort of mass panic, and it was splashed all over the papers at the time. It was feared that it would cause a nationwide panic if something wasn’t done, but then by Halloween the UFO reports just suddenly stopped, and the skies were quiet again. The story of the Midwest Invasion has gone on to be much discussed, and is even said to have been the inspiration for Steven Spielberg’s classic Close Encounter of the Third Kind. Many of the reports were compiled and collected by local UFOlogist Kenny Young, who says of the 1973 wave of UFOs:

The unusual aerial events happening during the October 1973 time-period remains one of the most fascinating of all UFO happenings, an intense and disturbing siege that no dismissive hypothesis or explanatory venture will easily rob of its strangeness.

There have been a few theories on what happened back in October of 1973. One of the most prominent is that this was all misidentifications of military aircraft involved with a military operation called “Operation Nickel Grass,” which saw the U.S. Air Force launching numerous large transport planes for the purpose of supporting Israel during the Yom Kippur War. The war began on October 6, when Egypt, Suria, and other Middle Eastern countries attempted to invade Israel, and Operation Nickel Grass was the U.S. response, beginning on October 13 and seeing numerous aircraft taking off for several weeks nearly around the clock. The idea here is that civilians may have mistaken all of these planes for UFOs, but it seems unlikely considering that the planes, mostly C-141 StarLifters and C-5 Galaxy cargo planes, looked and acted like planes, not the various other weird craft reported, and many of the witnesses were professionals who would have been unlikely to mistake a cargo plane for a maneuverable UFO. The Coyne incident was also definitely not a cargo plane. Other ideas are that there was some sort of meteor shower or that this was all simply a mass hysteria, but of course there is the possibility that this region was visited en masse by forces we cannot comprehend. If is were the case, then what were they and what did they want? We may never know the true answers, and the 1973 “UFO Invasion” remains a compelling piece of UFO lore.

The 3rd and final part of this story is born out of tragedy – the death of Ufologist and friend Kathy Kasten on August 7, 2012. As with parts 1 and 2 of this 3-part article, the origins of what I’m about to share with you could not have been anticipated. As far back as 2005, I had been corresponding with Kathy on matters relative to Roswell and her suspicions that the incident had nothing to do with aliens, but everything to do with post-war experiments on human guinea-pigs. At the time of her death, Kathy was working on a full-length book on her theory – parts of which closely matched the findings I detailed in Body Snatchers in the Desert, which was encouraging. So far as I am aware, no specific or serious attempt was made by Kathy to find a publisher, as she wanted to have the entire, lengthy manuscript completed before submitting it to a publishing house – rather than just hand over a brief synopsis and a sample chapter or two. Time and fate, however, sadly stepped in and prevented the next step from coming to fruition. Perhaps realizing that she was on a time-limit, one which was closing in, in early 2012 Kathy surprised me by emailing me to say that she was planning on handing over copies of her Roswell files to me, in the event that I might want to make use of the material – any of it or all of it – should I ever decide to write a sequel to my 2005 book, which I eventually did: The Roswell UFO Conspiracy.

It was shortly after Kathy died that her family got in touch, as they had decided to donate to me all of Kathy’s research files, correspondence, and much more – and not just her Roswell-based material. Which was, of course, extremely generous of them. A week or so later, a large amount of files turned up on the doorstep, collectively contained in heavy cardboard boxes. To say there were thousands upon thousands of pages of material, dating back decades, would not be an exaggeration. An Aladdin’s cave? Yep. Due to work and what is known as life, it took me several months to go through the entire collection, some of which had nothing to do with Roswell in particular – and nothing to do with UFOs in general, either. Probably a full third of the material was focused on issues relative to mind-control and mind-manipulation, such as the CIA’s MKUltra program of the 1950s. And there was a lot of material on post-Second World War files on unethical experiments on people in the 1940s and 1950s – which certainly was linked and relevant to Roswell.

Kathy’s notes and records show that from the early 1990s to the mid-2000s, she spoke with a few interesting characters, of a somewhat shadowy nature. They advised her that if she wanted to uncover the truth of Roswell, she would be wise to pursue the work and history of a certain William Randolph “Randy” Lovelace II.  That Kathy’s dossier on Lovelace is about five-inches thick demonstrates that she carefully followed the advice of her sources and left pretty much no stone unturned, when it came to the matter of exploring a possible Roswell-Lovelace connection. Of course, for those who aren’t aware of the man himself, there is a big question that needs answering: who, exactly, was William Randolph Lovelace II? Well, let’s take a look.

To say that Lovelace was a fascinating character is an understatement. Born in 1907, he was a physician who graduated from the Harvard Medical School in 1934, and, in 1938, took up a position with the Aeromedical Field Laboratory at Wright Field, Ohio (today, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base). It was at Wright Field that Lovelace undertook groundbreaking research to understand how exposure to high-altitudes could affect the human body and nervous system. Experiments with new and novel oxygen masks and parachutes were of paramount importance, too. A colonel with the Army Air Corps in the Second World War, Lovelace was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and – in 1947 – helped to establish the Lovelace Foundation for Medical Education and Research, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Then, in the late 1950s, NASA invited Lovelace to chair its Special Advisory Committee on Life Sciences. Such were his skills in aviation medicine, Lovelace worked closely alongside the original NASA Mercury astronauts. In 1964, Lovelace was appointed to the position of NASA’s Director of Space Medicine. He died as a result of a plane crash in December 1965, in Aspen, Colorado. Both his wife and the pilot were killed, too.

Strangest of all, back in 2011 I had heard a few rumors of a Lovelace-Roswell connection, but I had largely hit a brick-wall. That Kathy’s family very generously donated all of her files to me in 2012 – and which contained a lot of material on Lovelace and Roswell – allowed me to take my research to a new level. As with parts 1 and 2 of this article, I could never have anticipated how and why such developments could – or would – originate and come together.

I thought I would do something different today (and for the next couple of days). Namely, to demonstrate how the origin of a UFO investigation can be as intriguing as the case itself. Indeed, it’s very often what goes on behind the scenes that really stands out. We’ll begin with my research into the Roswell “UFO crash” of 1947 and how and why I came to the conclusion that nothing of an extraterrestrial nature crashed on the Foster Ranch, New Mexico. I have to admit that up until the latter part of the 1990s, I was – like so many – a believer that aliens died in New Mexico. Things started to change, however, in 1998. That was the year in which my second book was published by Simon & Schuster. Its title: The FBI Files. As the title suggests, it’s a study of the FBI’s investigations into the MJ12 documents, the Contactees of the 1950s, UFO encounters, and cattle mutilations. One of the chapters in that book was titled “The Oak Ridge Invasion.” It was focused on a wave of UFO activity in the late 1940s at the Atomic Energy Commission complex at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. It wasn’t long after the book hit the shelves that I got a letter from someone in the United States (I still lived in the U.K. then). It was a letter sent to Simon & Schuster’s offices in London from California. And it was then forwarded on to me.

The letter was written by a woman who wanted to share with me what she knew about Oak Ridge – something extremely controversial. She would only share what she knew in person, however. She didn’t want to say anymore by letter and she wasn’t online. And, she lived in the United States. Well, this made things pretty awkward, to say the least. Indeed, there was no way I could afford to fly all across the Atlantic and onto Los Angeles just to do an interview – an interview that might not even go anywhere. As  a result, things were in a state of limbo until 2001. That was when I moved to the United States to live. I still had the woman’s contact information, and I explained the situation: that I could now meet with her in person and we could have a chat. Well, that chat became much more than that. It was one of the most controversial interviews I’ve ever done. Eventually, there were numerous interviews. The woman was pushing eighty in 2001 and she wanted to share what turned out to be a very dark and disturbing story. She had a wealth of material (mainly of old black and white photos) showing she did indeed work at Oak Ridge in the 1940s. There was much more, though.

I assumed – wrongly – that the woman wanted to discuss the UFO reports at Oak Ridge that I wrote about in The FBI Files. What she did want to discuss, however, was something very different. As we sat in a California diner, with a family member along too, she told me something incredible and disturbing: she knew a great deal about Roswell, but not in relation to aliens from faraway worlds. Rather, she said that Roswell was really a series of top secret experiments that revolved around (a) high-altitude testing in craft that are known as “lifting bodies,” (b) huge balloon arrays, and (c) prisoners and handicapped people who were guinea-pigs used in the grim experiments – which all failed. You can, by now, see where all of this is going. The woman said that the UFO legend was a smokescreen to hide what was arguably an even more controversial situation. Even decades later, she was still very concerned for her safety. She was fearful there might be those in government who still might know where she lived, she told me. Her concerns were understandable. Not only that: she put me in touch with several other old-timers – who she knew of way back in the 1940s and 1950s – and who agreed to speak out.

It was after some time – around a couple of months – that I brought up the issue of writing a book. She was okay with that, providing that her real name wouldn’t be publicly revealed. So, when my 2005 book on all of this – Body Snatchers in the Desert – was published I called her the “Black Widow.” It’s hardly surprising that when the book appeared, there was a great deal of debate online (primarily on the now defunct UFO Updates). And, for a few months, I was the ufological Public Enemy Number One, which I was fine with. From there on, I got more and more material on the “human experimentation” angle of Roswell, to the extent that I wrote a sequel in 2017 called The Roswell UFO Conspiracy. Of course, most people in Ufology didn’t buy into it. Some just didn’t want to deal with such revelations: they couldn’t handle the possibility of Roswell not having been an extraterrestrial event. Too bad. I still get threads here and there that add to the story, to the extent there’s a distinct possibility of me doing a third book on all this. And it all had its origins in a solitary letter sent across the Atlantic by a woman who, for decades, had been quietly sitting on a secret of huge proportions.

Part-2 of this 3-part article is focused on how I was able to write what is probably my most controversial book. Its title: Final Events. It’s a book that looks at the secret activities of a small think-tank group within the U.S. government and which believes that the UFO phenomenon is not extraterrestrial in nature. Rather, the group has come to the conclusion that the mystery is one of demonic proportions. As was the case with part-1 of this article, there is an interesting story as to how and why I came across the story and why I decided to write the book. It all goes back to the final days of 2006. At the time, I was looking for a new story that I could turn into a book. As it happened, the story – that I quickly concluded was the one – practically dropped into my lap. It was in late 2006 that I happened to be chatting with Ufologist and priest Dr. Ray Boeche about the Rendlesham Forest affair of December 1980, which – at the time – I thought might have been a good idea for a book. The reason why I gave Ray a call was because he had done a lot of investigative work into Rendlesham throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s. It was during the course of the chat that Ray told me he had an even better and bigger story that might interest me. So, I sat back and listened to what he had to say.

Back in late 1991, Ray was clandestinely approached by a pair of physicists who were working on a U.S. Department of Defense program to try and contact what the group called non-human entities. Or, NHEs. Ray had a meeting with the pair at Nebraska’s Lincoln Marriott Cornhusker Hotel. Those who worked on the program, Ray said to me, started off believing that the entities they were were trying to communicate with really were extraterrestrials. It didn’t take long, however, for the group to conclude they were actually dealing with nothing less than demons. Not only that, there had been violent deaths in the program. Ray was shown graphic photos of several people – with their bodies in chairs – who had died while, it was assumed, they were trying to contact the demonic things. Even more controversial, the group was doing its best to try and weaponize the powers of those supernatural creatures. The pair was deeply worried about what they had gotten into and wanted Ray’s advice. That made a lot of sense, as Ray had a background in both UFOs and religion.

This was a fascinating story. I began interviewing (and audio-recording) Ray about all of this on January 22, 2007. Not only that, as time progressed I was able to learn more about the group. They used a nickname of “Collins Elite.” On page 42 of Final Events (which was published in 2010) I specifically pointed out that the name was an informal title created by the group. Almost certainly, the group had a highly-classified title. I never did get to learn what that real name was, however. I was able to speak with a number of the specifically retired staff, though. In the process of digging further I discovered that the group had actually been around for a long time – decades, in fact. But, that there were different levels and tiers within the group, which is why the two guys that met with Ray – and who, in 1991, were new to the program – weren’t aware of much that had gone on in the 1970s and 1980s. “Need to know” was very much the name of the game, which is why they were looking for advice from Ray.

How strange that I would never, ever have heard of a group in the DoD that was investigating demonic activity and supernatural powers had I not approached Ray Boeche about his research into the Rendlesham Forest incident of Christmas 1980. Not at all unlike part-1 of this 3-part article, this saga of aliens and demons is one that could not have been foreseen

Robin Cole is someone who, from the mid-to-late 1990s, spent a great deal of time investigating reports and rumors that the Government Communications Headquarters in Cheltenham, England was secretly deep into the UFO subject. For those who may not know, GCHQ is the U.K.’s equivalent of the United States’ National Security Agency. It was at the height of his investigations that Cole began to experience what can only be described as “secret surveillance.” With that said, over to Cole himself of something that happened in 1997: “I had just got home after a Sunday night out. I had some stuff to dump in my office and didn’t switch the light on. I put the things down and just glanced out of the window. Well, outside my window there’s a street light and beneath this was a white van. At first I just registered that the van seemed out of place. You know what it’s like: you tend to recognize the various cars and vehicles in your own street. But then I thought: well, it wasn’t there when I came in ten minutes ago. Why is it outside my flat under the street light? As I looked at it, I noticed that on top of the van were these two, weird, silver domes one behind the other – as if they were a part of the roof, built in. I thought that was odd, particularly when it occurred to me that where they were parked was also right next to the telephone junction box.”

Cole continues: “At that point, I grabbed my camera and put the light on in the office. But as I did that, the van suddenly started up and went quickly down the road. Well, a couple of weeks later, the van turned up again. This time, I ran down the steps outside my flat and dashed into the road; and again the van started up and shot off. But it was enough for me to get details of the van’s registration and make, which was a Bedford. Then I set about trying to trace the van. It so happens that I got a friend, a retired police officer, to pass the details on to a serving officer who put the details through the police computer.”

‘Well, a few days passed. But on getting home one evening, I found a few messages on my answer-phone from [the retired police officer] in a very excited state. As it was about 11 o’clock at night, I thought: it’s too late to phone him now; I’ll give him a call tomorrow. I went to bed, but at 12.15, the ‘phone rang. It was him. He said: ‘That vehicle – you were right to be suspicious about it. The registration regarding who actually owns it is blocked, but the address that it’s registered to is a Ministry of Defense post office box in Wiltshire [England]. This was heavy stuff. But I’ve not seen the van since – and this was March 1997. But this was real proof that I was under some sort of surveillance.” Heavy stuff, it certainly was. In addition to detailing the story of how he began his investigations of the link between UFOs and GCHQ and the apparent surveillance of his activities, Robin Cole has an equally bizarre account to relate concerning the acquisition of the photograph of GCHQ that appears on the front cover of his GCHQ and the UFO Cover-Up report. Back to Cole:

“‘I rang GCHQ up and told them that I was a freelance writer. I said that I was working on a piece about GCHQ and the possibility of the staff there having their trade union rights restored – this was heavily in the news at the time. ‘Can I come along and take some photographs?’ I asked. GCHQ responded by saying that they wouldn’t allow that, but they did have their own photograph which they would allow me to use. Now, they didn’t say that right away; I had to ‘phone them on several occasions. Well, they wanted to post the photo to me, but I didn’t want them to do that because they’d have a record of my name and address. In response to that, I said that I needed the photo that day to finish the article. ‘Can I come and collect it?’ I asked. That was okay; they had no problems with me doing that. So, I jumped into a suit, walked up to the main gates and up to the security booth and said: ‘Hello, I’ve come to collect a photo.’ ‘Ah, you’re the journalist, aren’t you?’ the chap said, adding while pointing his finger: ‘You want to speak with those two guys sat over there in the white Rover.’

Aerial view of GCHQ

Cole reveals what happened next: “I walked over to this car, somebody presumably pressed a button and down came the electric window of the car. It looked like the classic spy scene! The guy in the passenger seat was just looking forwards and the other one was looking straight at me. I repeated: ‘I’ve come to collect a photo,’ and they passed me this brown envelope. I didn’t really know what to do at that point and just said: ‘Oh, thanks,’ and walked off and up went the window of the Rover with no further words said.” But, as Cole now explains: “Before I put my report on general release, I had proof-readers’ copies done for the members of the group – I only felt it was fair that the members knew about the information before anybody else. I’d like to know if the copy GCHQ have is a finished copy or a proofreaders’ copy. If they’ve got a proof, then I know that someone within our group handed it to them – which wouldn’t surprise me. As I said, we’ve got a few members in the group who work for GCHQ. Now, the only way that GCHQ could possibly have got hold of a finished copy, is to have got into my flat and taken a copy.”

But is that really feasible? Cole certainly thought it was. He said: ‘There have been a number of…well…I don’t like talking about it because people think that you’re losing the plot or getting paranoid. But, yes, there have been instances where things have gone missing, things have been moved, and I tend to have a set place for everything. I suppose the most significant thing is that, just after publication, I held the master-copy of the report in my flat, with the photographs – color photographs – all pasted up in an envelope on a shelf. I went out to do a new print-run about four weeks later, got the report out, and the photos had vanished. Luckily, I’d made back-up copies, which I’d disseminated to various people. I’m glad now that I did, because I hunted my flat high and low.”

As all of this demonstrates, when you dig deep into the UFO subject – as well as the issue of what government agencies know about the mystery – you may well become the subject of extreme surveillance. Be very careful…

What should you do if you see a UFO? Calmly take out your cell phone, steady yourself against a wall or stationary object, photograph or record it with audio details on when and where you are, point the UFO out to anyone else in the area so there are multiple witnesses, report it to the authorities, the media and UFO tracking societies, post on social media. There’s probably more things, but that’s a good list to start with.

Now, what do you do if you’re a military pilot who encounters a UFO? If your flag is the Japanese one, you now have a specific list of procedures to follow, courtesy of Japan’s Defense Minister Taro Kono, who released the procedures to the general public as well. Kono’s list for pilots in Japan’s Self-Defense Forces includes:

• Record on camera any such phenomenon they may detect.
• Analyze the UFO/UAP as much as possible.
• Collect similar reports and information from the public.
• Frankly speaking, I don’t believe in UFOs.

Defense Minister Taro Kono speaks during an interview in Tokyo on Sept. 3. Kono on Monday unveiled protocol for the Self-Defense Forces to follow for dealing with unidentified aerial objects that could pose a threat to Japan’s security.

REUTERS

Wait … what was that last item?

“No SDF [Self-Defence Force] pilot has encountered a UFO. The videos have come from the US Defence Department so I would like to hear their analysis. I don’t really believe in UFOs. We would like to establish procedures in the event an encounter takes place with a UFO.”

Back in April of 2020, Defense Minister Kono requested (demanded?) that the Pentagon share with him any and all things it has on UFOs above and beyond the Tic Tac videos from the Nimitz encounter, even though he himself doesn’t believe in UFOs. That demand by Kono led to a meeting with U.S. Secretary of Defense Mark T. Esper in August and the list of UFO encounter protocols in September. What does Kono now know that prompted him to release procedures for witnessing things he doesn’t think he’ll ever see for himself?

Can you hear the Japanese crickets?

What UFO?

Japan Times and The Mainichi appear to be the first media sites to report on Kono’s list (too soon to make it into a movie?) and they refer to a statement released by the Defense Minister, but an extensive search has failed to uncover it. That’s too bad because, unlike the still-secretive U.S. Defense Department, those of other countries have been more open about releasing UFO information and more progressive is setting up departments to deal with them. It would be nice for Japan to do the same – perhaps that might move the Pentagon to do more.

Can you hear the American crickets?

In the meantime, we have people in New Jersey posting UFO videos that send the Internet into a frenzy until a cursory investigation points out that the UFO is the Goodyear blimp. This is what happens when the pandemic shuts down live sporting events – no one remembers what the blimp looks like.

It’s time to hear more than crickets.