UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

The UFO phenomenon has many aspects that are all increasingly weirder than the last. It is often difficult to ascertain just what we are dealing with, and such accounts can really run the range from the merely odd to the downright absurd. Among all of these reports one can find certain strings of reports that don’t seem to really fit into any particular mold, and definitely one of these was a strange flap of anomalous green fireballs that appeared over a period of a couple of years over New Mexico, in the United States, which are mostly an obscure oddity but which still have never been solved.

The strange phenomena known as the “green fireballs” can best be tracked back to December 5, 1948, when a USAF C-47 transport plane crew was on their way from Lowry Air Force Base, Colorado, to Williams Air Force Base in Chandler, Arizona. It had been a fairly routine flight until they got near Las Vegas and observed an eerie green light described as a “green ball of fire” illuminating the sky to the west of the city, followed by another not long after. At around the same time, another plane in the vicinity reported the same thing, describing it as pale green with a pale green trail, and saying that the light seemed to be coming towards them, fast enough that they took evasive maneuvers to avoid a collision. The crew at first thought it might be a meteorite but they dismissed this due to the fact that the object was too low to the ground and not moving fast enough. One pilot would say of the object:

Take a soft ball and paint it with some kind of fluorescent paint that will glow a bright green in the dark… Then have someone take the ball out about 100 feet in front of you and about 10 feet above you. Have him throw the ball right at your face, as hard as he can throw it. That’s what a green fireball looks like.

Image by Steve Baxter

Interestingly, while it was mostly thought that this was clearly a meteorite, when a Dr. Lincoln LaPaz, head of the University of New Mexico’s Institute of Meteoritics was sent to the area where it was believed the object should have fell based on its reported flight path there was no sign of any impact and no trace of a meteorite. On December 8, 1948, sightings of these strange green lights would continue, when a Beech T-7 on its way from Kirkland AFB to Las Vegas when the pilot and co-pilot saw a brilliant green light about 2,000 ft above them, which was headed their way at high speed and with a trajectory described as “flat and parallel to the ground.” The researcher LaPaz would once again step in to investigate and learn that there had been several other sightings of these green balls of light, all of them near the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and Sandia atomic-weapons laboratory, as well as at other key military and sensitive installations in the region such as radar stations, nuclear reactors, and fighter-interceptor bases around the country. Why? No one knows.

Making it all rather intriguing was that most of these sightings were being made by trained observers and reliable witnesses such as pilots, weather observers, scientists, intelligence officers and other military personnel, who were unlikely to be making this all up or making mistakes as to what they were seeing. During his investigation LaPaz was also unable to uncover any evidence of meteorite activity, nor that there had been ever any rocket or flare tests in the areas where these sightings were taking place during those time frames. He also was beginning to doubt the meteorite theory by this point, because of the horizontal trajectories of the objects and the fact that green was not considered to be a usual color for meteorites, with him saying of the strange phenomenon:

The fireballs are Kelly green, whereas meteors are red, yellow, blue, or white. A green color could be caused by large amounts of copper, but this element is rarely found in ordinary fireballs. It could also originate from certain man-made atomic fuels. They make no noise. None of the observers of green fireballs, nor persons in the area of the balls, have report any sound whatsoever. Also the fact that they disappear and no fragments have been found on the earth, may be evidence that their flight is controlled.

Sightings of the strange green balls of fire would continue coming in over the coming month, with LaPaz himself seeing one of them on December 12th near Santa Fe that due to its perfectly horizontal trajectory, color, speed, and the way it wobbled convinced him this was no meteor. He would later ascertain that the object had passed directly over the Los Alamos laboratory and had been seen by several other witnesses in the area. A particularly spectacular sighting was made on December 20, when a patrol at Los Alamos observed several luminescent green lights descend rapidly at an angle of 45 degrees, only to then level off and continue on a horizontal pathway out of sight. On this occasion there was even mention made of what looked like an exhaust trail, similar to that of a rocket. Making it more curious is that when these sightings were reported the Air Force was quick to keep it all under wraps, even going as far as to halt the press release on the incident because of “pressure from other agencies also investigating this occurrence.” The story still managed to get out, and in a Feb 29, 1949 edition of the local newspaper Skyliner it was written of the secrecy:

A call to El Paso, Tex., brought official denial from D. K. Brown, head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation district that embraces Los Alamos, that his agency had not been called to deal with the matter. At the information or thought-control office officials indicated that they knew about the recurring green flame in the sky but indicated that it wouldn’t be wise to write about it. Capt. Carroll Tyler, project manager, said simply that all he knew about the lights was rumor — the same rumors that everyone is hearing.

Why was there so much official denial over these sightings? Who knows? Sightings would continue into the next year, when there were more reports into January. One notable account occurred on January 30, 1949, when an extremely bright green fireball was observed over New Mexico by over one hundred witnesses, including trained military personnel, oil workers, aircrew, control tower personnel, all of who described the same thing and noted that the object was completely silent. Sightings would keep on coming in right on into the following year, when pilot Captain A. Harvey and co-pilot Merrick C. Marshall saw a green fireball as they were approaching Albuquerque from Gallup, New Mexico. The Dec. 18, 1950 edition of the Albuquerque Journal would say of the encounter:

The two flyers reported that the light first appeared in the northeast, approximately over Las Vegas. They watched the light for ten minutes, they said, as it moved in the direction of Las Alamos. During that time the “greenish fireball” seemed to circle Los Alamos and then head directly toward Albuquerque. In turning, the light changed from green to a very bright white and passed over and to the rear of their plane — then near Albuquerque — at an estimated speed of over “700 miles an hour.” The time when the light was first sighted was at exactly 11:25 p.m. It remained in view until 11:35. Both pilots are experienced airmen and said it could not possibly have been another plane.

After this the sightings of the green fireballs sort of peter out and we are left to search for answers. Theories have abounded as to what could have caused the 1948-1950 green fireball flap of the Southwest. The meteor theory was largely put to rest by LaPaz, who could find no evidence whatsoever that meteorites were to blame and also pointed out time and time again that the objects displayed very uncharacteristic features for meteorites. Another idea is that it was caused by the phenomenon called ball lightning, which is in itself little understood and entails hovering orbs of electricity that appear and then blink out of existence. Still other ideas are that this was evidence of top secret aircraft or rocket tests, fallout-debris clouds associated with top-secret atomic testing, or Soviet spy technology, which might explain why they were always seen near these government installations. Of course there is also the idea that these were UFOs or even probes dropped from larger alien spacecraft. What was at the heart of the deluge of green fireball accounts reported by so many during this time span? Was this meteors, atmospheric phenomena, or visitors from another world? We didn’t know then, and we don’t know now. It remains a mystery.

Africa is not typically known by the mainstream for its UFO reports, but it is certainly ground zero for some of the strangest. It began as a calm, peaceful day at Ariel School in the small rural farming community of Ruwa, Zimbabwe, where on September 16, 1994 62 of the school children ranging in age from 5 to 12 years old and of mixed ethnic heritage were out playing in the playground during their break time as their teachers had a school meeting indoors. The air was filled with laughter and merriment, but this was soon to change to gasps of alarm when something very strange materialized out of the unknown. What would transpire next has become one of the most interesting UFO encounters to come out of the continent of Africa, and which has never really been satisfactorily explained.

There was allegedly a bright flash in the sky, and when the children looked up in bafflement, approaching the school were three or four silvery, disc-like objects with what appeared to be lit portals around their edges. These mysterious objects reportedly would vanish and reappear some distance away several times, suggesting that they were either moving very fast or teleporting, before one of the objects began to descend, following some electrical lines towards a brush choked patch of overgrown feral land adjacent to the school grounds, where it eerily descended to disappear behind the gnarled trees and tangled underbrush. At this point the kids were enthralled by what they were seeing, and one of the witnesses would later say of the object:

This thing, whatever it was, was beautiful. It had a circular-shaped bright light as the leader, and behind it were tails of light in beautiful colors: green, orange, and yellow. It moved slowly and looked as if it was just above the house. The amazing thing is that it moved absolutely silently.

The area into which the craft had come down in was off limits to the children, fenced off because it was deemed to be too dangerous, but they pressed as close as they could to this tangle of undergrowth and its barrier to peer within, and they saw only about 100 yards away the mysterious object. It was described as either sitting upon the gnarled weeds or hovering slightly over them, and at this point it still generated amazement in the gawking children. Yet this would change into alarm when the craft seemed to open to disgorge two strange beings, which were described as very thin, frail even, with slender neck and very large, outsized almond shaped, slanting black bug eyes, and dressed in tight-fitting shiny black and silver one-piece suits of some sort. Some witnesses would later say that the entities also possessed long, straight, black hair upon their heads. The enigmatic beings silently approached the children, although some of them would report having received telepathic contact during the encounter. One witness named Emily Trim would later explain of her version of events, saying:

All I can tell you is that two beings were hopping along beside Lisa and I. And … they were curious. They weren’t touching the ground [inaudible] … they were almost like mimicking us. All of a sudden they were in front of us. I describe them as being about arm’s reach. And we were frozen. Telepathic images started going across my face … communication through the eyes … that’s all I can really describe it as. It was just image after image after image. Those thoughts came from the man – the man’s eyes. One of the other girls standing beside me, she got more communication about the environment, and, for me, mine was more technology uses and [inaudible] uses of technology.

For many of the children, especially the younger ones, their astonishment and awe was turning to outright fear, and some of them began crying and screaming as these otherworldly beings frolicked and cavorted about. The creatures then apparently just vanished into thin air, after which the craft rose above the trees and shot off into the distance to leave them awestruck. The children then ran back to the school in a panic and explained the bizarre series of events to the adults, who were at first apprehensive and not a little skeptical about it all. The children were then asked to separately draw pictures of what they had seen, and spookily what was depicted on paper was eerily the same across the board. It was at this point that the adults began to believe that perhaps something really unexplainable had happened out on that rural schoolyard, and that it was not merely the imaginations of a bunch of scared kids.

One of the alien sketches

The incident began making the rounds in the news, helped along by local African UFO researcher Cynthia Hind, and when word got out into the open it attracted the attention of eminent American Harvard psychiatrist, Cambridge Hospital physician, and Pulitzer prize winning author Dr. John E. Mack, who made his way all the way to Zimbabwe to do an investigation. Along with Hind, Mack would spend several days meticulously interviewing witnesses and perusing the sketches the children had made, and they were both impressed with the calm sincerity with which these children told their tales. They came to the distinct conclusion that the kids at least truly believed that this had all happened, and that these were reliable witnesses, made even more remarkable due to the fact that many of these rural children had never even heard of UFOs before. Mack would become convinced that they were telling the truth, whatever that meant, and would say:

[The children] experienced a very powerful encounter with these beings and we’re left with a rather disturbing fact that this seems to be what it is and it seems to have no other psychiatric explanation. I would never say, yes, there are aliens taking people. [But] I would say there is a compelling powerful phenomenon here that I can’t account for in any other way. Yet I can’t know what it is but it seems to me that it invites a deeper, further inquiry.

This was pretty remarkable because Mack was far from some crackpot, being a highly respected psychiatrist at the top of his field, but it seems that it may have been detrimental to his career as his peers, who did not share his view that this was a real UFO event. Indeed, others in the psychiatric field looked upon the whole thing with raised eyebrows at best, and sheer scorn at worst, with one Paul McHugh of Johns Hopkins Medical School calling Mack, “a brilliant fellow who occasionally loses it, and this time he’s lost it big time.” It probably didn’t help that Mack had written a book on alien abductions called, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens, which had also somewhat tarnished his credibility among his peers and caused him to be labelled as a bit out there. It got to the point that Mack was actually investigated by a committee looking into whether he was really fit to provide clinical care and investigation for these people, the first time a tenured Harvard professor had ever been subjected to such an inquiry. Mack would say of the letter he received from the dean informing him of this:

One of the deans at the Harvard Medical School handed me a letter that called for the establishment of a small committee to investigate my work [on the alien abduction phenomenon]. After explaining vaguely that ‘concerns’ had been expressed to the university about what I was doing (although he told of no specific complaint, nor was any offered in the letter), he added pleasantly – for he had been a friend and colleague – that I would not have gotten into trouble if I had not suggested in the book [Abduction] that my findings might require a change in our view of reality, rather than saying that I had found a new psychiatric syndrome whose cause had not yet been established.

Mack would later be found by the Dean to be clear and free to “study what he wishes and to state his opinions without impediment.” Sadly, Mack would die in 2004 after being hit by a drunk driver in London, but his work lives on, and remains some of the best and deepest ever done into the Ariel School UFO encounter. In 2007, filmmaker Randall Nickerson travelled to Zimbabwe to make a documentary on the incident, interviewing witnesses further and sort of carrying on the torch from Mack’s work, yet it has still become a mostly rather obscure and forgotten case.

As for the witnesses themselves, it is interesting to note that even all of these years later, now adults, they still remember vividly that day and continue to stand by their stories. It is a remarkable case in that all of these kids, across ages and cultural and ethnic divides, managed to give the same exact story and stick with it well into adulthood when the case had already come and gone in the public conciousness. Along with the intrepid research of Hind and Mack, both of whom expressed genuine intrigue and cited the believability of the accounts, it certainly seems to be an obscure report that is deserving of consideration. No matter what happened on that day, the Ariel School incident had remained a little-known, but very pervasive UFO account in African UFO lore, and remains discussed to this day.