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.

RELATED VIDEOS, selected by peter2011

Some of the most outstanding and spectacular UFO encounters are those that leave behind some physical evidence or trace. This can take many forms, but typically it is very intriguing in that we have something left behind to remind us of their presence. This can sometimes be taken to extremes, and while UFOs mostly don’t cause a lot of damage there are those cases in which they cause chaos and collateral damage. Here we will look at some rare cases of when UFOs have, either intentionally or not, left behind devastation in the form of fire.

One of the stranger cases of a UFO connected to a fire comes to us from the country of South Africa. In September of 1965, two police constables by the names of John Lockem and Koos de Klerek were on patrol along the Pretoria-Bronkhorstspruit highway, and that evening started out as just a normal, mundane shift for them. As the lane lines flickered by in the night and the evening danced by, they were ready for this to be just another uneventful shift, but that would soon change. At around midnight, their quiet daydreaming was interrupted by something very odd blooming into the headlights from the murky gloom ahead. The startled two constables caught sight of some sort of metallic object that they at first took to be some vehicle stopped on the road, but it very quickly became apparent that this was no normal car or truck.

The thing in the road appeared to be a copper-colored, domed, disc-shaped object about 30 feet in diameter, and as they approached it at first just sat there silently. After a few seconds, before the two men could even really process what they were seeing or what was going on, the disc suddenly launched up at great velocity into the air, while copious jets of flame erupted from beneath it to light up the night. It looked as if the fire was spouting from two tubes underneath the craft, with the flames actually bouncing about three feet up in the air from the asphalt, and the heat was so intense that the highway purportedly actually caught fire and the officers were unable to get closer. This fire apparently went on for some time before it subsided enough for the two policemen to approach, and they found that the asphalt had actually melted, and that there was a caved in portion where something very heavy had been. The scorched area was reportedly around 6 feet in diameter, and the heat had been so formidable that the gravel had actually separated from the tar.

According to UFO researcher John Hall, the two constables reported the incident, but it was sort of brushed under the carpet by the government, with a Lt. Col. J.B. Brits, District Commandant of Pretoria North, saying the event was “of a highly secret nature and an inquiry is being conducted in top circles,” and that was that. There has been no other word on it since, and it was only briefly covered in an article for the Associated Press, Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1965 and later in English by NICAP in 1969. Adding to the mystery of it all is that there were supposedly samples taken from the site that were sent off to be analyzed, but results have never been forthcoming and nothing more has been released to the public.

At least in this case the fire left behind by the object was contained, but this doesn’t seem to always be the case. One Reddit user called “Echatoner” claims to be a firefighter working in Utah, and one call he got would be something he would never forget. He claims that he was called to a wildfire just south of Dugway Proving Grounds and as he and his crew sped off towards the emergency with a convoy of four trucks, they saw a formation of eight black military helicopters that fell in with them as if they were escorting them. This went on for about 10 miles before the helicopters veered away to fly off, and things would only get stranger from there. The witness says:

A little while later we are parked and about to start hiking to the fire line when suddenly a thin column of smoke shoots probably about two hundred feet into the sky, it was a good mile away but the concussion was pretty significant when it hit us and the noise was still ridiculously loud. We thought it was probably no big deal, we knew we were near a strike zone. A good five minutes later an aircraft like nothing I have ever seen flew by us at maybe five hundred feet. It was flat black and sort of rectangular but with fins and wells on the underside. It was moving pretty slow and was dead silent so I have to assume it was some sort of stealth glider. It sounds ridiculous but it immediately reminded me of a huge, flying bat mobile, Time Burton era.

After that some military personnel got on our radio frequency and instructed us to leave the area immediately, when our crew chief asked who it was and why they signed off and the Incident Commander (the guy in charge of managing the entire situation) came on the radios and said we were evacuating the area. They sent us to a completely different fire about a hundred miles to the south and never told us why except that it was higher priority which was bullshit, it was already out when we got there and we just assisted crews in the mop up operation. The thing that confuses me about this is that if the army didn’t want us to see that shit or if it was dangerous why didn’t they keep us clear of the area in the first place? Either a communications breakdown or they had a now shit situation going down and had to get us out of there without warning.

The witness came away with the impression that the strange craft he had seen had caused the fire and riled up the military, but beyond that it is all a mystery. Was this a UFO, some experimental aircraft, or what? What connection did it have to the fire? We will probably never know. In 2019 there was a massive wildfire at Katon-Karagay national park, in East Kazakhstan, which quickly enveloped an estimated 82.2 hectares of wilderness, and before long there were rumors that the blaze had been caused by a UFO. One Vladimir Sanarov, inspector of flying-industrial service KazAviaForestGuard, would say of this:

According to the witnesses who saw this falling unidentified flying object and filmed in on the phone cam, an object fell from the sky and caused fire. Firefighters didn’t manage to put it out immediately as the locality is difficult to approach, it took three days to extinguish the fire. Liquidation works are underway. The main task is to prevent repeated fire.

One of the main theories is that this was all due to a rocket stage falling to earth, but considering that there doesn’t seem to be much further information on this we are left to speculate. A similar incident that also went down in 2019 comes to us from the Chilean port city of Dalcahue on the island of Chiloé. On September 25, 2019, reports began to come in from frightened residents who claimed to have witnessed strange a red ball glowing in the sky, and many of these local witnesses insisted that the object was causing fires. Some even claimed that they had seen the object faltering and crashing into the wilderness. At least six wildfires broke out in the region during this flurry of UFO reports, and firefighters on the scene described how the areas were permeated by a strange smell and smoke that was “not smoke from material but rather from stone, like Sulphur.” Alejandro Verges, Director of Chile’s National Office of Emergencies of the Interior Ministry (ONEMI), made a statement, saying:

The fires are attributable to an object that, so far, has not been identified. There cannot be six sources of fire in a radius of 200 meters and all of them isolated. It’s like if small balls of fire have fallen. Some burnt the roots and others burned a little more. It is very strange.

The main idea at the time was that the fires and sightings had been caused by a meteorite or space debris, but no sign of either of these were turned up. In fact, a follow up investigation carried out by Chile’s National Service of Geology and Mining led them to rule out the possibility that this had been caused by a disintegrating meteorite after not a shred of space rock was turned up at any of the fire sites. Searches also didn’t turn up any signs of metal that could have been from a fallen satellite or other space junk, and the Chilean fires and the UFO reports surrounding them have remained mysterious.

Perhaps one of the most well-known incidents involving mysterious fires and talk of UFOs occurred between 2003 and 2005, in the area of Canneto di Caronia, Siciliy, in Italy. It started in December of 2003, when a local resident reported that his television had inexplicably sparked and exploded, followed by various unexplained fires spontaneously erupting throughout the home at all hours. Before long, other residents of the area were reporting the same thing, with cars, mattresses, beds, furniture, fuse boxes, air conditioners, kitchen appliances, computers, and even wedding presents bursting into flame for no discernible reason, all confined to one delineated area. Some of these fires would start in the same place over and over again, and at least one witness said that his TV had caught fire on five separate occasions. In more serious cases, entire homes were burned to the ground by the mystery blazes, and these fires continued even after the utilities company cut power to the neighborhood. From January to March of 2004 a total of 92 fires were reported, and in none of the cases were officials able to find a rational cause. It was causing a panic, and 39 residents would be evacuated from the area during the scare, all fueled by strange reports of the flames acting oddly, appearing to move almost with purpose or jump place to place.

In the meantime, an interdisciplinary research group coordinated by Francesco Venerando Mantegna from the Sicilian Protezione Civile, reportedly found evidence of unusual electromagnetic activity in places where the fires had broken out, as well as strange reports of unexplained lights in the sky and a helicopter that experienced allegedly anomalous rotor damage. This soon had frightened locals whispering rumors of the fires being caused by ghosts, witches, demons, secret U.S. military tests of radiation weapons or “Tesla technology,” and of course UFOs, only further fueled by sightings of strange lights in the sky at the same time the fires were going on. The mayor of the town explained it as the result of “unknown electromagnetic radiation,” and one government report supposedly read that the blazes were “caused by a high power electromagnetic emissions which were not man-made and reached a power of between 12 and 15 gigawatts,” but no one knew for sure. One ufologist by the name of Nigel Watson would say of the fires and their connection to possible alien forces:

Spontaneous combustion of electrical appliances or interference with them is often associated with UFO sightings. There are literally hundreds of cases of cars stalling and their electrical systems being messed up in the presence of UFOs.’ In the town of Caronia, northern Sicily, there was a spate of appliances, machines, mattresses and electrical wiring suddenly bursting into flame. Geophysicists and electrical experts were puzzled by this phenomenon, but the villagers noted that this was an area that was suffering from a high concentration of UFO sightings.

What was going on here? It was eventually thought to be the work of arsonists, but no one was ever arrested and fire authorities never were able to explain how the fires had started. Curiously, the phenomenon would return to the area in 2014, and this time an arsonist named Giuseppe Pezzino was arrested, but it is unknown what connection this has to the 2003-2005 mystery fires. What happened at Canneto di Caronia? It is uncertain just how true any of these cases are, or if UFOs really were involved or not, but they serve to make us think, and show us that not all supposed alien encounters are of the benevolent variety. What was going on here? Who knows? They will likely never be solved for sure, and they serve to add more to the lore of this very strange phenomenon.

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

It’s one thing to see a UFO. It’s quite another to see a 100-foot UFO in a daytime confrontation with military jets and get decent photographs of the encounter. It’s not surprising that a government in possession of said photos would be unwilling to release them it’s frustrating that said government would ignore a commitment to release them to the public after 30 years, and then not only renege on said commitment but vow to keep them hidden for another 50 years. That’s not the plot of a paranormal thriller but a real-life drama going on the UK right now as the infamous photos of a diamond-shaped UFO hovering over Calvine, Scotland, in 1990 were scheduled to be released in January 2021 but have been locked up again for 50 more years. Is it because this the smoking gun? The holy grail of UFO photos? The proof that we’re not alone? The thing that would change I-want-to-believers into believers?

“I soon got the story out of my predecessor and read the file myself. It was an extraordinary tale: two men had been out hiking near Calvine in Scotland.

Suddenly, they’d seen a massive UFO hanging in the sky above their heads, silent, motionless and menacing. Awestruck, they shot off six photographs before the object accelerated away at immense speed – vertically!

The shell-shocked witnesses sent the photos to a Scottish newspaper and a journalist contacted the MoD press office, looking for a comment.

Somehow – perhaps using a D-Notice or perhaps using some real-life Men-in-Black trickery – someone at the MoD managed to extract all the photos and the negatives from the newspaper, who never got them back.”

Nick Pope, the former Ministry of Defence official who ran its UFO project, told the story of the Calvine UFO to The Sun – a story he had intimate on-the-job knowledge of and could still not disclose everything due to its classified status.

“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.”

The incident was downplayed by the Defence Ministry and the photos were never returned to the witnesses, who said they also saw RAF jets flying at a lower altitude as the UFO sped off. Pope says he helped colorize the photos (and had one made into a poster, which was later confiscated) but the department was never able to explain them. That probably still holds true, but is that a sufficient reason to lock them up for 50 more years? The authorities in this case are the National Archives. A Freedom of Information Act complaint about this new action has been filed and is under investigation by the Information Commissioner’s Office — the UK information watchdog. As always no comments by the National Archives nor the Ministry of Defence.

Will anything happen? It’s pretty doubtful. Nick Pope sticks to his policy of refusing to reveal classified information, and that’s probably a good plan considering the UK government is playing hardball. Does Tom DeLonge have any pull across the pond? He doesn’t have that much in his own pond.

We ALL want to believe.

Nick Pope had his “I want to believe” Calvine poster forcibly removed. Fox Mulder has never been able to update his. Are those signs of our chances for disclosure on the Calvine UFO files? On ANY X-Files? Perhaps Dana Scully can provide some hope.

“We do our work. The truth still lies in the X-Files, Mulder.”

Over the last week I’ve written several articles here that are focused on the Majestic 12 documents, Stan Friedman’s FBI file, espionage, counterintelligence, and disinformation. Most of it revolves around secret documents, leaked papers, spies and UFOs. And with the Russians poking their collective nose in too – but for reasons that, to this very day, still remain unclear. All of that brings us to another part of the story; a part that many of you may not be aware of. When, in the late 1980s, the story of the Majestic 12 documents got more and more complicated and multi-layered, Bill Moore – the co-author with Charles Berlitz of The Roswell Incident – quite reasonably tried to get his hands on his FBI file – if such a thing existed. It turns out that such a file did exist. It has to be said that it would have been a huge surprise if there wasn’t such a file on Moore, given all that had gone down with regard to crashed UFOs, bodies of aliens on ice, the FBI connection, and allegedly leaked top secret papers on extraterrestrial life. On November 16, 1988 – when the FBI’s investigation of the Majestic 12 papers was at its height – UFO investigator Larry Bryant approached the Center for National Security Studies.

Bryant explained that Moore was looking to try and obtain his FBI file and determine what it contained. There was a good reason for this: Moore had already been able to determine that a file existed on him, which at the time, ran close to sixty pages; but he was having trouble getting the papers declassified. Moore’s file got lengthier when the FBI’s Majestic 12 probe got ever more complicated, something that is hardly a surprise. Notably, some of the documents on Moore, the man himself learned, fell under the “B1” category of the Freedom of Information Act. Rather notably, B1 covers U.S. national security issues. That was quite a revelation. For Moore, though, not necessarily a good revelation.  In a proactive fashion, and with regard to Moore’s file, Bryant put together an ad for publication in various military-themed publications. The ad was titled “UFO Secrecy/Congress-Watch.” It revealed that Moore’s FBI file was officially classified at a “Secret” level, and that it demonstrated another agency, beyond the FBI, was also watching Moore. The ad was published on November 23, 1988 in The Pentagram, an official U.S. Army publication. Bryant, in the ad, suggested those reading it should demand a congressional hearing in relation to the UFO phenomenon. Despite Bryan’s gung-ho approach, and help and advice from the Center for National Security Studies, Moore only managed to secure a small portion of his file.

One year later, 1989, Bryant tried to get a hold of any and all files that the FBI might have had on yet another figure in the Majestic 12 story: Stanton Friedman. The FBI got back to Bryant on August 2: “Mr. Friedman is the subject of one Headquarters main file. This file is classified in its entirety and I am affirming the denial of access to it.” Attempts to determine the length and the scope of the file fell flat. So, on August 28, Bryant filed a suit in the District Court for the Eastern District of Columbia. He said: “My complaint seeks full disclosure of the UFO-related content of the FBI dossier on Stan Friedman. Neither Stan nor I have been able to convince the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation to loosen its grasp on that dossier, which Bureau officials assert bears a security classification.” Today, we know that the Friedman file is not too exciting at all. As this article demonstrates – combined with those I’ve written over the past few days – in the latter part of the 1980s, a great deal was going on behind the scenes in relation to Russians, FBI files, ufologists, and disinformation programs (such as the one that brought Paul Bennewitz down). Guess what? The story still isn’t over.