Of all of the UFO sightings and encounters on record, very few can claim to have been witnessed by more than a few people at a time at best. These are typically very isolated incidents, seen by only small groups of people at most, and this has only further served to generate doubt on the part of skeptics or for those who place no veracity on UFO phenomena as a whole. Yet, every once in a while there is a truly spectacular case of a mass sighting that gets plenty of documentation and exposure, and perhaps one of the most well-known, classic accounts of this occurred in 1997, when thousands of people witnessed something unexplainable in the dark skies over the U.S. state of Arizona.

What has gone on to become one of the most well-known and oft-discussed and debated mass UFO sightings in history is widely accepted as having started on March 13, 1997 in the skies over Henderson, Nevada, in the United States. Here a witness claimed that at approximately 6:55 PM he saw a large, V-shaped object about the same size as a passenger airliner with a formation of six lights along it front edge, which flew across the sky at a good clip with a sort of whooshing noise to disappear to the southeast. This same object would soon after be witnessed by a police officer from Paulden, Arizona at around 8:15 PM, who said that he saw a triangular formation of four mysterious lights trailed by a fifth, and claimed to have watched the strange sight through his binoculars as they travelled south.

This would be the beginning of one of the most famous UFO cases there is. Before long there were sightings coming in of something strange in the sky coming in from the area of Prescott, Arizona and the Prescott Valley. Many of the witnesses at the time described it as solid, blocking out the stars and the sky as it passed over, and it was mostly explained as being rather enormous. One witness who saw the boomerang-shaped object said it was massive, at least a mile wide, stating:

We don’t have anything that big. It was totally silent. I’ve never seen anything even close to the colors from the exhaust that propelled that thing. It was as big as downtown Prescott and completely blocked out the stars.

The object or objects was usually described as being a V-shaped or wedge-shaped formation of red or orange lights, with the leading light being a bright white, usually said to be embedded within a solid object but descriptions varied, and they were sometimes claimed to be separate lights moving independently. At the time there were dozens of witnesses from all ages and walks of life observing it as it made its way inexorably towards Phoenix to the southeast. The lights were also seen from the nearby town of Dewey, around 10 miles away, and as they drew closer to the greater Phoenix area there would be a deluge of people seeing whatever it was that had come in from out of the unknown.

The phenomenon reached Phoenix at around 8:30 PM, after which it hovered around the area for around two hours, being seen by thousands of people in the process. During this time it seems that there were actually two separate events going on over the region at the same time, with one being the massive V-shaped group of lights moving through the air, and a second formation of lights south of Phoenix that seemed to be stationary or moving very slowly. These lights, which wuld go on to collectively be known as the “Phoenix Lights,” were seen by people from all walks of life, including police officers, pilots, military personnel, and even the governor, none of who could come up with any explanation for what was going on. While most of the reports described some massive solid object, an interesting aspect of it all is that witness descriptions of the phenomena tended to vary to quite a wide degree, of which UFOlogist Peter B. Davenport has said:

Witnesses were reporting such markedly different objects and events that night that it was difficult for investigators to understand what was taking place. Some witnesses reported five lights, others seven, or even more. Some reported that the lights were distinctly orange or red, whereas others reported distinctly white or yellow lights. Many reported the lights were moving across the sky at seemingly high speed, whereas others reported they moved at a slow (angular) velocity, or they even hovered for several minutes.

An image of the Phoenix Lights

The objects were being seen all over the place at the time, seen in places as far away as Las Vegas, New Mexico, and northern Mexico, always inspiring awe and dread. In the meantime, the media didn’t really seem to show much interest in it, and officials seemed to treat it as a big joke, with Arizona Governor Fife Symington III holding a press conference on the situation flanked by an aide wearing an alien costume. However, when the story hit USA Today it blew up into national news, appearing all over newspapers and TV shows. The USA Today piece was quite sensational, including the line, “The incident over Arizona was the most dramatic I’ve seen. . . . What we have here is the real thing. They are here,” and people ate it up. Before long the Phoenix lights were being talked about and widely discussed all over the nation, with theories being thrown about as to what the phenomena could have been, which is made somewhat complicated by the fact that it seems that there were two separate phenomena going on at the same time, the large moving object and the hovering lights.

One of the main ideas put forward was that at least the second event concerning the stationary lights was simply flares dropped by the military during a nighttime training exercise, but this has been challenged by many. Curiously one of the main opponents of the flare theory was the governor himself, who would end up later changing his tune entirely, claiming to have seen the lights himself, and he would say of this:

As a pilot and a former Air Force Officer, I can definitively say that this craft did not resemble any man made object I’d ever seen. And it was certainly not high-altitude flares because flares don’t fly in formation. It was enormous and inexplicable. Who knows where it came from? A lot of people saw it, and I saw it too. It was dramatic. And it couldn’t have been flares because it was too symmetrical. It had a geometric outline, a constant shape. I’m a pilot and I know just about every machine that flies. It was bigger than anything that I’ve ever seen. It remains a great mystery.

Symington also found it odd that his attempts to get more information from the government on what was going out out there were shot down with basically “no comment,” and that no government agency had made any effort to seriously investigate. Another opponent of the flare theory was UFO enthusiast Jim Dilettoso, who claimed that he had done a full spectral analysis of the lights in one of the videos and determined that they could not have possibly come from a manmade source. However, considering that such an analysis on video footage images would be inaccurate, this had been criticized as an incomplete analysis at best. It has also been pointed out that the wind direction and speed at the time were consistent with flares as to the movement seen with the pattern of lights, which also supports the flare theory, as does the fact that the lights seemed to dip over the horizon and disappear, very much as flares would do. With regards to at least this aspect of the event, even UFOlogists have conceded that it could have been flares in this case.

Photo of the Phoenix Lights

The first event, which covers that huge, light studded craft moving over the state and blocking out the stars, has been more difficult to explain. Skeptics say that it was just a formation of high altitude aircraft flying in formation on a classified mission, the blackened sky just an illusion. This has been corroborated by amateur astronomer Mitch Stanley, who claims that on the night of the incident he had observed the large V-shaped craft through a telescope to find that it was unambiguously aircraft, specifically a formation of five planes that were either A-10s or possibly T-37 fighter-trainers. However, many of the thousands of witnesses have denied that this could have been the case, the planes were apparently not picked up on radar, and the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson did not assert that they had any aircraft in the air at the time. In the end, it all remains a curious oddity, of which one investigator with the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) has said:

Do we have evidence that it was an extraterrestrial event? No. We have evidence that it was an extremely bizarre event. We can’t put a label on it other than it was an anomaly.

Interestingly, there have been reemergences of the lights in later years that have been explained as flares. On February 6, 2007, almost exactly the same thing was seen over Phoenix and military officials were quick to admit that it was flares they had dropped, and on April 21, 2008, there was another wave of sightings of the lights, this time found to be flares attached to balloons. Yet, the sightings that remain the most well known is the original 1997 incident, and whatever was behind it all, the Phoenix Lights have continued to have a place among the greatest, most extensively seen and documented UFO sightings ever, and still remain mostly a mystery.

In an interview with New York Magazine, U.S. Navy pilot Chad Underwood finally came forward for the first time and spoke about his encounter with the infamous tic-tac shaped UFO that was filmed off the coast of California in 2004. The incident has been widely recognized as the “Nimitz UFO encounter”.

The bizarre footage of the unidentified flying object was captured on Underwood’s radar pod on the F/A-18 Super Hornet that he was flying that day. As for why it took fifteen years for Underwood to come forward with his story, he said that “at no point did I want to speculate as to what I thought this thing was – or be associated with, you know, ‘alien beings’ and ‘alien aircraft’ and all that stuff. I’m like, ‘No. I do not want to be part of that community.’”

He did, however, admit to seeing something very mysterious and unexplained that day back in November of 2004. “It is just what we call a UFO. I couldn’t identify it. It was flying. And it was an object. It’s as simple as that,” he said. Part of the reason why the encounter was so bizarre was that the object was flying at approximately 50,000 before suddenly dropping down to around a hundred feet above sea level in just a few seconds without making a sonic boom or expelling any exhaust plumes. He added that the craft had “no method of propulsion that was keeping it airborne: no wings, no heat, keeping it airborne or aloft.”

One of the many theories circulating is that they witnessed a bird, but Underwood said that it’s not possible. “You don’t see birds at 5,000 or 10,000 or 20,000 feet. That’s just not how birds operate,” he explained.

As for the theory that it was a top-secret military test craft, Underwood claimed that if it was a test aircraft, he had the clearance to know about it. “You know, I’ve got top-secret clearance with a ton of special-project clearances. So, it’s not like I wasn’t cleared to know. But, as I’m sure you’ve found in your research, to have clearance to know something, you have to have both the clearance that it’s elevated to and you have to have the ‘need to know’ it. And, clearly, whatever it was, if it was a government project, I did not need to know.”

In addition to that, there is no known aircraft on this planet that could have maneuvered in that manner. “The thing that stood out to me the most was how erratic it was behaving. And what I mean by ‘erratic’ is that its changes in altitude, air speed, and aspect were just unlike things that I’ve ever encountered before flying against other air targets,” he said, adding, “Because, aircraft, whether they’re manned or unmanned, still have to obey the laws of physics. They have to have some source of lift, some source of propulsion. The Tic Tac was not doing that. It was going from like 50,000 feet to, you know, a hundred feet in like seconds, which is not possible.”

The entire interview that New York Magazine conducted with Chad Underwood can be read in full here.

So, what exactly was the tic-tac shaped object? Nobody seems to know and the military even spent weeks attempting to figure out for themselves what Underwood and his co-workers saw that day. The mystery continues…

2019 was a year full of UFOlogical developments, especially in the way the phenomenon is being treated by mainstream media. With great fanfare Tom DeLonge’s To the Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences (TTSA) released their six-part TV series Unidentified on the History Channel during the summer; which not only showcased the testimony of Commander David Fravor, and other Navy pilots who have encountered unknown aerial objects during exercise missions on both coasts of the United States, but also explored other military encounters with UFOs –like the famous Rendlesham forest incident.

The narrative TTSA is trying to construct seems pretty clear: Whatever they are and wherever they come from, UFOs (or UAPs, as it is the new PC way to address the subject) constitute a threat. Not only because their aerodynamic capabilities far surpass those of the most advanced jet fighters in the world –which give them carte blanche to intrude into the restricted airspace of the most sensitive installations with total impunity– but also due to the deleterious effect which can be suffered by being directly exposed to these objects. To illustrate this the producers of Unidentified interviewed John Borrows, one of the main witnesses in the Rendlesham incident, who has suffered from a series of serious medical problems which seem directly related to his close encounter in December of 1980.

Yes, the literature is full of numerous cases in which witnesses suffered temporary or permanent health problems caused by exposure to the UFO phenomenon, and those problems range from the very mild ones –skin burns, nausea and irritated eyes– to the life-threatening ones on very rare occasions –like the Cash-Landrum incident, in which one of the witnesses developed cancer (Betty Cash) and eventually died as a result of it. But is that always the case?

As it turns out, UFO researchers also have in their files plenty of cases in which a close encounter proved beneficial to the witness; not only  for having the chance of experiencing something which only a rare minority of individuals have encountered firsthand within their lifetimes –and due to the mind-expanding potential of such experiences– but also because in those cases the witness found him- or herself cured of some illness or health condition, by a process which can only be described as miraculous for lack of a better term.

Let us now examine three cases of UFO-induced healings:

Jaume (Jacques) Bordas

The fascinating story of Jaume Bordas Blas was first publicized by Spanish researcher Antonio Ribera in 1971, and was subsequently picked up by Jacques Vallee who included it in Messengers of Deception. Bordas was born on July 20, 1911, and for most of his childhood he was a weakling sick boy; a hormonal deficiency (possibly thyroid related) caused him to suffer from serious weight problems, and his pituitary condition also resulted in slow mental development and impaired attention at school. 

One night, when he was 12 years old, Bordas felt the sudden and inexplicable urge to climb to the terrace, where he saw a wondrous vision: A group of small, triangular objects that looked to him like little planes were flying all around, across the sky. Three of the craft –which measured less than nine feet in length– landed near him; one of them opened up like a fan and from it emerged a being no bigger than the young boy, wearing a white suit and a bright white mantle. The entity said this to Bordas:

We have come to see you, because we have taken you under our protection. We know how much you suffer, and we know your dream of becoming a strong man, an athlete. You will realize it, with our help; you will be strong, not only physically but mentally, too. Now that we have adopted you, we will never forsake you. In the future we will come back to you again. In the meantime, as a token of friendship, take this.

The little being showed Bordas what looked like a square piece of dark candy, and told the boy to eat it completely for this would be the beginning of a new life for him. Bordas had obviously never heard of the warnings included in my pal Joshua Cutchin’s book A Trojan Feast (“never accept any food from fairies!”) because he did as he was told; the being went back to his ‘airplane’ and the three objects flew away. The next morning Bordas woke up with a strange taste of tar in his mouth, which showed the amazing encounter had not been a dream.

Jaume Bordas

And if the boy needed further confirmation, the proof came during the next four years as he went through a seemingly impossible physical transformation: he lost all the extra weight and grew to be incredibly strong. His mind had also been equally fortified and he developed a curiosity for scientific topics and mountains; eventually Bordas became an expert mountain climber and accomplished many feats, including being the first Spaniard to climb to the top of the Aiguille Verte in the French Alps, in 1934. In 1937 he crossed the Grand Jura and ascended Grand Chervoz.

Just like the little man had forewarned Bordaz, he had other enigmatic encounters with non-human entities during his lifetime, which we will cover in a future article. Suffice it to say the man lived to be 100 years old –maybe not all fairy food is bad, after all!

“Doctor X” (Pierre Gueymard)

Here’s another remarkable case that was known to English-speaking UFOlogists thanks to the work of Jacques Vallee, who learned of it from his mentor Aimé Michel (Michel used the pseudonym “Doctor X” to protect the witness’s identity, but this year Vallee published Forbidden Science Vol. 4 in which his real name was disclosed). Gueymard was born in 1930 and had a successful medical career which allowed him a comfortable life in a large French villa located on a hillside, where he lived with his wife and fourteen-month-old-son. 

It was the baby’s crying which actually woke Gueymard up during the night of November 2, 1968. The man went over to check on the child, walking with some difficulty since three days prior he had suffered a nasty injury in one of his legs, while cutting wood with an ax. His son’s room was dark, except from some bright flashes coming from the window despite the close shutters; the baby was fully awake and pointing toward the window from his crib, yet Gueymard paid no immediate attention to whatever could be transpiring outside his home, and gave the restless toddler a bottle of milk. Later the doctor stepped into a balcony, to witness the most fantastic spectacle he’d seen in his entire life.

From his privileged vantage point Gueymard observed two large, identical disks with a silver-white top, while their bottom sections were glowing with the color of the setting sun. The saucers were perfectly horizontal, and were casting a bright white beam directly beneath them onto the ground; a tall vertical antenna was on top of each object, and on the side they both had a shorter, horizontal antenna from which small sparks started to appear once the disks started to slowly move close to one another.

If that wasn’t incredible enough, what happened next could test the credulity of even the most open-minded UFO believer: the two objects merged into one and the remaining saucer changed course and flew toward the witness, who remained transfixed standing on the balcony. Suddenly, the disk tilted its horizontal axis in such a way that the white beam emanating from its lower half struck Gueymard directly on the chest; there was a loud bang and the object completely vanished, leaving behind only a whitish form like cotton candy (angel hair, perhaps?). The doctor felt a nervous shock and he quickly came back inside, but the surprises were far from over…

Gueymard woke up his wife to tell her what he had just witnessed. To both of their astonishment his leg injury was completely healed and he could now walk without any pain; not only that, but a much older and serious wound he had suffered in Algeria (where he was serving in the Army) had also mysteriously disappeared. 

The strange red triangular marking on Dr. X’s abdomen

Over the next few days Gueymard started to suffer some abnormal physical symptoms: he lost weight and suffered from abdominal pain; he also developed a curious red triangle around his navel, which was seconded by a similar shape which appeared in the abdomen of his son. There are many other strange aspects comprising the case of “Doctor X” including encounters with strange visitors, claims of levitation and teleportation, and even the spontaneous appearance of psychic faculties; but for the purposes of this article we’ll leave the matter by noting how, in 1985, an independent medical report corroborated the complete disappearance of the injuries Gueymard had suffered in Algeria in 1958.

Rey Hernandez

The two cases mentioned above are part of the ‘classic’ annals of XXth century UFOlogy, whereas the next one is among the most interesting cases reported in the new millennium, and has been covered in Diana Pasulka’s book American Cosmic as part of her exploration on how UFO experiences can affect religious perspectives (and vice versa). 

Rey Hernandez was, according to his own account, a die-hard rationalist and atheist –as well as a very successful lawyer– living happily with his wife Dulce, despite the fact that she remained a very devout Catholic due to her Mexican origin. In March of 2012 Dulce was heartbroken because her beloved pet Niña –an old Jack Russell terrier– was gravely ill and they had finally decided to put her out of her misery. Rey’s wife sought refuge in her faith and prayed to God to save her ‘little girl’, for that’s what ‘Niña’ means in Spanish.

Rey Hernandez

According to Rey’s testimony, her wife woke up very early in the morning to check on the poor dog, which was so sick she could only move from the neck up. Dulce took Niña downstairs and that’s when she saw a glowing object floating four feet off the ground, metallic in appearance and with the domed shape of an inverted ‘U’. Startled by this apparition, Dulce did what probably any good Mexican Catholic with a devotion to the Virgin of Guadalupe would do: she went on her knees and pleaded to the luminous object to go away if it was a “bad spirit;” but if it was “an angel of the Virgin Mary” she begged it to stay and not let her dog suffer anymore.

As if it was an answer to her prayers, Dulce then saw green flashes blinking in front of her, which caused her to freak out and yell to her husband for help. Thinking his wife had probably seen a mouse or a cockroach in the kitchen, Rey ignored her at first –there’s a Latino marriage for you!– until Dulce rushed upstairs and practically dragged him out of their bedroom. One of the most interesting aspects of this case is that, when Rey finally came downstairs, what he observed was markedly different to what his wife saw: instead of a metallic object, what was in front of him was a compact, multicolored formation of plasma-like energy which looked like a horizontal cylinder with fuzzy edges. But even more astounding was the reaction of the ‘stalwart rationalist’, because instead of calling 911 or getting a camera he just stared at it for a few moments, thought it was no big deal and went back to bed!

This nonsensical ‘trance-like’ state of his lasted only 15 minutes or so, because the next thing Rey Hernandez remembers, is coming back to his senses and rushing back downstairs to see her wife jumping up and down in joy followed by her happily-barking Niña.  The miracle she had asked for had been fulfilled, and the dog was completely cured.

This was the start of a series of incredible experiences which have completely transformed Hernandez’s philosophy of life and his goals. He ended up co-founding the Foundation for Research into Extraterrestrial Encounters (FREE) along with the late Dr. Edgar Mitchell, Harvard astrophysicist Dr. Rudy Schild, and Australian researcher Mary Rodwell. FREE’s goals include the scientific study of the close encounter experience and the role that human consciousness plays in the UFO mystery.

Conclusions

So what can we make about these three cases, aside from the fact that there are reports of inexplicable cures in the UFO literature? Many researchers in UFOlogy (and even government scientists) have studied the malignant effects suffered by close encounter witnesses, and suspect it is the result of non-ionizing microwave radiation generated by the objects –which has been of great interest to some countries for its potential to create new weapon systems. But could microwave radiation be used for the opposite goal of healing patients? Among dozens of links addressing the fear about the harmful effects of microwaves, a cursory search on Google shows there have been a few promising experiments in which low-dose microwave radiation can help in the healing of bone fractures, and the use of UV radiation in wound care; yet that could hardly explain the instantaneous recovery experienced by both Pierre Gueymard and Rey Hernandez’s dog.

Perhaps the “candy” offered to young Jaume Bordas managed to alter and rewrite his DNA in ways modern science can only dream of, or maybe it was all just the result of the placebo effect triggered by a vivid dream. But the placebo effect could not be accounted for in the case of “Doctor X,” who wasn’t expecting to be cured of his illnesses as a result of his UFO sighting, and it certainly could not be behind the healing of a dog!

Maybe we still don’t have the necessary scientific framework to understand the mechanisms behind these healing processes. We can only hint at the possibility that perhaps the UFOs’ apparent ability to manipulate both Space AND Time may be behind it. When explaining the concepts of higher dimensions, Carl Sagan once said that a hyperdimensional entity would be capable of putting the whole universe within inside the body of a hapless three-dimensional being; if that is the case, why not use that same power in order to bring back the body to a state in which the illness had yet to be developed?

Alas, I don’t have any scientific training so I’ll leave the figuring out to people smarter than me. What I really want to conclude with is this: Be wary of the people seeking to push just ONE side of the UFO narrative. Whether it is TTSA playing the “UFOs are a threat” card in order to lure the attention of the military industrial complex; the neo-Inquisitors using shoddy techniques to retrieve terrifying accounts of unnatural conjugal union with ‘demonic beings’, who seek to replace us with their hellish hybrid offspring; or the New Age gurus who assure us our “Space Brothers” seek only to guide us into a bright future away from our Earthly sorrows, and that all the cases in which UFOs have shown any type of hostility are the result of ‘military psyops’; the fact of the matter is that the UFO phenomenon is a vast, multifaceted, and terribly complex mystery with many layers, which defies simplistic explanations. 

It is only by studying all those layers, not just the ones that suit a particular agenda, that we may have any hope to come closer to the truth.