Over the years and decades, reports of UFOs by police officers have grown and grown. Some such cases are more well-known than others. With that said, today I’m going to share with you some intriguing UFO cases involving the police. One of the most fascinating of all UFO reports secured from a serving police-officer concerns an English police-officer named Colin Perks, who, in the early hours of the day in question, was on duty in the town of Wimslow, U.K. According to Perk’s official log report: “Sir, I have to report that I have been in the Police Force for almost four years. I am 28 years of age, a married man and I reside with my wife and child in [witness’s address]. I am in excellent health and I have no worries of any description. On the night of Thursday/Friday the 6th to 7th January 1966, which was a cold clear night and started [sic] with a full moon which made visibility good. I commenced duty at 10pm on the 6^th and due to finish duty at 6am on the 7^th. At 1.15am on the 7^th I had my refreshments at Wilmslow Police Station where I resumed normal patrol at 2am on this date where I commenced walking around the village. I was alone on this occasion.”

(Nick Redfern)

The document continues: “About 4am on the 7th I was checking property at the rear of a large block of shops which are situated off the main A34 road (Alderley Road) Wilmslow. At 4.10am I was still checking property and facing the back of the shops when I heard a high pitched whine, for a moment I couldn’t place the noise as it was most unfamiliar to the normal surroundings. I turned around and saw a Greenish/Grey glow in the sky about 100 yards from me and about 35 feet up in the air. I stopped in my tracks and was unable to believe what I could see. However I gathered myself together after a couple of seconds and made the following observations. The object was about the length of a bus (30 feet) and estimated at being 20 feet wide.”

Perks added: “It was elliptic in shape and emanated a greenish grey glow which I can only describe as an eerie green color. It appeared to be motionless of itself; that is there was no impression of rotation. The object was about 15 feet in height. The object had a flat bottom. At this time it was very bright and there was an East wind. Although it was cold there was no frost. No cloud formation was anywhere near ground level. The object remained stationary for about five seconds then without any change in the whine it started moving at a very fast rate in an East-South-East direction.” Despite an extensive investigation by the British Ministry of Defense (the official report of the MoD runs to 21-pages), the affair was never satisfactorily resolved.

The following document, dated September 16, 1980 and written on official U.S. Air Force stationery, was forwarded to UFO researcher Leonard Stringfield by a source to whom Stringfield gave the pseudonym of “Jeffery Morse.” He said:  “In January of 1978, I was stationed at McGuire AFB, N.J. One evening, during the time frame of 0300 hrs. and 0500 hrs., there were a number of UFO sightings in the area over the air field and Ft. Dix MP’s were running code in the direction of Brownsville, N.J. A state trooper then entered Gate #5 at the rear of the base requesting assistance and permission to enter. I was dispatched and the trooper wanted access to the runway area which led to the very back of the air field and connected with a heavily wooded area which is part of the Dix training area. He informed me that a Ft. Dix MP was pursuing a low flying object which then hovered over his car. He described it as oval shaped, with no details, and glowing with a bluish-green color. His radio transmission was cut off. At that time in front of his police car, appeared a thing, about 4 feet tall, grayish, brown, fat head, long arms, and slender body.”

“Morse” added: “The MP panicked and fired five rounds from his .45 cal. into the thing, and one round into the object above. The object then fled straight up and joined with eleven others high in the sky. This we all saw but didn’t know the details at the time. Anyway, the thing ran into the woods towards our fenceline and they went to look for it. By this time several patrols were involved. We found the body of the thing near the runway. It had apparently climbed the fence and died while running. It was all of a sudden hush-hush and no one was allowed near the area.” I should stress this case has been promoted by some ufologists and totally dismissed by others. It’s about time a new investigation was put into action.

In February 1962, an employee of the UK Royal Air Force Police – one Sergeant C.J. Perry – was ordered to investigate a then-recent, extraordinary UFO report. The documentation prepared by Perry is now in the public domain. It tells an intriguing story: “At Aylesbury on 16^th February 1962, at 1530 hrs., I visited the Civil Police and requested information on an alleged ‘Flying Saucer’ incident. I was afforded every facility by the Civil Police authorities and although no official report had been made, details of the incident were recorded in the Station Occurrence book. The details are as follows: Mr. Ronald Wildman of Luton, a car collection driver, was traveling along the Aston Clinton road at about 0330 hrs. on 9^th February 1962 when he came upon an object like a hovercraft flying approximately 30 feet above the road surface.”

The documentation continues: “As he approached he was traveling at 40 mph but an unknown force slowed him down to 20 mph over a distance of 400 yrd., then the object suddenly flew off. He described the object as being about 40 feet wide, oval in shape with a number of small portholes around the bottom edge. It emitted a fluorescent glow but was otherwise not illuminated. Mr. Wildman reported the incident to a police patrol who notified the Duty Sergeant, Sergeant Schofield. A radio patrol car was dispatched to the area but no further trace of the ‘Flying Saucer’ was seen. It was the opinion of the local police that the report by Mr. Wildman was perfectly genuine and the experience was not a figment of imagination. They saw that he was obviously shaken. I spoke to Sergeant Schofield and one of the Constables to whom the incident was reported. Both were convinced that Mr. Wildman was genuinely upset by his experience” The case was never resolved. And, now, finally…

(Nick Redfern)

Shortly before 1:00 a.m. on June 8, 2008, a South Wales Police helicopter, carrying a crew of three, was over Ministry of Defense St. Athan, awaiting permission to land and refuel. As they held their position in the skies, the crew’s attention was drawn to a “brightly lit” object above them that was reported as being ‘flying saucer shaped.’ Suddenly, without warning, the object raced towards them at “great speed” – something that caused the pilot to take immediate, evasive action to avoid a potential collision. The object then sped away and the helicopter crew decided to follow. Their pursuit took them over the Bristol Channel until, as they neared the North Devon Coast, a lack of adequate fuel forced them to abandon the chase.” And, this is just the tip of police-based UFO cases on record.

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In October of 1986, the Soviet Navaga-class ballistic missile submarine K-219 was prowling through the waters of the North Atlantic, about 1,090 kilometers (680 mi) northeast of Bermuda, on a routine nuclear deterrence patrol. At the time the Cold War was in full swing, and this was pretty normal procedure at the time, basically lurking about to let the enemy know you were there, and since the K-219 was equipped with between 32 to 48 nuclear warheads and 16 R-27U liquid-fuel missiles, you can be sure that the Americans heard the message loud and clear. At around 0530 Moscow time, seawater began inexplicably leaking into missile silo six, and not long after this chaos would erupt aboard the K-219 and turn into a great mystery that has become part of the lore of the Bermuda Triangle.

As the leak continued, efforts were made to fix the situation, the alarm was sounded, and measures were made, which included hermetically sealing all compartments. However, it was too late. At 0538, an explosion occurred in missile tube No. 6, killing two men outright and a third when toxic fumes suffocated him, and it also ejected the missile and its warheads into the sea. Another man died while trying to shut off the submarine’s engine reactor, which had oddly not turned off automatically, and the disaster would in the end claim five lives. K-219 was able to limp to the surface, where it was found that the side of the vessel had a deep groove, as if it had struck something underwater, and K-219’s Captain Second Rank Igor Britanov believed that it could have been the reason for the leak that had led to the explosion. The only problem was, they were in the middle of nowhere, and had not received any collision alarm, so what was going on here? The K-219’s problems only continued from there.

K-219

Considering that the sub was basically dead in the water, it was towed by a Soviet freighter back towards their home port of Gadzhiyevo, a full 7,000 kilometers (4,300 mi) away, but the tow line broke, and the order was given to abandon ship. The surviving crew were rescued and the metal behemoth sank down to the bottom of the Hatteras Abyssal Plain, coming to rest at a depth of about 6,000 m (18,000 ft) in dark, freezing waters and taking its full payload of nuclear warheads with it. Oddly, when an operation was later launched to investigate the wreck, it was found that all of the warheads were nowhere to be found and the silo hatches were dangling open. Considering the loss of life, the sub, and the warheads, it was a pretty big deal, and there were immediately accusations flying as to what had caused the leak and explosion.

The Soviets were very quick to lay the blame on the Americans. Their official stance was that the K-219 had collided with the American submarine USS Augusta, which was operating in the same general region at the time. However, both the captain of the USS Augusta and the captain of the K-219 denied this, and it was also found that the American sub was nowhere near them at the time of the incident. In fact, no U.S. sub had been anywhere near them, and no American vessel had come in for repairs for any such underwater collision. So what had caused that gash on the sub? How had there been a leak in the silo, where such a thing should have been impossible? The Soviets would continue to hang onto the theory that it had to have been a collision with an American submarine, and they fully charged Britanov with negligence, sabotage, and treason, although these charges were eventually dismissed. For years the incident aboard the K-219 was a mystery often debated and discussed, and considering its proximity to the infamous Bermuda Triangle at the time, you can be sure that of course some began turning to speculation taking us into the world of the weird.

The main idea here is that it was, well, aliens. There would be numerous uncorroborated and unverified claims that subs and vessels in the area had seen mysterious lights zipping about underwater, often called Unidentified Submerged Objects, or USOs, as well as a strange low frequency sound picked up on equipment that sounded like a quacking duck or a low croaking. Appropriately called “Quakers,” these sounds have been speculated as being anything from misidentified whale song, to some sort of top-secret sonar system, to alien transmissions, and apparently the K-219 picked up these sounds as well shortly before its accident. In 2010, a former Russian naval officer, a Captain Nikolai Tushin, came forward with a new piece of testimony in the incident. According to him, at the time of the incident, Tushin was part of a group of specialists of the Soviet Navy tasked with admission of nuclear submarines built in Severodvinsk at Sevmash to the fleet, and so he had his finger on the pulse of pretty much everything that happened with the submarines, including every accident and incident. According to him, the K-219 had picked up not only one of the unidentified Quaker noises, but had also tracked a mysterious moving underwater object on its radar. He had allegedly kept this information classified for decades, but came forward with it when he figured that there would be no repercussions. He would speak to Russian researcher Dmitry Sudakov would say of all of this on the site Pravda:

Nikolai had no doubts that the underwater object that collided with the strategic submarine “K-219” carrying two nuclear reactors and 16 ballistic nuclear missiles was not man made. Incidentally, he was the one to tell me about the troubles endured by Soviet (as well as American, British, and French) atomic submarines from the so-called “Quakers.” He said that experienced sailors were quite serious about the talks of underwater unidentified objects. According to Tushin, he, like many other submarine commanders, saw glowing balls and cylinders in the ocean. Almost every diver has a “cherished” story. It was not customary to talk about it, and no instruments recorded sightings of such objects. Even now little is known about these croaking invisible objects. They were first heard a few decades ago, when more or less sensitive sonar equipment that could hear the ocean in many sectors of sonar range appeared on submarines, especially nuclear ones.

The range of “Quakers” action expanded from the Barents Sea to the Mid-Atlantic, including the Bermuda Triangle, where Russian atomic submarine “K-219” has perished. The theory of the man-made origin of the mysterious underwater object sounds rather weak because even the wealthy United States could not afford such costs. These mysterious objects persistently pursued Russian (and not only Russian) submarines, and the chase was accompanied by characteristic acoustic signals resembling croaking of frogs. According to Tushin, sometimes submarines thought that the mysterious objects were displaying friendliness.

The famous atomic experienced diver, admitted to the controls of nearly all projects of the Soviet nuclear submarines, admitted that we might be dealing with some unknown underwater civilization. Indeed, the underwater world is explored much less than space. Those who thought of the unidentified objects as the reason of the accident were afraid to speak up not to be considered insane. Tushin was convinced that “К-219” was sunk by a mysterious force, but at the time could not admit it out loud. The unidentified floating objects remain a mystery of the ocean.

What was going on here? Is there any truth to this at all? As of now, the whole incident has been sort of brushed over and forgotten, with many ideas put forward. Was this just a technical malfunction, a collision with an American sub, or something else, perhaps something more otherworldly? By the way, where did the nukes go? Do you have them? I know I don’t, but I sure wish I knew who did. It is a rather obscure account from the Cold War era to be sure, and the answers have not been coming in. Perhaps time will tell.

We’ve read and heard plenty about the so-called Tic Tac UFO encounter in 2004 between pilots from the USS Nimitz and a pill-shaped unidentified aerial phenomena whose performance defied current technology and whose identity has not been confirmed, despite both media and Pentagon investigations. It’s a safe bet that most people believe there’s much, much more to this story. For example, although it was kept hidden from the American public for over a decade, a current member of Congress recently revealed when he learned about it … he was there when it happened!

“It was about 100 miles or so away from me, so I heard a lot of the communications going on.”

Representative Mike Garcia (from his website)

Meet Mike Garcia, a US congressional representative from California. Garcia was first elected to Congress in 2020, so he obviously wasn’t there when the USS Nimitz UFO incident occurred. Where was he? According to an interview in Roll Call, in 2004 Naval Officer Mike Garcia was an F/A-18 pilot from the USS Nimitz. Not only that, Garcia admits he was in the air at the time of the encounter, 100 miles away, and listened in on the conversations between those pilots and the ship.

“It was one of those things that you couldn’t believe it when you heard it. The guys who actually saw it weren’t allowed to talk about it until just recently, so we couldn’t even ask questions.”

Garcia, fresh from a six-month deployment as part of the 2003 Operation Iraqi Freedom, was an experienced F/A-18 pilot. A graduate of the US Naval Academy, he eventually accrued over 1,400 hours of operational flight time over the course of nearly 20 years of military service. In other words, he sounds like the perfect representative of Congress – both literally and figuratively – to head up the latest UAP commission, keep the public informed, keep Congress informed, etc. And yet, he seems to have slipped through the cracks like a wet Tic Tac. Roll Call tried to pin him down on the Nimitz incident.

“I’m intrigued by it. I don’t know that it’s extraterrestrial — I do believe it’s man-made. And I’m not going to presuppose where it comes from, but I hope it’s American-made. It goes to show that we’ve got to continue to invest in our military technologies and not take it for granted that we are the only superpower out there. We have peer threats out there nowadays, not just near-peer threats. China and Russia have advanced capabilities that we don’t even know about.”

F/A-18 Hornet

Should we really believe that an experienced fighter pilot who was in the air during the Nimitz incident who is now a member of the US Congress has not used that position to find out what those Tic Tacs really are identified as in the secret files we all know exist somewhere in the X-files of the government and the Pentagon?

“I do think it would be an amazing coincidence if we were the only life forms in this universe. That’s why we’ve got to invest in space programs to start answering some of these questions we all have and maybe one day see the extension of God’s creations on other planets.”

It doesn’t take long after they’re elected for members of Congress to memorize the pat answers to tough questions. Representative Mike Garcia may be a good congressman, a good family man and a good guy – but he doesn’t appear to be a good inside man for UFO disclosure. Why has he waited until now to reveal his own experience in the incident? To paraphrase Democratic vice-presidential candidate Senator Lloyd Bentsen to Republican vice-presidential candidate Senator Dan Quayle in a debate in 1988:

We knew House Speaker Harry Reid. Harry Reid is a friend of ours. Congressman Garcia … you’re no Harry Reid.

Those are questions I’ve been getting in the last few months. The sheer level of UFO activity that has been mentioned online and in other media (the only one for me being CNN) has clearly demonstrated that. Frankly, in my view if, tomorrow, the U.S. Government chose to reveal a bunch of dead, mangled, rotted alien bodies before the world, I don’t think that anyone would be worried, scared or even terrified. I think most people would be amazed, and eager to see what aliens really look like. That’s how I feel. But, it hasn’t happened. And, as I see it, there are only two options: (a) there will be disclosure; or (b) there  won’t be disclosure. But you knew that, right? Right! So, here’s how I see it: the reason why we aren’t getting full disclosure is because there’s something that is so monumentally bizarre or terrifying that no-one wants to reveal it. And because no-one in government wants to reveal it. The approach of the government may simply be: “We don’t know how to say it, or how reveal it, so let’s just hide it. Forever. ” I sometimes think that really is why we don’t have disclosure and may never will. Possibly, it can’t be told without fucking up all of human civilization.

(Nick Redfern)

I should stress I don’t have any new, secret rumors to support what I’m about to say now. None, at all. But, there is one picture that I believe could be the one that ensures we never get to know the complete, full picture. I’ll say this: I’m not a religious person. I have no particular stance on life after death, deities, gods, Hell, Heaven, reincarnation, and so on. Although, dogs just have to have souls. A greater animal was never created. Far better than us. Like most people, I occasionally wonder about it all, but that hardly makes things any clearer. It just means I occasionally have opinions on such controversies. There is however, one issue – directly related to all that Heaven and Hell stuff  – that I think would be the key issue that would prevent us (all of us) from being informed.  It’s a story that revolves around the human soul. Now and again, I’ve been told of tales concerning the human soul and its supposed links to the UFO subject. I started to get a lot of information on this issue in 2007 when I was researching my book, Final Events, and interviewing a few people from the so-called Collins Elite group.

Some of the C.E. members told me of a belief (not proof) in their ranks that the human soul was suspected of being a form of “fuel” for the black-eyed Grays of Ufology. In simple terms, the scenario was very similar to the picture in The Matrix: that our souls are nothing less than fodder to the aliens. Rather than being reliant on electricity, as is the picture. And, that’s why we can never be told, so it goes for some. Because it’s too terrifying: kind of like the classic words of Charles Fort: “We are someone else’s property.” I didn’t have long and lengthy conversations with the Collins Elite about all of this (I wish I did), but I can say that most of them had bought into that angle of soul-stealing ETs. And, when I did bring it up, it caused a lot of awkwardness. In some cases, fear. I’m hardly religious, but it even made me feel a bit clammy and cold when it was first shared with me.

Of course, there’s nothing new about this theory of aliens really being demons. When, however, you get the picture of it from a guy in his seventies, who worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency, and who was talking, in serious tones, about how the story cannot be told – and while leafing through the pages of Kurt Seligmann’s 1948 book, The Mirror Magic – things start to get a bit serious – and surreal. With that said, let’s take a look at what sounds eerily similar to some of the things I was told from 2007 to 2010. Probably the one person, more than any other, who concludes that the alien presence on our planet is driven by the “soul-scenario” is Nigel Kerner. He has written two books on the subject. They are The Song of the Greys and Grey Aliens and the Harvesting of Souls. Combined, they make a worryingly persuasive argument for the theory that aliens somehow “use” the human soul. Danielle Silverman, Kerner’s assistant, prepared the following for me on his theories and conclusions. She stated that Kerner,  “…went on to delineate a fascinating concept, explaining that a ‘soul’ might be a derivational information field that comes out of a natural cadence that came into the Universe with the big bang. This field holds the power to maintain information in what he called a morphogenetic electro-spatial field with an eternal scope of existence in whatever form circumstance allows. The soul is thus an ancestrally contiguous and coherent mechanism for holding information.”

(Nick Redfern) My copy of the Seligmann book

It’s also worth noting the experience of Sergeant John Healey, of the U.S. Army Reserve. On the night of October 18, 1973, he encountered a brightly-lit UFO, as he and his colleagues were on-board a UH-1H helicopter, rapidly closing in on Cleveland Hopkins, Airport, Ohio. In the aftermath of the encounter – which, in essence, was a near-collision between the two craft – Healey had several weird out-of-body experiences, as he told to UFO investigator, Jennie Zeidman. It was, he explained, as if he was dead in his bed, and that his spirit was above him, staring down at his sleeping form in the bed. That Sergeant Healey’s experiences occurred not in relation to the abduction phenomenon, but to a UFO sighting, suggests that other components of the UFO issue come into play when it comes to the relationship between UFOs, life after death, and our souls. Notably, several members of the helicopter crew were later contacted by representatives of the Department of Defense, who exhibited interest in – and deep concerns about – the UFO / soul-ingestion angle. This suggests a disturbing scenario: that certain elements of the U.S. Government may know something of the origins and agenda of the paranormal parasites.

It’s a fact that most people who have studied the claims of Bob Lazar focus their attentions on what he had to say about the UFOs allegedly held at S-4, as well as his statements concerning Element 115. There is one issue that doesn’t get the attention that it really should. It’s a part of Lazar’s story which takes things down a path that is filled with disturbing revelations involving the afterlife. One of the many briefing papers that Lazar said he read at S-4 stated that the aliens refer to us, the human race, as what we would call “Containers.” But, containers of what? Well, that’s where things get really controversial. Lazar told KLAS-TV’s George Knapp “religion was created so we have some rules and regulations for the sole purpose of not damaging the containers.” As for the “Containers,” the Knapp-Lazar discussion then went into the matter of human souls and their importance. How much of all this (some of it, all of it, none of it) is true, I have to say I don’t know. What I do know for sure, though, is that there are a lot of people in the U.S. government, and in the U.S. intelligence community, who do believe this is the real picture. And, from their perspective, that’s why we won’t get full disclosure. We’ll get a sanitized-type disclosure. Because, they say, it’s much easier on everyone. A case of what we don’t get won’t hurt us. Until, possibly, it eventually does.

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One place where UFOs seem to be frequently encountered is on the lonely roads and highways of our world. These objects seem to be drawn to such desolate places, and there are numerous stories of UFOs stopping cars or even abducting people from such places. One subspecies of such encounters is that of vehicles that have been involved with chasing or being chased by these mysterious objects, and here we will look at some strange cases of this.

On the evening of August 4, 1963, 18-year old Ronnie Austin and his girlfriend, Phyllis Bruce were driving along Route 15 heading towards Wayne City, Illinois, after a trip to Mt. Vernon. At some point, at around 11:30 p.m., they noticed a large, glowing white object moving along nearby at treetop level, which they soon noticed seemed to be following them. When they slowed down, so did it, and when they sped up it gave pursuit, eerily keeping pace with them much to their astonishment. On several occasions, the UFO came very close to the vehicle, only to speed off and follow once again, and it pursued the terrified couple all the way to Phyllis’ house, where her family saw it as well. Once there, it went off to hover over a nearby electronic relay tower, where it remained motionless for a time. At this point, Ronnie decided to make a run for it, and things would get even stranger from there. Francis Ridge, who was at the time a field investigator and the subcommittee chairman of National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) would later investigate the case, and said of what happened next:

As soon as he pulled away from the Bruce home, the object began to follow. In our interview with the boy’s father (Orville) on August 12, he told us that this is what scared Ronnie, the thought that the UFO was waiting for him to be alone before it took off after him. He had to head south and the object was on his left now. When he turned east onto another gravel road, the object suddenly shot diagonally ahead of him over a barn about a mile away, just beyond the T-road. The object now changed from a brilliant white to a duller or dimmer light with an orange tinge.

Ronnie said he “really poured the coal” to the car and must have been doing 120 mph when he topped the hill on the gravel road. Then, he reported, the object flared bright orange and came straight toward him at high speed. It hovered over the car, within 100′. Just before it hovered it had swerved upward and Ronnie judged its size as that of an automobile. At the point right over the car his radio (tuned to WLS) went crazy with static, which was described as a loud whining sound. At that time, he noticed a “cooling effect”. The object made another pass at the car, this time west to east, and at this point where the object was again overhead, the engine of the car started missing. The object proceeded back to its position over the barn, hovered, changed to a duller orange. This small road running east to west is only about a mile long and the events that took place according to the witness indicates an increase in activity by the object, which really had the boy scared by now.

Ronnie now turned north at the intersection (extension of road not shown) and headed for home which was over 3 miles away. The object followed him again. As he headed west down the lane leading to his home, the object cut across the road behind him to the left. He spun his car around in the driveway in front of the house, got out of the car and ran inside. The object was now above another farmhouse in the east about 300 yards away.

He would then tell his father, Orville Austin, of what was happening, who grabbed a shotgun and ran to the door to see it for himself. The object then moved towards the house to loom nearby, and realizing that the weapon wouldn’t do too much good, Orville put it down, closed the door, and turned off the lights. They then called the police, who arrived to see the object too, and several neighbors also saw it. It would lurk about the vicinity for nearly an hour, its intentions unknown, before speeding off into the night. According to subsequent news reports and Ridge’s report, Ronnie’s car would be found to have higher radiation levels than normal, and he would also claim that the Air Force had done an investigation into it, after which they had swept it under the carpet. Ridge would say of this:

Evidence gathered by the Air Force indicates that the car was slightly radioactive or magnetized. This was determined by the type of readings called off by members of the AF team as the family watched and listened. An interesting historical note for the record, the Air Force team consisted of three men. These were Lt. Col. Robert J. Friend, then the Director of Project Blue Book; Capt. Hector Quintanilla, and Sgt. Charles R. Sharp. Later in the year or early in 1964, Quintanilla became the Project Director. The AF, and especially Quintanilla, were ridiculing many witnesses who claimed sightings of UFOs. The “explanation” issued after the investigation was “a refueling operation” or the “planet Venus. The AF must have considered this case important. They had flown in the special team of physicists from Wright-Patterson AFB, Dayton, Ohio. Normally, when investigating a case, they would send the local “UFO officer” from the nearest airbase. In this case it would have been Scott AFB at Belleville, Illinois (near St. Louis). Something strange was going on in the midwest, and AF Intelligence was interested in something that “didn’t exist.” A quick check would have eliminated a refueling operation and the need for an onsite.

The following year, on June 29, 1964, a man named Beauford E. Parham was driving home near Lavonia, Georgia, in the United States, when he was startled to see a very bright light approaching him from directly ahead. As it drew nearer, he could see that it was “a top-shaped object,” about 6 feet high and 8 feet wide, spinning and “emitting a hissing sound like a million snakes,” and there were flames spewing from several portholes around it. The mysterious object then stopped right in front of him, matching his speed, seeming to toy with him, and at this point, Parham would say that he was in some sort of daze that had washed over him. It then made several passes at him, emitting a mist or vapor of some sort, before passing right over the car to disappear. Parham would later develop a burning sensation in his arms, and noticed that the paint on his car in some spots had bubbled up as if subjected to high heat. What was going on here? We’ll probably never know.

Image by Steve Baxter

Another very spectacular encounter allegedly happened on April 17, 1966, and involved police officers. In the early morning hours of that day, at around 5 a.m., deputies Dale Spaur and Wilbur ‘Barney’ Neff, with the Portage County, Ohio, Sheriff’s Department were on patrol near the town of Ravena, Ohio, when they noticed a strange lighted object coming up over some trees from a nearby wood and experienced a deep hum like “an overloaded transformer.” Spaur would explain of what they saw:

When I looked in this wooded area behind us, I saw this thing. At this time, it was coming up… to about tree top level. I’d say about one hundred feet. It started moving toward us. As it came over the trees, I looked at Barney and he was still watching the car, and he didn’t say nothing and the thing kept getting brighter and the area started to get light. It was very bright; it’d make your eyes water. I told him to look over his shoulder, and he did. He just stood there with his mouth open for a minute, as bright as it was, and he looked down. And I started looking down and I looked at my hands and my clothes weren’t burning or anything, when it stopped right over on top of us. I was petrified, and, uh, so I moved my right foot, and everything seemed to work all right. And evidently, he made the same decision I did, to get something between me and it, or us and it, or whatever you would say. So we both went for the car, we got in the car and we sat there.

Image by Steve Baxter

When they reported it, their sergeant then told them to pursue the object, and they proceeded to chase it through the countryside as it headed over the road, illuminating the ground beneath it as it did. It was moving at a brisk pace, travelling at around 100 mph and still pulling ahead as the two officers tried to keep up with it, with other police officers joining in the pursuit as they did. Police Officer Wayne Huston of East Palestine, Ohio, near the Pennsylvania border, saw the UFO pass with the police chasing it sirens blaring, and he joined in as well, tearing off after it along with the others. They chased it for nearly 85 miles, with numerous patrol cars from different jurisdictions chasing it, and then it suddenly stopped to hover there over the road as they all screeched to a halt. There was allegedly chatter that the Air Force was scrambling fighter jets, and then the object just shot straight up into the sky at breathtaking speed. The Air Force would quickly step in to brush it all off in typical clumsy fashion, and UFO researcher Richard Hall would say of this:

The Air Force “identified” the UFO as a satellite, seen part of the time, and confused with the planet Venus. Under pressure from Ohio officials, Major Hector Quintanilla, chief of PROJECT BLUE BOOK, had an acrimonious confrontation with witnesses and refused to change the identification, although it was pointed out to him that they had seen the UFO in addition to Venus, and the moon at the conclusion of the observation. Major Quintanilla also denied that any jets had been scrambled. William B. Weitzel conducted an exhaustive investigation on behalf of the NATIONAL INVESTIGATIONS COMMITTEE ON AERIAL PHENOMENA (NICAP), obtaining taped interviews, signed statements, sketches, and all pertinent data which was assembled into a massive report that was made available to congressional investigators. When the UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO UFO PROJECT was initiated in 1966, a copy of Weitzel’s report was hand-delivered to the director, Dr. Edward U. CONDON, for his consideration. The CONDON REPORT, published two years later, does not mention the case.

From 1967, we have a case from the UK, which supposedly played out October 24, 1967 somewhere between Okehampton and Holsworthy, in Devon, England, and involved two police constables by the names of Clifford Waycott and Roger Willey. While they were driving along on patrol, they saw a “pulsating flying cross” that was “star-spangled – just like looking through wet glass,” and was moving about just over the tree line beside the road. They decided to pursue the object, which immediately started accelerating away from them as they sped along, reaching speeds of up to 90 mph before they gave up for fear of getting in an accident and the object sped off into the night to join a second object that appeared. The report was corroborated by a farmer in the area who also saw the spectacle, and others in the immediate area began calling in with reports of seeing the same “fiery cross,” suggesting that the bizarre flying object was lurking about for some time. The case, which would be mentioned in UFO Flying Saucers over Britain, by Robert Chapman, has never been explained.

Perhaps one of the strangest UFO chases of all comes from 1988, in Australia. On January 20, 1988, Faye Knowles, her adult sons Patrick (24), Sean (21) and Wayne (18), and their two dogs were making their way towards Melbourne, Australia across a vast expanse of limestone bedrock called the Nullarbor Plain. The area is a remote desert moonscape of a place, with no one around for miles and other cars a rarity, so it was considered odd when in the very early morning hours a light was spotted some distance ahead, just outside of the tiny town of Mundrabilla. The light seemed to get steadily brighter as they watched it, and as they got closer they could see that it was semi-spherical or egg shaped and was most certainly not another vehicle as it was just a single bright light and seemed to be hovering in the air over that desolate expanse.

As the family struggled to comprehend what they were seeing, the strange object allegedly emitted a beam of light that swept towards their vehicle and caused the driver, Sean, to take evasive maneuvers. The beam missed the car, but this is when Sean would claim the object had begun to follow them down that lonely roadway, easily keeping pace with them no matter how fast they went. They apparently passed another car going the other direction, after which the mysterious object stopped pursuing them and followed the other vehicle. Sean the reportedly turned the car around to follow the other car and its UFO pursuer to figure out what was going on, but thought better of it and turned around yet again. The object then must have decided to go after them again, because it was soon ominously closing in on them once again.

It purportedly got brighter and closer, passing them a few times to circle around to approach again before positioning itself right above their car as the terrified family within screamed out in fright. There was then a thump on the roof, and the car slowed down as if something very heavy were sitting atop it, leading them to the horrible realization that it had actually lowered itself to make contact with the vehicle. According to the witnesses, it then issued a shrill, ear piercing sound, and Faye would say that they were overcome with the sense of something invading their minds, later saying, “It felt like something was going into our heads,” and Patrick would say “I felt like my brain was being sucked out.” They also claimed that their voices became distorted and that they moved sluggishly, as if underwater or experiencing a slowing of time itself. Things would intensify when they then felt the car physically lift off of the road, after which they were shaken violently from side to side as a grey mist filled the car and dropped back down with such force that it blew one of their tires and disabled the vehicle to leave to leave it lying in that unforgiving place like a wounded beast. Fay Knowles would say of the otherworldly encounter:

I wound down the window and I felt this thing on the roof… all of this smoke stuff started coming into the car, the car was covered in black stuff. It was a small light and all of a sudden it became big like this, like a big ball. We thought we were dying, then we got out the car and we hid behind a little tree and the bushes and it couldn’t find us.

When the cowering family were sure the object was gone, they warily went back to their car, changed the tire, and got out of there as fast as they could, eventually making their way to Mundrabilla, where they excitedly told of what had happened to them. Interestingly, a trucker at the gas station there would tell them that he had also seen the strange, eerie light out over the desert as well. When their car was examined, it was found to be banged up, and both the exterior and interior covered with a fine film of black material like soot or ash that had an unusual odor like “a blown fuse.” The Knowles were able to get some truckers to go with them out to where the incident had supposedly occurred, where they allegedly found odd skid marks on the road that seemed to show that the vehicle has been dragged sideways by some powerful force, making it all even stranger.

The police would subsequently examine the vehicle to find a grey powder that was found to have a similar chemical composition to the coating used on NASA space shuttles. Oddly, the South Australia police were apparently very eager to distance themselves from it all, finish the investigation, and sweep it under the carpet, and the whole case was just sort of filed away even as it was hitting the news in a big way. And that was that. The rather harrowing case has been picked apart by Ufologists and skeptics ever since, but no clear answer has ever been agreed upon. What happened to this family out on that bleak stretch of road? What forces came calling for them to follow them around and terrorize them? No one really knows.

Special thanks to Steve Baxter for his artwork.

Some whistleblowers know where the bodies are buried. Others know where the money is buried. Luis Elizondo knows where the UFOs and possible aliens are buried … or at least that’s what publishing company William Morrow is hoping as it announced it has won the bidding war to publish the “shocking” memoir of the former head of the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP). Will Elizondo identify the smoking UAP or will he be silenced like the Lone Gunmen?

“(The memoir) promises to reveal shocking never-before-shared details regarding what Elizondo has learned about UFOs and the profound implications for humanity, all of which will escalate what is already a hot topic globally.”

We want dates!

The Hollywood Reporter was the first to break the news that William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins, will publish the highly anticipated exposé by the ultimate insider to the secret Pentagon investigations of unidentified aerial phenomena. The former U.S. Army Counterintelligence Special Agent was director of AATIP from 2008 until resigning in 2017 in protest of the organization’s secrecy. Elizondo attempted to expose some of the secrets himself by joining the To the Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences and making public (and famous) three declassified videos of the ‘Tic Tac’ UFOs taken by pilots from the USS Nimitz and USS Theodore Roosevelt. Despite these revelations, plus many interviews – including a well publicized one earlier this year on “60 Minutes,” Elizondo apparently (and hopefully) has much, much more to tell.

“The American people now know a small portion of what I and my colleagues in the Pentagon have been privy to: That these UAP (unidentified aerial phenomenon) are not secret U.S. technology, that they do not seem to belong to any known allies or adversaries and that our intelligence services have yet to identify a terrestrial explanation for these extraordinary vehicles. This conversation is only just beginning.”

Still image from the footage of the “tic-tac” UFO

Elizondo is referring to the brief public report by the Pentagon earlier this year which did not rule out aliens as a possible cause of UFOs seen by Navy pilots or others investigated by AATIP, along with the many more reported but not investigated. The whistleblower will face the naysayers who question the extent of his actual involvement within AATIP – an accusation strongly refuted by former senator and key driving force in the formation of AATIP, Harry Reid. Then there’s Elizondo’s “security oath” – which he has taken seriously as a reason to not reveal too much in previous interviews. Will it still be a muzzle in the memoir?

Like Fox Mulder and the Lone Gunmen, so many people want to believe. Let’s hope Luis Elizondo’s memoir is the bible they’ve been waiting for.

There are plenty of supposed UFO encounters out there. Those between people on the ground, planes, and everything in between. The phenomenon ranges across a wide range of scenarios, but one very strange corner of all of this are those weird encounters that have been logged between trains and UFOs, and these are both more interesting and more bizarre than one might think.

On October 3, 1958, diesel freight train No. 91 was moving through north central Indiana on its way from Monon to Indianapolis along with a crew composed of engineer Harry Eckman, Cecil Bridge, the fireman, and Morris Ott, the head brakeman, as well as the conductor Ed Robinson, and Paul Sosbey, the flagman. At approximately 3:20 a.m., they went past a remote crossroads called Owasco when they saw “four big, soft white lights” in the sky up ahead. The fireman, Bridge, would say of what transpired:

They (the lights) crossed the tracks ahead of the train – about a half a mile ahead of us, we estimated. They were moving pretty slowly, too, at no more than about 50 miles an hour, four big, white, soft lights. Just the three of us in the engine saw the lights at this time. We were pulling 56 cars – that’s a little more than half a mile of cars – and because of the angle at which these things were approaching and because they were so low right then, the boys in the caboose probably couldn’t see them. I talked to Robinson, (the conductor), and told him what we had seen. During the time we watched these things, from Ewasco to Kirklin, we did a lot of talking on that radio. The dispatcher in Lafayette could hear us, of course, but he never cut in. Conductor Robinson continues the story. I was sitting in the cupola, looking forward over the train, when Bridge called me on the radio. I had already noticed the four gobs of light but I couldn’t make out what they were. They were half a mile ahead of the caboose – the whole length of the train. A little bit after he called me the things went away and we didn’t see them for a few minutes… then all of a sudden they came back.

I’d say they were only a couple of hundred feet above the train as they came toward the caboose. And they weren’t moving very fast – maybe 30 or 40 miles an hour. It was hard to tell – a fellow just doesn’t notice details like that under the circumstances. The freight train is pretty noisy, of course, but I didn’t hear any other noise, like the roar an airplane would have made. I think they were silent, or nearly silent, at least. They flew over us one after the other – big, round white things that looked about the colour of fluorescent lights, kind of fuzzy around the edges. They didn’t glare and they didn’t light up things as they went over. They just came back toward us, over the top of the cars, one after the other. Then they went on down the tracks maybe another half a mile and seemed to stop. When these things shot back over to the east of us, they lit up much brighter than they were before. They turned in line, going north or northeast and we noticed that they lit up in sequence – the front one first, then number two, three and four. They changed course and came back past the train. They were going in the opposite direction to us when they made this pass. I guess they were at least a mile or two east of us when they did it.

We had flashlights in the engine and in the caboose. Up on the head end of the train – in the engine where I was –we blinked our flashlights at the things and we waved the lights. We thought we might get them to come in closer. They did come down over the train a few minutes later, as Robinson related, but of course, I can’t say they did it because we flashed the lights at them. At any rate they didn’t flash any lights back at us. In the caboose we had a five-cell sealed beam flashlight that throws a pretty good beam a long ways. When the things came down and flew right up the tracks behind the caboose, I grabbed that sealed beam flashlight and shined it on them. As soon as the light hit them, they jumped sideways out of the beam. When they got back over the tracks I did it again and they scattered. They acted like they didn’t care for that light at all. While we were switching at Frankfort they stayed away back up the tracks, just hovered there, until we moved on. Then they followed us again. When they finally went away at Kirklin, they just zipped off to the northeast and kept on going and we didn’t see them anymore.

What was going on here? It would turn out that all of the crew had seen the mysterious light show from different angles depending on whether they were on the bridge or in the caboose, and they could all see that the lights seemed to be following them. From the caboose, Ed Robinson observed the phenomenon and would say of it:

We didn’t see them from the back end of the train for several minutes after they went away to the east and turned. But the boys in the engine were still seeing them. I got back on the radio with Bridge. He was watching them right then. They must have circled the train and gone north of us, real low, because the next time we saw them they came rushing up the tracks right in back of us. They were coming a lot faster this time – a lot faster than they had come back over the train the first time.

They were just above the tree-tops along the right of way, and they had changed their way of flying — their formation. This time they were sort of flying on edge. Two of them were on edge – the two in the middle. The two on the outside were tilted at an angle both in the same direction. The four of them flew like that up the tracks behind the train – a tilted one on the east, two of them straight up and down, then the one on the west tilted just like the one on the east. When they first came back over the train we could see that they were round things – circular shaped on the bottom. Then when they flew up the tracks in back of us we could see – Sosbey and I – that they were about 40 feet in diameter and maybe 10 feet thick. The two flying straight up and down were approximately over the edges of the right of way and about 200 yards in back of the caboose. If they had been flying flat down instead of edgewise. They would have just about have touched edges so they must have seen somewhere around 40 feet across the bottom.

This case has no real answers in sight. Another rather harrowing report comes from October 20, 1973, from the near Mt. Vernon and Evansville, Indiana. On this morning, a train crew on a L&N train near Upton, in the Mt. Vernon area, began experiencing engine trouble at around 6:50 a.m. but they kept on going towards their destination, and at one point observed a mysterious light in the distance that was pulsating from really bright to dim, and back to bright. It did not look like an aircraft, and they watched it head out of sight, yet this would not be the end of their ordeal. UFO researcher Francis Ridge, an investigator for National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) would say of what happened next:

When they neared Caborn (6-7 miles east of Mt. Vernon), the lead conductor told the rear conductors by intercom that they had seen a real bright light. When they got near St. Phillips, the rear conductor reported that there now was a train following them, on the same track. By then they had gotten up on Belknap hill (at Peerlsess Crossing), “a pretty good pull on a train”, and had gotten hung up. One of the rear men suggested that they should get the train behind them, which he said had been following them for awhile, to push them. The lead conductor replied, “Well, I haven’t heard him on the radio.

After a short while the rear man suggested the same solution to the problem, again: “Well, he’s been following us and I can see his light back there and the ‘board’ is red!” The object following them had given them a “red board” on their blocking system. The signal referred to here is a series of lights, similar in color to regular traffic lights, situated on a pole on the side of the tracks. This shows either red, amber, or green, indicating “danger” , “caution”, or “all clear”, respectively. (This signal is a part of the Automatic Blocking System which tells of other traffic on the same track). The “red board” normally meant that something was on the track behind them. The rear conductor again suggested that the crew call the “tower” (Howell Round House at Evansville) and see if there was a train behind them.

A quick check with the yardmaster showed that there was no train behind them at all. Upon receiving the news, the rear conductor replied, “There is a headlight behind us. I can see it. It’s real bright. After the train had gotten hung up and had stopped on Belknap Hill, they got out and looked around. The conductor, after backing the train down the hill, got out, walked down to the rear unit and pressed the restart button. To his surprise the unit “kicked right off, ran real good. The light or the object was now moving off, back from where it had come from. According to the conductor, whatever had given them a “red board”, now was giving them a “green board.” As he, himself, stated, “The board went green. The light cleared up the board”. The train, previously hampered with a bad rear unit and way over-tonnage, was now fully able to climb the steep, hill and made it in to Howell without further mishap.

Interestingly, this happened during a major UFO sighting wave in the area at the time, and we are left to wonder just what was going on here. A few years later, there was another very odd account investigated by Ridge as well, this time from the region of Columbus, Ohio. In late October of 1977, a freight train headed out to the Fostoria Distribution Company warehouse just north of Fostoria, Ohio in order to pick up a food shipment. They reached their destination without incident and began loading up the train when things began to get strange, starting with a sighting made by the engineer, Howard J. Albert. Ridge would say in his report on the incident:

At about 3:20 AM, Howard saw what looked to be a shooting star to the west; it curved down out of the northwest. He was sitting in his cab facing southbound. The first box car blocked his view in this direction. The light came down in the field toward Route 23 between him and the church. Slowly, at about the speed of a walking man, it came toward him across the field. It was approximately 16 feet off the ground and stopped on the other side of the tracks between four and five box car lengths away – 180 to 270 feet.Howard picked up his radio and called out to his conductor who was about seven or eight car lengths down the track, “Donald… come up to the engine.” Donald replied by radio and asked what was happening. Howard answered, “Hey, we got a g- d— UFO up here.” By this time the UFO had moved to within two car lengths of the track.

The object was “birthday cake” or disk shaped, about 90 feet in diameter, and 45 feet high. It was brightly lit, with banks of nine vertical “tubes” separated by a dark void space that reflected no light. Short horizonal tubes ran over the top and bottom of these voids. The bottom of the disk could be seen; it appeared like ceramic and was “the color of a common kind of knife sharpening stone… gray with a trace of lavender.” No windows, ladders, antenna, or markings of any sort were observed. There was no sound associated with the disk. The disk was slightly tilted and rotating counter clockwise. Both Howard and Donald used their railroad stop watches twice to time the speed of rotation. The speed was 9 rpm. They could not say what was used as a reference point for the timing, but are sure their estimate was accurate. The object glowed yellow. Electric-like energy arcs ran around the disk in a clockwise direction. They were blue in color. As the arc touched the tubes, the tubes lit up. When the center of the tubes were touched, the ends lit up. When the ends of the tubes were touched by the arcs, the centers lit up.

At one point the tower operator In Fostoria, hearing radio conversation between the three men, called and asked, “Hey, Howard, you got a UFO out there?” Howard replied, “Yes, Merv, we got a UFO up here. He’s damn close.” Merv then asked, “Do you want the cops up there?” The reply was, “Nol They can’t drive up to where we’re at. And if they do get here, they’ll probably shoot at It. It isn’t hurting anybody. We’re playing games with it. When the object was close across the tracks something told them that they should stay on the train and not cross the tracks. They also seemed to know that if they blew the train whistle the object would leave. Howard thought that the object’s occupants were observing their engine, a relatively uncommon model, and in turn were allowing them to observe their craft.

Howard then began turning the train cab headlight on and off in an effort to somehow signal the mysterious object, and when the light went on, the object grew brighter and dimmed again, as if responding. It was at around this time that he realized that the engine was no longer working, and that the radio and walkie-talkies were also oddly out of operation. The object then began spinning at a rapid pace and grew almost blindingly bright, before shooting straight up and then speeding off to the northwest, completely silent the entire time. More recently still is a case from January 14, 2002, in the area of Paintsville, Kentucky, which allegedly involves an actual collision between a train and a UFO. At approximately 2:50 AM in the early morning hours, a coal train was lumbering along its course when the electronic systems on the train starting going haywire. As the crew tried to figure out just what was going on, they turned a bend at a stretch called “Milepost 42” and that was when they noticed lights headed in their direction. It was assumed that this was an oncoming train, and so they killed their own lights so as not to blind the incoming conductor. However, this was no train. The witness describes what happens next in his official report with the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC) as follows:

As we rounded the corner our onboard computer began to flash in and out, speed recorder went nuts, and both locomotives died. Alarm bells began to ring and that’s when we saw the objects. Apparently scanning the river for something, the objects, (at least 3) had several “search” lights trained there, the first object hovered about 10 to 12 feet above the track. Metallic silver in color with multiple-colored lights near the bottom and in the middle, no windows or openings of any kind that we could see. Approximately 18 to 20 feet in length and probably ten feet high. With both engines dead as we rounded the corner, we made little noise and the first object did not respond in time, I estimate that we hit the object at 30 mph with 16,000 trailing tons behind us. It clipped the top of our lead unit then skipped back slicing a chunk out of our trailing unit and first two coal cars. The other objects vanished into thin air.

After this, the train came to a stop around 2 miles past the impact, screeching slowly to a grinding halt after the emergency brakes had kicked in, and the power to their systems jumped back to life. They notified their dispatcher and then surveyed the damage, finding the cab of the rear locomotive to be “demolished and smoking” and the second two cars looking as if they “had been hit with a giant hammer.” Despite the extensive damage, the train was deemed track worthy, and was able to limp along the rail back to the yard, and this is where things would get perhaps even stranger than they already were. The witness explains:

We pulled into Paintsville yard at approximately 5:15 am. The huge overhead lights lining the yard were noticeably dark and the only lights came from what we assumed were railroad officials’ vehicles parked near the end of the track. We pulled to a stop and began unloading our grips off the wounded train. We could hear what sounded like an army of workers immediately tending to our train. Vehicle doors slamming, guys running by in weird outfits and lights glaring from all directions, the one thing missing was railroad officials. A guy named Ferguson shook my hand and asked me to follow him into the old yard office. We did, once inside they, and by they I mean I have no idea who these people were, began to ask us hundreds of questions, they then told us for our own protection we’d be medically tested before we could leave.

I asked repeatedly to talk to my road foreman or trainmaster and not only were these requests denied but they confiscated my conductors’ cellular phone. Hours later we were led outside the old yard office and the strange things continued to happen, the 2 locomotives and two cars were removed from the rest of the train we had brought in and my only guess was parked 4 tracks over under a huge tent like structure buzzing with activity. We were led off property and told due to national security our silence on this matter would be appreciated. We were then put in a Railroad vehicle and taken to Martin Kentucky were we went through questioning again with railroad officials and were then drug tested.

What exactly happened here? Was this an actual collision with a UFO and how did a slow-moving coal train manage to hit it? Who were those officials they were interrogated by? or is this all some sort of hoax? It is hard to say, but a train crashing into a UFO is not something you see every day. That can probably be said about all of the cases we have looked at here, and they occupy a very strange little corner of the UFO phenomenon. What was going on here and what were these objects? The answers remain unclear.

A few days ago I wrote an article here at Mysterious Universe on an alleged UFO crash somewhere in the U.K. during the Second World War. It was a story given to American journalist Dorothy Kilgallen in 1955. It was, of course, the usual kind of such tales: strange, little dead bodies, studies of the craft and dead crew by government agencies, and cover-ups and conspiracies. You can find the article at this link. There is, however, another angle to this whole story that I’ll share with you today. Depending on your opinion on the whole affair, you’ll either think “Wow!” or “Meh.” With that  said, on with today’s article. It all revolves around an entertaining BBC show that hit televisions in the U.K. back in the 1990s. Its title: Invasion: Earth. Before we get to the matter of the story, here’s some background information itself. First and foremost, it’s obvious that the creators of the show dug deep into the world of Ufology. And, the writers and producers were very familiar with that Second World War crashed UFO story, too – as it appears in the show itself.

tvdb say of the show: “A six-part mini series produced by the BBC & the American channel, Sci Fi. The mini series went out in 1998. The plot was simple but effective. A team of military and scientists discover that a hostile alien force is planning to turn Earth into a breeding farm. Another alien race, the echos, tried to warn the Earth about the aliens (ND’s) during the Second World War. However, only one person listened and he went off with the Echo’s. In the late 1990’s a UFO is shot down with the returning man. Suddenly the small team is left to defend the Earth. However, the ND’s had been poisioning the Earth for over 50 years and men are dying out while women could become hybrid creatures. Nothing seems able to stop the ND’s.”

Here’s how the story begins: “England 1944, during the height of the V-2 rocket blitz on England, an unidentified and notably non-German object crashes, devastating the suburb in which it falls. A bomb disposal team arrive on the scene, led by Lieutenant Charles Tyrell (Anton Lesser), a Cambridge Don and anthropologist, but while searching the scene the soldiers discover two of the crashed craft’s occupants; one is shot dead by a soldier while attempting to flee the scene (much to Tyrell’s dismay), while the other occupant falls out of the craft, badly injured by the crash. It soon becomes apparent that the occupants are not human, with their domed heads and speckled pale skin. Tyrell establishes a rapport with the survivor, just as Military Intelligence arrives.

Now, we get to the “Hmm” part of the story. At the same time that Nick Pope was writing his Operation Thunder Child novel, back in the 1990s, the British Ministry of Defense gave a large amount of assistance and support to the BBC’s Invasion: Earth team’s show that dealt with an attack on the planet by hostile alien entities. Inevitably, this led to rumors – within the U.K. UFO research community, if nowhere else –  that it was all part of a less-than-subtle attempt on the part of certain elements of the British Government to get the general public thinking about the possibility of humankind waging outright war against an alien species. Does the MoD know something that the rest of us don’t? A Ministry of Defense employee – referred to me by Nick Pope – had something to say about this at the time. The MoD man said:

Nick Pope

“It’s extremely strange that on the one hand the MoD is publicly so dismissive about UFOs; and yet on the other they bent over backwards to provide assistance to a TV company producing a science-fiction drama which starts with the Royal Air Force shooting down a UFO. Normally, the Ministry of Defense only helps film and TV companies where it believes that significant benefits will fall to the MoD in terms of recruiting, training or public relations. This was the case, for example, with our participation in the James Bond film, Tomorrow Never Dies. What, one wonders, did the MoD think it had to gain from helping to perpetuate a view that the Royal Air Force were virtually at war with extra-terrestrials? Questions about our participation in this project were raised at the highest level within the Ministry of Defense.”

Just a case of the Ministry of Defense giving a bit of help to the BBC? Or, did the MoD have other reasons for wanting to help with the production of the show? Perhaps someone should dig deeper into all of this, even though the strange story is now more than twenty years old.