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.

UFO reports come from all corners of the globe and from people from all walks of life. There seems to be nowhere that is immune to such strange phenomena, with this seeming to be an all-encompassing wave of strangeness that is as of yet beyond our ability to comprehend. One area that has seen plenty of UFO action are the islands of our world, and this may make sense in that UFOs have often been said to be drawn to water. Whether that is true or not, islands have consistently brought in some weird accounts, and here are some of the weirdest.

In 1954 there was a very bizarre UFO event in the island nation of Madagascar, which would be witnessed by potentially tens of thousands of witnesses. On August 16, 1954, an “electric green ball” was seen hurtling down from the sky over the Palais de la Reine, also called the Rova of Antananarivo, in the bustling city of Antananarivo. The mysterious object went streaking behind a nearby hill, and at the time it was thought to be perhaps a meteorite that was about to hit, but there was no explosion or impact. As a multitude of alarmed citizens tried to figure out what was going on, the green light reappeared from behind the hill and proceeded to silently fly up and down over the Avenue of the Liberation while an estimated tens of thousands of awestruck people looked on in various states ranging from awe to horror. It was noticed at the time that street lights and shop lights would flicker and go out as the object passed over them, only to snap back on as it went by, and dogs all over the city were furiously barking. The object continued travelling over the city, passing over a zoo, where all of the animals became absolutely hysterical, and when it passed by cattle on the outskirts of the city they too went nuts. Whatever it was then flew off to the west and was gone. The event was witnessed by as many as 200,000 people and has never been explained.

Antananarivo

In 1958 there is a case from the remote rocky uninhabited speck of rocky land called Trinidade, located in the South Atlantic between Brazil and Africa. The island is far from civilization, with no settlements and the only people here being the seasonal staff of an oceanographic post and a meteorological station operated by the Hydrography and Navigation Division of the Ministry of the Navy. It is a wind-lashed, forbidding place, surrounded by lonely seas and forgotten by the world, and where not much ever really happens, but that would change in January of 1958. At the time, a Naval oceanographic research vessel called the Almirante Saldanha made its way to the island to perform scientific studies, after which it was to head off to Rio de Janeiro. On January 16, as the ship was preparing to depart after several days on the island, something very strange would happen. On that day, a number of people on deck witnessed a bizarre object in the sky, which a photographer on board by the name of Almiro Barauna also observed and managed to take photographs of. He would say of it:

It was on January 16, at 12:15 P.M. The ship was preparing to leave the island, to come back to Rio. I was on the deck observing the operations to take aboard the boat used in the trips between the ship and the island (the island has no harbor). The sea was agitated. The weather was cloudy, clear, with no shadows. I had my Rolleiflex 2.8, Model E, which was kept inside an aluminum box for protection against the corrosive effects of water and salt. I had left my Leica with a telephoto lens in my cabin a few moments before. The deck was full of sailors and officers. Suddenly, Mr. Amilar Vieira and Captain Viegas called me, pointing to a certain spot in the sky and yelling about a bright object which was approaching the island.

At this same moment, when I was still trying to see what it was, Lieutenant Homero, the ship’s dentist, came from the bow toward us, running, pointing out to the sky and also yelling about an object he was sighting. He was so disturbed and excited that he almost fell down after colliding with a cable. Then I was finally able to locate the object, by the flash (of light) it emitted. It was already close to the island. It glittered at certain moments, perhaps changing its own light – I don’t know. It was coming over the sea, moving toward the point called the Galo Crest. I had lost thirty seconds looking for the object, but the camera was already in my hands, ready, when I sighted it clearly silhouetted against the clouds. I shot two photos before it disappeared behind the peak Desejado. My camera was set at a speed of 125 [125th of a second], with the aperture at f/8, and this was the cause of an overexposure error, as I discovered later.

The object remained out of sight for a few seconds – behind the peak – reappearing bigger in size and flying in the opposite direction, but lower and closer than before, and moving at a higher speed. I shot the third photo. The fourth and fifth ones were lost, not only because of the speed the saucer was moving, but also for another reason: In the confusion produced as a result of the sighting, I was being pulled and pushed by other persons also trying to spot the object and, as a consequence, photographed the sea and the island only – not the object. It was moving out to sea again, in the direction from which it had come, and it appeared to stop in midair for a brief time. At that moment I shot my last photo (the last on the film). After about ten seconds, the object continued to increase its distance from the ship, gradually diminishing in size and finally disappearing into the horizon. The object was sighted by almost all the people on the deck at that time, including Lieutenant Homero, Captain Viegas, and Mr. Amilar Vieira.

Trinidade Island

Barauna would have the photos developed as soon as he could, and the negatives were turned over to the Navy. It would also turn out that others in the area on other vessels had also seen the object and even photographed it, and he was extensively interviewed by Navy officials. Barauna would say of all of this:

I was interviewed by several high-staff officers, who asked me all kinds of questions. I went there twice. At the first meeting, they requested the negatives for examination. They were sent to a civilian organization, the Cruzeiro do Sul Aerophoto grammetric Service, remaining there for four days. I was told by the Navy officers that the analyses proved they were genuine -excluding definitely the possibility of a trick or falsification. On the second visit, they performed several time-tests. While I worked with my Rolleiflex, taking shots at the same time intervals I had used to photograph the object, three Navy officers with chronometers registered the times.

They came to the conclusion – based on these tests as well as on studies concerning the ship’s position and examinations of charts of the island – that the object was flying at a speed between 900 and 1,000 km./hour [about 600 mph]. The object’s size was also estimated on the basis of studies related with the island’s details also appearing on the photos, diagrams drawn on charts, graphs, et cetera. The object was about 120 feet in diameter and about 24 feet high. They requested me to keep the matter secret for some time. I was permitted to publish the case only after authorization from the Navy. The permission was granted, verbally, on the night of February 15, by Commander Bacellar. They made only one restriction, which I cannot mention for the reason that I have given my word. I was informed of four other sightings over the island during those thirty days preceding the incident of January 16. I was also informed of another thing: At one of those sightings, the object was photographed by a Navy sergeant. His photo obviously was not released and probably never will be – the reasons are evident. Besides those four sightings, there was also the RADAR case. A target flying at supersonic speed was tracked by the radar of the Almirante Saldanha on January 15.

The photos eventually got out into the wild and created quite a lot of excitement in the general public, as they were very clear photos of an actual UFO. As people discussed and debated them, the Navy went quiet and refused to make any comment or answer any questions on the matter, despite the fact that many high-ranking Navy personnel had witnessed the event and were telling their stories. The hype over the incident and its photos got so intense that the Navy had to step in, making a statement that said:

With reference to the reports appearing in the press that the Navy is opposed to divulge the facts concerning the appearance of a strange object over Trindade Island, this Cabinet declares that such information has no basis. This Ministry has no motive to impede the release of photographs of the referred-to object, taken by Mr. Almiro Barauna, who was at Trindade Island at the invitation of the Navy, and in the presence

of a large number of the crew of Almirante Saldanha from whose deck the photographs were taken. Clearly, this Ministry will not be able to make any pronouncement concerning the object seen, because the photographs do not constitute sufficient proof for such purpose.

In the end, the Brazilian Navy would say nothing more on the case, the photos, or its analysis of them, and we are left to wonder what all of these qualified witnesses saw out there at that island and what is in those images. Another weird case happened at the rugged and remote Anglican mission village at Boianai, Papua, New Guinea, where on April 5, 1959, a Father William Booth Gill was there doing missionary work when he would have an outlandish experience. On that evening, Gill would observe a strange fast-moving light moving through the sky in the distance over the remote Mount Pudi. This would be followed a month later by an “inverted saucer-shaped object” hovering over the mission. At first Gill tried to put these anomalous occurrences out of his head and get on with his work, but on June 26, 1959 Gill and dozens of other witnesses saw a four-legged, disc-shaped object fly out from the wilderness to hover over the mission with four small humanoids that busily went about some unknown task as a blue beam intermittently shot down from the craft to the ground below. Curious, some of the witnesses waved their hands and were astonished when the entities waved back. Gill would say:

On the large one, two of the figures seemed to be doing something near the center of the deck. They were occasionally bending over and raising their arms as though adjusting or “setting up” something. One figure seemed to be standing, looking down at us. In a moment of anticipation, I raised his arms and waved to the figure. To our surprise the figure did the same. Ananias waved both arms over his head; then the two outside figures did the same. Ananias and myself began waving our arms, and all four seemed to wave back. There seemed no doubt that our movements were answered.

After about an hour of this the beings entered the ship again and flew off, after which several smaller craft would patrol the area for some time before disappearing. Later that evening, Gill would hear a loud bang from outside and go out to see four UFOs circling about before flying off. The sightings have never been explained. Moving on to 1972 there is a curious account from Uruguay’s remote Isla de Lobos, a tiny island just off the coast, populated by fur seals and with the only sign of humans is a lone lighthouse on the rocky, wind blasted shore. This lighthouse is manned by a garrison of five Navy men who do 15-day shifts, and on October 28, 1972 the shift would have dinner as usual, after which one of the men, a Corporal Juan Fuentes Figueroa, went out to check the generators on a routine inspection. As he was out there, his attention was caught by some strange lights in the sky hovering near the top of the generator building, seemingly right above a terrace that was situated up there about 20 feet above the ground. The lights looked to him like car headlights, although this was of course impossible, and they seemed to be flashing and oscillating between a mix of white, yellow and violet.

Fuentes was so unsettled by the sight that he went back to get his pistol, oddly not telling any of the other men what was going on. When he went back outside to approach the generator building again, this time he could see that there was an object up there apparently landed on the terrace, described as a metallic, copper-colored object shaped like an inverted bowl, standing on some sort of landing gear and with a rotating antenna of some sort on its top. What’s more, in the eerie illumination of the lights there was what looked to be a figure standing beside the object, and a second and third figure were descending from the craft. They seemed to be wearing some sort of dark suits akin to diving suits, their heads appearing somewhat elongated and oversized, and one seemed to be noticeably taller than the others, although Fuentes could not make out a lot of details. He then realized that they had turned towards him and seemed to be very aware that he was there.

At this time, Fuentes was overcome with fear and panic, and raised his pistol to point it up at the craft. It was at this point that he felt a strange sensation throughout his body like a vibration that sent his hair standing up on end, and found that he was unable to move, as if paralyzed, all while a voice boomed through his head that said “Don’t shoot because it is useless.” After this, the strange entities went back up into their ship, seemingly walking up steps of some kind, appearing to be pulling themselves up with handrails, after which the craft closed and began to lift off as its landing legs retracted telescopically. It hovered up in the air momentarily, then silently sped off at breathtaking speed with a flash of bright light like a fireball. At this point, Fuentes ran back to the others and told them what had happened, but no one believed him. Considering he was the superior officer and no one believed him, this came as a shock, but it would seem that at least one of the men, Francisco Cascudo, thought it was odd enough to pass it along to a superior officer and they would all check it out.

Not long after their tour at the lighthouse ended, Fuentes was called aside by high-ranking officials, who interviewed him at length on what he had allegedly seen. Fuentes would claim that there had also been two men who he believed to be from the U.S. Embassy lurking in the background taking notes, and who were later identified as officers of the “Spatial Affair Service.” Fuentes was also shown various pictures of different UFOs and asked to point out which were most similar to what he had witnessed and then dismissed. At no point was he ever directly questioned by the mysterious Americans, but he could see them excitedly talking to his interrogators in another room, making it obvious they were very interested in his sighting. After this, the case came to the attention of the Uruguayan UFO Investigation Center, who subjected Fuentes to some psychological tests and came to the conclusion that he was a solid witness, described as “sincere, uncomplicated and simple, with no tendency to fabrication or fantasy and lacking an average imagination.” It was also noted that Fuentes had no previous interest in or knowledge of UFOs, and they came to the conclusion that he at least truly believed he had seen what he claimed. Sub-officer Cascudo would back this up, describing Fuentes as a “simple and honest man, incapable of inventing a story of this nature.”

Finally, we have a report from the Canary Islands, located in the Atlantic Ocean in the region called Macaronesia and just about 62 miles from the northwestern coast of Africa off Morocco. On June 22, 1976, people living on the islands of Tenerife, La Palma, and La Gomera began calling in to report numerous strange lights performing odd maneuvers in the sky, amongst them one that seemed to be larger than the others, described as a giant, luminous sphere. Among these reports some were more spectacular than others, and one of the first reported incidents was made by the Navy escort ship, the Atrevida, which at the time was positioned off the coast of Fuerteventura Island. On this evening at approximately 9:27 PM, the crew observed an extremely bright light moving in the general direction of the ship. It was first thought to be a normal aircraft, but this turned out to not be the case, as it began rotating, pulsating, and generating a blindingly bright halo of yellow and blue, as well as various flashing strobe effects. The baffled crew watched this mysterious object for a full 40 minutes, and the official report from the ship would read in part:

The original light went out and a luminous beam from it began to rotate. It remained like this for approximately two minutes. Then an intense great halo of yellowish and bluish light developed, and remained in the same position for 40 minutes, even though the original phenomenon was no longer visible. Two minutes after the great halo, the light split into two parts, the smaller part being beneath, in the center of the luminous halo, where a blue cloud appeared and the part from which the bluish nucleus had come, vanished. The upper part began to climb in a spiral, rapid and irregular, and finally vanished. None of these movements affected the initial circular halo in any way, which remained just the same the whole time, its glow lighting up parts of the land and the ocean, from which we could deduce that the phenomenon was not very far away from us, but was close.

At no point was the craft picked up on radar, and a check of air traffic in the area showed no military or civilian aircraft scheduled to be in the vicinity. This would start a whole series of reports from throughout the Canary Islands as whatever it was headed out on its inscrutable mission, and people seemed to be reporting two different types of phenomena, one being this large sphere and the other being smaller flitting orbs, and these were seen by hundreds of people across several islands. One of the most intriguing reports came from a doctor Francisco Padron Leon, who at the time was in a taxi on his way to a house call at the town of Las Rosas. However, things got very odd when both he and the driver noticed an illuminated globe up in front of them, just seeming to hover over the ground. According to Leon’s report, it measured an estimated 100 feet across, and was seemingly made up of a semi-clear material like crystal. More bizarre still was that as they drew closer they could see that the bottom of the sphere was ringed by some sort of metallic platform, upon which two immense humanoid beings around 10 feet in height were standing next to large consoles of some kind. These two creatures had oversized heads, wore some kind of helmets, and seemed to be operating a giant tube that belched forth a bluish smoke, and the doctor would say of these entities and what happened next:

At each side of the center there were two huge figures of 2.50 to 3 m. [8.5 to 10 ft.] tall, but no taller than 3 m. [10 ft.], dressed entirely in red and facing each other in such a way that I always saw their profile. Then I observed that some kind of bluish smoke was coming out from a semi-transparent central tube in the sphere, covering the periphery of the sphere’s interior without leaking outside at any moment. Then the sphere began to grow and grow until it became huge like a 20-story house, but the platform and the crew remained the same size; it rose slowly and majestically and it seems I heard a very tenuous whistling.

This gigantic sphere would ascend and then purportedly shoot off at astounding speed along with its mysterious occupants. It would then be seen by several other witnesses directly after this, including the very patient that the doctor was on his way to see, all of who described the same translucent crystalline structure and giant beings on their catwalk. By the end of the evening there would apparently be thousands of reports from across the archipelago describing something bizarre going on in the sky, coming from a wide variety of professions and ages and making them one of the most mass witnessed UFO events ever, yet it was all mostly swept under the carpet by the Spanish Air Force.

The Canary Islands

The following year, in 1977, some of these reports were leaked to journalist J. J. Benitez by a Spanish Air Force General, and would subsequently find their way into his book UFOs: Official Documents of the Spanish Government, but this was all still considered unverifiable and filled with spooky conspiracies. It would not be until 1994 that people would really take it seriously, when the Spanish Air Force declassified its files on the events and it was clear for all to see that something very odd had indeed been documented from that evening. The declassified report was very detailed, included over 100 pages of testimony, evaluations, drawings, a full chronology of the sightings, and it also took the step of separating witnesses by their perceived level of veracity and reliability, with the reports of the crew of the Atrevida and that of doctor Leon ranking at the top. It was also explained that an investigative adjunct had been launched by the Spanish Air Force, which had found that there had been no military or civilian aircraft at the time and they officially labelled it an “unidentified aerial phenomena.”

There are no easy answers for any of these cases, and they join the ranks of the many, may UFO reports that have come before them. Although such accounts come in from all over the world from many environments, there just seems to be something fascinating about these island reports. To know that there are these strips of land out there isolated from the rest of the world having these incidents holds a certain sense of allure, and it all only adds to the mystery of the UFO phenomenon at large.

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When we think of UFOs during the Second World War, more often than not, it will likely provoke images of the Foo Fighters. They were small, fast-moving, ball-like, illuminated “things” seen in the sky and mostly during battle and confrontation over Europe. The creations of the Allies? The Nazis? The questions still exist. And, it’s most unlikely that we’ll ever get the complete answers to the Foo Fighter issue. What’s even less well-known, though, are the reports of UFO activity during the Second World War that had nothing to do with the Foo Fighters. In other words, today’s article is on claims of Flying Saucers seen – and allegedly examined by scientists – during the Second World War. I should stress that the story I’m sharing with you today has nothing to do with the extremely dubious stories of “Nazi UFOs” that certain figures have promoted for disturbing, political reasons. Rather, we’re talking about an American journalist, dead aliens and more. With that said, let’s move on.

May 22, 1955 was the date on which a well-respected journalist, Dorothy Kilgallen, put together an account for the American press. The story, that surfaced while Kilgallen was on vacation in the U.K. at the time, read as follows: “I can report today on a story which is positively spooky, not to mention chilling. British scientists and airmen, after examining the wreckage of one mysterious flying ship, are convinced these strange aerial objects are not optical illusions or Soviet inventions, but are flying saucers which originate on another planet. The source of my information is a British official of cabinet rank who prefers to remain unidentified.” One of Kilgallen’s informants for the tale was suspected of having been Gordon Creighton. For a long time, he was the editor of the Flying Saucer Review magazine. Timothy Good, author of a 1987 book, Above Top Secret, knew Creighton. Good followed the Kilgallen story, saying that it “…was alleged to have taken place during a cocktail party  given by Lord Mountbatten, but I have been unable to substantiate this with Mollie Travis, Mountbatten’s private secretary at the time.”

The FBI file on Dorothy Kilgallen

And who was Lord Mountbatten? Read on: “As with many royal relatives, Louis Mountbatten was related to both Prince Philip and Queen Elizabeth. A great-grandson of Queen Victoria, he was a distant cousin of the Queen’s as well as Prince Philip’s uncle. Philip’s mother, Princess Alice of Battenberg, was Louis’s sister. Philip also lived with the Mountbattens for several years following his mother’s institutionalization… In August of 1979, Lord Mountbatten was killed at age 79 in a terrorist attack by the Irish Republican Army. His fishing boat, named Shadow V, was blown up off the coast of the Republic of Ireland by a bomb that had been smuggled aboard.” Now, back to the story/yarn of the crashed UFO. Dorothy Kilgallen’s primary source for the story – believed to have been Mountbatten, himself – quietly told her these words: “We believe, on the basis of our inquiry thus far, that the saucers were staffed by small men – probably under four feet tall. It’s frightening, but there’s no denying the flying saucers come from another planet.” Kilgallen, recognizing that she had an amazing story on her hands, had more to say: “This official quoted scientists as saying a flying ship of this type could not have possibly been constructed on Earth. The British Government, I learned, is withholding an official report on the ‘flying saucer’ examination at this time, possibly because it does not wish to frighten the public. When my husband and I arrived here from a brief vacation, I had no premonition that I would be catapulting myself into the controversy over whether flying saucers are real or imaginary.”

London Underground

For years, that was where the story pretty much began and ended. However, over the years tales have circulated to the effect that the UFO crash had nothing to do with Roswell (as some have suggested), but everything to do with a Flying Saucer crash somewhere on the U.K. – and, as a result, the Americans and the Brits secretly created a project to study the wrecked craft and dead bodies that reportedly fell into their laps. I’ve heard rumors that during the Second World War, the remains of the dead aliens from the crash were, from 1944 to 1953, held deep in a bunker in the London Underground. Another story (or, more correctly, another rumor) suggests everything was flown over to the United States, along with a team of U.K. scientists. The tales are fascinating. Try proving it all, though. True or not, the story is still an intriguing one. And if there is any truth to it all, then it adds another weird story to strange, UFO-themed activity encountered during the Second World War.

One curious corner of the UFO phenomenon is not what goes on up in our skies, but rather what seems to be going on beneath the seas of our world. Called Unidentified Submersible Objects, or USOs, these are those unidentified objects seen whizzing and zipping about beneath the waves of our oceans and lakes, and while they are rarer than traditional airborne UFOs, they are a curious subspecies of a larger phenomenon. Seeing as these strange underseas craft are supposedly roaming about our waters, it seems only reasonable to assume that Navies have at some point encountered them, and this is true. Indeed, such encounters constitute some of the more believable of reports, with various reliable witnesses with nothing to gain from lying coming forth with such stories. And so here we delve into some strange and often harrowing encounters between military forces and strange underwater forces we may never understand.

In 1966 there was a rather strange series of events seen from the Navy submarine the USS Tiru SS-416. The sub had left Pearl Harbor, in Hawaii, and was on its way to Seattle, Washington, where it was to be docked for several days before being moved to a bay in order to carry out some torpedo exercises. During the journey towards Seattle, on one afternoon the lookout reported something strange in the sky about 2 miles distant, and he called others to come check it out even as the radar station began to pick up an anomalous contact. One of the witnesses, a crew member named Jim Speiser, would tell of what happened to UFO Casebook:

The lookout refused to tell the OOD what it was that he had seen and instead insisted that the starboard lookout and the OOD both look at that area. The three men looked through their binoculars toward the area reported and were astounded to see a metal craft larger than a football field tumble from the clouds into the ocean. It actually tumbled end over end and when it hit the water and sank beneath the ocean huge geysers of water rose into the air. When the port lookout was sure that the others had seen it he then told the OOD that he had seen it tumble from the ocean up into the clouds. The OOD and the starboard lookout were speechless. Within a few minutes, however, they all became excited when it again rose from the water and tumbled up into the cloud layer.

At about the same time a crew member below queried the bridge about a radar contact at the same range and bearing. Sonar also reported strange echos. The OOD called for the Captain to come to the bridge at that time. At about the same time the object emerged from the clouds and fell down into the ocean. All five men witnessed this. The QMC took pictures as it rose up into the clouds and then back down into the ocean once again.The five men watched for quite a while longer but nothing else happened. Soon the sub had moved out of visual range and the Captain told all witnesses that they were never to discuss what they had seen with anyone under any circumstances. He stated that the incident was classified information. The Captain then went below and sent a radio msg. There was no doubt as to what we had seen. It was a metal craft with machinery on and around the outside of it. It appeared to have windows or lenses placed around its perimeter. It made no noise that we could hear. It did not disturb the subs electrical systems nor did it affect the gyro compass. It looked very much like a round flying “ship” as in sea going ship. It had the shape and form of a saucer with a bowl inverted in the saucer and it was huge. I will never forget it as long as I live.

After this the sub managed to reach its destination without further incident, and none of the multiple witnesses have any explanation for what they saw out there. Another such incident happened 1991, off the west coast of South America. The case, which I have reported on before and was reported to the files of the site UFO Casebook, comes from a witness who claims that at the time he had been an operations and intelligence petty officer serving aboard the Knox-class destroyer escort the USS Kirk FF1087, and that they had been part of a drug interdiction force, which consisted of the USS Kirk and three other Naval vessels. Their primary mission was to patrol using a network of radar to track and then intercept drug-running aircraft flying out of Columbia, Panama and Guatemala, as well as to engage any smuggling ships they were able to find. The witness says that his primary duties took place within the CIC, or the Combat Information Center, which he and 22 other specialists manned 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with them rotating between two 11-man shifts.

The witness claims that he was on CIC duty at 2 a.m. on the morning of December 16, and it was a quiet night with nothing going on. He says he took a break to go up to the ship’s bridge, and at the time the entire vessel was in a state called “darkened ship,” with all of the exterior lights turned off, as well as those on the bridge, meaning the area was only faintly illuminated by instrument panels. He began talking casually with the officer of the deck, and this is when things would suddenly get weird. He says:

All of a sudden and out of nowhere, like a huge flash from a camera, emanating from the starboard bow sea level upward was a huge flash of red glowing light, which lit up our entire ship. It only lit up our ship, not the surrounding ocean, just our ship. It happened so fast, that the OOD, the navigator and I were speechless for about 5 seconds, at which time I looked at the OOD and asked him if he just saw that light. He stated yes in a sullen voice. I then asked the navigator and he replied yes. I then took the navigator’s sound powered headset, and asked the forward and aft look outs, if they had just seen the same red flash, to which the forward look out stated, “YES! WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT?” Aft lookout said yes as well. I then immediately contacted CIC, and asked the CIC officer if we had any aircraft or surface ships in our vicinity, to which he replied clear as a whistle. I asked if we had any submarine activity in the area, to which he replied, no.

What had just happened did not make any sense. The flash emanated from the sea, directly off of our starboard bow (like it was touching our bow), and ascended upwardly so rapidly, creating the effect of the bright red flash. The other weird aspect of this event was that only our ship was lit up within the red flash, not the surrounding sea, but our vessel only. Up until this event, I did not believe in UFOs or USOs. I have no doubt that our ship, steaming along at 12 knots, came right up on a submerged unidentifiable aircraft. I don’t think the aircraft or USO had any idea we were sailing up to them. I think whatever it was, took off in a very unplanned and fast manner, and wanted to quickly identify us, thus the flash.

In the end, after much consideration they decided not to wake the captain, merely logging it as an “unexplained phenomenon.” Another Naval submarine encounter supposedly occurred in October of 1989, aboard the USS Memphis. On October 24 of that year, the sub was on an assignment to secure the shuttle launch pad in Florida, patrolling about 150 miles off the coast when something very large was picked up on sonar approaching them at a fast pace. As it did, apparently the instrumentation on the submarine and operations on the ship in general went absolutely haywire, and the witness would say of this:

The ship was malfunctioning, our tanks were blowing out of control, we were losing navigation ability and the communications area was totally lost. We went to all stop and tried to access what was happening. The controls in the reactor area started to malfunction. This presented a serious danger to our safety, so the captain ordered us to shut down the reactor, surface and go to diesel motors. When the ship surfaced I went to my watch station. The ship was still experiencing electronic difficulties but the mechanical devices such as diesel engines, cook stoves, and turbines were fine.

USS Memphis

The ordeal wasn’t over for them, because whatever had caused the disturbance then emerged from the water, an inverted V-shaped craft of some kind, and it was described as absolutely massive. The witness would say of what happened next:

This huge vessel was over a half mile across. The UFO made a half circle around our ship then passed across the stern causing our electronics systems to go crazy. We had permanent damage in communications and the sonar room. As the craft flew over the stern, I could see the rain stop under its red glow. The water seemed to rise almost a foot as the UFO passed over silently. When the UFO finished its swing across the stern it paused – the sky got brighter red and it simply moved off at tremendous speed inside 15 seconds. When the UFO left, our boat returned to normal with the exception of the radio and sonar. We did a quick system check and the captain ordered us to return to reactor power and get underway. The captain took two petty officers, the executive officer, and myself into the wardroom. He told us to not spread any rumors until we had a chance to talk to Commander Submarine Fleet – Atlantic. We reached port in about 7 hours where I was taken into “protective custody.” Two enlisted men and myself agreed we had witnessed a real UFO. I was the one who shot it with a laser range finder, so I was the only one that had its exact sizes. I shot that vessel as it hovered and I got solid readings, not spotty like I would on debris. We were in holding for about three hours when an officer from the Air Force arrived and gave us a line of bull about an exploding weather satellite. The Navy then transferred virtually everyone on the crew to new assignments. This included the captain, the executive officer and the entire crew. They were split up which almost never happens unless one of them gets a promotion or a new command, neither of which happened.

More recently there was a report from E-4 Petty Officer John Baughman, who was stationed onboard the USS Carl Vinson, a Nimitz-class supercarrier, in 2010. At the time, the ship was off the coast of Haiti delivering humanitarian aid to the region, which had just suffered a catastrophic earthquake. On this day, he was taking break and sitting on the SAM Launcher Deck, just looking out across the water, something he often did and during which time he’d see “everything from sharks, dolphins and whales to giant squids, sea turtles, and swordfish,” but on this occasion he’ see something altogether stranger. He would say of what happened and his thoughts on the matter:

I was staring into the water from above when a large, fat, white ‘Tic Tac’ object, approximately twenty feet in length, suddenly appeared in my view below me, moving right and darted into the depths as fast as it appeared. I had a pretty good reference point on how big or deep something was in the water, especially when you can see the water line on the side of the ship. I couldn’t really comprehend what I saw. It was definitely a solid object, but when it descended, its forward end rapidly collapsed in on itself and disappeared. It’s hard to come to grips with something like this, and I still feel somewhat insecure about it because it doesn’t make sense. It could have been just about anything. Rapidly moving flotsam with a keen ability to completely disappear, very large albino shark or an albino whale. Could even be an optical illusion, but it cast its own shadow and that’s how I was able to perceive it as a solid object. But at the same time, more data points, even as basic as my story, could help solve the mystery of whether they’re foreign adversaries playing mind games, non-human entities, or the myriad of other possibilities.

What was this thing? When he reported it to his superior, it was apparently just brushed off and not taken very seriously. What did Baughman really see out there? Who knows? Some interesting cases of USOs have been reported by personnel within the US Navy as well, from which there has been footage released showing UFOs entering the water. Chief among the proposed evidence for this is a video taken off the coast of San Diego in July of 2019 by crew aboard the USS Omaha. The video, which was released by UFO researcher and investigative filmmaker Jeremy Corbell, shows a spherical object fly over the vessel before coming down to make a controlled descent into the water, with a crewmember heard to exclaim “Wow, it splashed!” You can see a report with the footage here. The video caused quite a stir online, but it would become even more interesting when Corbell claimed that a Navy sub had been sent to find the object but came up empty-handed, and information would come out that at around the same time that US submarines had also been picking up other mysterious and anomalous objects underwater in the area that seemed to defy physics as we know them. The Navy confirmed that the footage was authentic and unexplained, and the Washington Examiner’s Tom Rogan has said of this in connection with the USS Omaha footage:

Relevant to this video, an area we will learn more about is the interaction between US Navy submarines – nuclear ballistic submarines and attack submarines – picking up sonar contact of things moving at hundreds of knots under the water. There is an undersea dimension to this, on top of what the pilots are seeing above water. Hundreds of knots under water? I don’t think people can even digest that. That is what I have heard from very good sources and that the US Navy has the data.

This was only one sighting among many UFOs also being seen in the area in a flurry strange activity, including fast-moving “tic-tac” UFO that was also filmed, a “flying pyramid” that was also caught on film, and others. Indeed, videos and photos of these events leaked and began doing heavy rounds online, to the point that the military had no choice but to address it all. One Pentagon spokesperson would say of it all:

I can confirm that the referenced photos and videos were taken by Navy personnel. The UAPTF has included these incidents in their ongoing examinations. As we have said before, to maintain operations security and to avoid disclosing information that may be useful to potential adversaries, DOD does not discuss publicly the details of either the observations or the examinations of reported incursions into our training ranges or designated airspace, including those incursions initially designated as UAP.

Still from the USS Omaha footage

It seems that it is not only the Americans who have to deal with these underwater objects, as the Russian Navy also have several cases of this sort of thing going on. One case comes from a Vladimir Nikolayevich Chernavin, who is an alleged ex- Commander-in-Chief of the Soviet Navy. Among his many strange claims, such as that USOs had been harassing Russian subs since as far back as 1947 and that the objects were exploring underwater caves in Antarctica, he also claims that he had his own experience with one of these objects. Of which he says:

I saw this phenomenon, including when I was captain of the submarine during our time in the Atlantic and the Caribbean, I clearly saw a flying object over one of our Soviet positions appearing in various forms, but mainly in the form of a round hat. It was especially glowing, this light was changing, but the dish was moving at a tremendous speed, then it would stay hovering in one place and disappear immediately to appear in another place, and then dive into the water and disappear from view, and after a while it came out of the water but in another way, we were watching like this phenomenon, as I saw it, the extraordinary phenomena cannot be ignored.

British UFO investigator Philip Mantle has mentioned several such cases involving Soviet submarines in his book Russia’s USO Secrets, which is based on information coming from declassified documents and testimony from Russian military veterans. One such account comes from former nuclear submarine commander Yury Beketov, who says his submarine was doing maneuvers somewhere near the Bermuda Triangle when they had a strange encounter, of which he says:

We repeatedly observed that the instruments detected the movements of material objects at unimaginable speed, around 230 knots (400 km per hour). It’s hard to reach that speed on the surface – only in the air is it possible. The beings that created those material objects significantly exceed us in development.

A particular harrowing report mentioned in the book allegedly happened in 1951, when a Soviet submarine encountered a massive underwater object, which measured 200-250 meters long and was supposedly rising from the depths as it headed towards shore. According to the account, the captain actually ordered depth charges to be dropped on the object, which seemed to have no effect, but which nevertheless caused it to stop its ascent, change course, and head out to deeper water at great speed. What are we dealing with in cases like these, with such inscrutable objects that even the military is unable to deal with? How can we even begin to fathom the forces behind such encounters, or possibly understand the technology that must be involved to allow for what is being seen? In some cases these mysterious craft seem to defy the very laws of physics as we know them, with Lue Elizondo, former director of the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, saying of this:

Imagine a technology that can do 6-700 g-forces, which can fly at 13,000 miles per hour, which can evade radar and which can fly through air and water and eventually. in the space. And oh, by the way, has no obvious signs of propulsion, no wings, no control surfaces and yet can still defy the natural effects of Earth’s gravity. This is precisely what we are seeing.

The veracity of these reports seem to be sound, as we are dealing with seasoned Naval personnel who know the sea and what can be expected to be found out there. What are we dealing with here? What are these mysterious craft that seem to be taunting even heavily armed military vessels? Where are they from and what do they want? It remains unknown, but with the increasing admittance by the Navy that these things are really out there it really raises cause to wonder, and perhaps cause for concern. As most people blissfully go about their everyday lives, this stuff is happening, unexplained and evading understanding. what it all means perhaps time will tell.

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On March 28, 1975, Senator Barry Goldwater wrote the following, highly thought-provoking, words to a UFO researcher named Shlomo Arnon: “The subject of UFOs is one that has interested me for some long time. About ten or twelve years ago I made an effort to find out what was in the building at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base where the information is stored that has been collected by the Air Force, and I was understandably denied this request. It is still classified above Top Secret.” Goldwater continued to Arnon: “I have, however, heard that there is a plan under way to release some, if not all, of this material in the near future. I’m just as anxious to see this material as you are, and I hope we will not have to wait much longer.” Born in 1909, Barry Morris Goldwater served as a Major-General in the U.S. Air Force, a Senator for Arizona, the Chairman of the U.S. Government’s Senate Intelligence Committee, and the Republican Party’s nominee for President of the United States in the 1964 election. Indeed, it was on May 2, 1964, that Goldwater received no less than 75 percent of the vote in the Texas Republican Presidential primary. Moving onto the next case…

You may not be surprised to know that other senators have got into the UFO subject – and related phenomena, too. From January to March 1973, the state of Iowa was hit hard by cattle mutilations. Not only that, many of the ranchers who lost animals reported seeing strange lights and black-colored helicopters in the direct vicinity of the attacks. That the FBI took keen notice of all this is demonstrated by the fact that, as the Freedom of Information Act has shown, it collected and filed numerous media reports on the cattle-mutes in Iowa. The next piece of data dates from early September 1974. That’s when the FBI’s director, Clarence M. Kelley, was contacted by Senator Carl T. Curtis, who wished to inform the Bureau of a wave of baffling attacks on livestock in Nebraska – the state in which Curtis resided and represented. At the time, the FBI declined to get involved, as Director Kelley informed the senator: “”It appears that no Federal Law within the investigative jurisdiction of the FBI has been violated, inasmuch as there is no indication of interstate transportation of the maimed animals.” The mystery was never solved. Indeed, cattle mutilations continue.

One year later, in August 1975, Senator Floyd K. Haskell, of Colorado, made his voice known to the FBI, on the growing cattle mutilation controversy: “For several months my office has been receiving reports of cattle mutilations throughout Colorado and other western states. At least 130 cases in Colorado alone have been reported to local officials and the Colorado Bureau of Investigation (CBI); the CBI has verified that the incidents have occurred for the last two years in nine states. The ranchers and rural residents of Colorado are concerned and frightened by these incidents. The bizarre mutilations are frightening in themselves: in virtually all the cases, the left ear, rectum and sex organ of each animal has been cut away and the blood drained from the carcass, but with no traces of blood left on the ground and no footprints.” Now, onto the Rendlesham Forest “UFO landing” of 1980.

A well-respected Democrat, Jim Exon was the governor of Nebraska from 1971 to 1979, and the senator for Nebraska from 1979 to 1997. Jim Exon was also a key member of the U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services, specifically the chairman of the subcommittee. It was in the early months of 1985 that ufologist Ray Boeche decided to take his investigation of the Rendlesham Forest UFO case of December 1980 to the next level: namely, to seek help from Senator Exon. Ultimately, things didn’t go quite as well as Boeche had hoped for. There is no doubt at all, however, that the whole situation touched a highly sensitive nerve within the labyrinthine corridors of power. Boeche put out a notable feeler to the senator, as Boeche told me: ““We got him a copy of Sky Crash and Clear Intent. [The latter] contained six-pages of material on the case, and we sent those to Exon’s office. A copy of the Halt tape, too. And that started the entire thing.” On March 18, 1985, Exon wrote to Ray: “As you requested, I have asked the Air Force for their assistance. Please know that when I hear from them, I will be back in touch. I am still reviewing the two book you provided me, Mr. Boeche. I will return them when I have finished.” Ray received another response from Exon on April 2. Exon came straight to the point: “Frankly, I am not convinced that the incidents you are concerned with did, in fact, occur. Nor have I found any evidence of a cover-up by the government.” The story didn’t go much further.

Among all of the evidence presented for UFOs and aliens over the years, perhaps the most mysterious and compelling are those we never got to see. There are numerous cases of supposed lost photos or footage, lost witnesses, even lost alien bodies, all of which leave us lingering in a limbo of speculation and wonder. A curious case of this comes from 1973, when a hot shot Hollywood producer and his businessman investor happened across a tale of a supposedly amazing piece of footage of a UFO and alien contect, which has been lost and buried to perhaps never be seen again.

In 1973, a Los Angeles filmmaker, producer, and composer by the name of Robert Emenegger made his way out to Norton Air Force Base, in in San Bernardino County, California, along with a well-connected business man and partner by the name of Alan Sandler. Although an Air Force Base seems like a rather odd place for these two to be going, they had a very good reason, in that Emenegger was trying to put together a documentary on Air Force advanced research projects and technology, and had been invited there by the commander-in-chief of the Special Investigations Division and the head of the intelligence department, Paul Schartl in order to have a sit-down. It would soon get very weird indeed.

Robert Emenegger

The men allegedly spent some time discussing various research projects being carried out by the Air Force at the base and beyond, but things got really interesting when the topic of UFOs came up. The two officials then began weaving a very odd tale of a UFO that had allegedly landed at Holloman Air Force Base, New Mexico, in 1964. This craft had apparently come down to land at the base at 6 a.m., and not only that, but aliens had actually gotten off of the ship and talked with the top ranking commanders. In addition, the whole encounter had allegedly been filmed, and both of the officials at this meeting had seen the footage for themselves. Schartl would say of what was seen in the 16mm film footage:

Three flying objects in the shape of a disk arrived, one of which landed, and the other two flew away. On the landed UFO, a door opened, from which three creatures appeared. They were human-size. They had an odd, gray complexion and a pronounced nose. They wore tight fitting jump suits and thin headdresses that appeared to be communication devices, and in their hands they held a ‘translator.’ Their eyes had vertical slits like a cat’s, the nose was clearly defined, and their mouths were thin and slit like, with no chins. A Holloman base commander and other Air Force officers went out to meet them.

Schartl would also claim that they would continue meetings for several days, storing the spaceship in a hangar in the meantime, and that during the alien meeting the entities had eerily mentioned that they were monitoring an unfamiliar alien race that they did not know about. When Emenegger pushed for more information on what the aliens and commander had talked about, the officials clammed up and would only offer vague allusions to sharing technology and knowledge, and they also said that the aliens were “doctors, professional types.” It was all incredibly intriguing, so at this point Emenegger had already decided to do his documentary on UFOs and this amazing account. Much to his surprise, the Air Force officials even agreed to allow him to use 3,200 feet of the mysterious footage, and they even personally brought him to the site where the landing had allegedly happened, as well as the hangar where the UFO was kept and the buildings where the meetings with the aliens had supposedly been conducted.

It was all seemingly too good to be true, even though they were given the ominous caveat that the film should be made to look like a hypothetical scenario and that they were to in no way claim that any of it was actually real. Nevertheless, when Emenegger and Sandler left, they did so in high spirits, amazed that they would soon be able to see this mysterious footage for themselves. When days turned into weeks and weeks into months with no further word, Emenegger decided to go to Wright-Patterson AFB and talk to one of his military contacts, a Col. George Weinbrenner. When asked about what had happened to the footage, Weinbrenner allegedly began ranting about Soviet technology and the MIG 25, seemingly completely off-topic, and it was very odd, yet as he continued his tirade he apparently produced a signed a copy of J. Allen Hynek’s book The UFO Experience from a bookshelf and showed it to Emenegger with a nod. Emenegger would later explain that to him the odd monologue was just a cover to throw off anyone listening in through bugs in the room, and that the book was a silent confirmation that the footage did exist. However, he would never get to see it, it never arrived, and no one knows what ever became of it or even whether it exists or not.

Even without the promised film, Emenegger would release his documentary in 1974, called UFO’s Past, Present & Future, which would then become a book of the same name. In the end there are a lot of problems with this story. The first one is that we only have Emenegger’s word to go on. The primary source for this entire tale is three pages in his book, and that’s it. There is no corroboration, no way to verify any of it, you simply have to take his word for it. Another problem is the question of why would two high-ranking Air Force officials not only spill the beans on the whole thing to this Hollywood filmmaker, but also promise to release the film and then show him around the base where it all happened? In an area where secrecy and shadowy cover-ups are the order of the day, why were they so candid with these guys? Does that make any sense? In the end the footage has never been revealed — we don’t know if any of it was real or not, but if it was real I sure would like to see it.

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It might seem hard to believe in this day and age, but there was a time when photographs of UFOs held some amazement and awe, a rime before photoshop and video manipulation made fakes and hoaxes commonplace and ruined the veracity of photographic evidence in general. I have recently done some articles on UFO photos and footage from the 1950s, as well as from the 1960s, going back in time to a sort of golden era of UFO photography. Here we will look at a selection of some compelling such cases from the 1970s and the 1980s, still before the dawn of mass manipulation of photographs.

In 1970, an unnamed couple were out boating at Tagish Lake, in Yukon Territory, Canada, when they had a strange experience they would never forget. They were out on the lake with another couple in a separate boat, with the two men involved identified in the original report by just their first names, Jim and George, and at 10 a.m. Jim and his wife reportedly saw seven eerie glowing yellow spheres floating over the lake and on the mountainside, each one described as being around 4 feet in diameter. Three of the orbs were apparently hovering about further back on the mountain while the other four moved slowly over the water before joining the others, after which they moved off out of sight. Luckily, Jim was able to snap a photograph of the strange objects, but it would turn out that his friend George and his wife had not been paying attention and had not seen the objects.

Jim went about making slides of the photograph and gave one to George, who was amazed by what he saw and sent a duplicate to the Weather Office, who then submitted it the Department of National Defence in Ottawa, and after that this particular slide seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth. For a full year nothing more was heard on the matter, and when George contacted the Department of Defence to ask about what they had found in their analysis, they ominously told him it was classified and would say nothing more about it. Another slide was analyzed by the ufobc in great depth, and they were unable to explain it away as just a trick of light or reflections off the mountain rocks. As to what the photos show and what happened to the slide given to the Department of Defence, it remains unknown. You can read a detailed analysis of the photos here.

The Tagish Lake photo

Close-up of the alleged UFOs over Tagish Lake

From 1971 there is a curious photograph taken by a witness named Rudi Nagora, of Munich, Germany, who on May 23, 1971 was vacationing with his wife near St. Lorenzen, Austria, when he had a rather bizarre experience. At about 12:30 p.m., they stopped their car and Nagora got out to walk around a bit, and that’s when he allegedly heard a strange whizzing sounds from above. When he looked up to the sky, he saw a metallic silver disc reflecting the sunlight as it flew along in an erratic zig-zag pattern. It was weird enough that he quickly grabbed his camera and snapped a full roll of 12 exposures of the object before it suddenly shot up into a bank of clouds above it and disappeared. What would go on to be known as the Nagora photographs would go on to be widely touted as some of the best photos of a UFO ever taken and have never been fully explained.

One of the Nagora photos

Some of the most controversial UFO photos ever taken come from the 1970s, originating with a man named Eduard “Billie” Albert Meier. A purported alien contactee from the age of 5 years old, he claims that he had been regularly visited by humanoid aliens from the Pleiadian star cluster, taught about all manner of wisdom and wonders and assigned as their representative on Earth. Being a mediator for them seems to have had its perks, because according to him they regularly allowed him to photograph their spaceships, to the tune of a total of over a thousand crystal clear photographs of them. When they were first released they were impressive for their clarity and the sheer number of them, but of course they were picked apart by skeptics and quickly deemed to be a hoax. Meir himself has always defended them as genuine, and although today they are mostly regarded as fake even within the UFO community, at the time they were a big deal and caused a lot of waves, being perhaps the most instantly recognizable and most famous UFO photographs of not only the 1970s, but any era. You can read more about Billy Meir and his photos in much more detail in my article on it here.

One of Meir’s many, many photos

Going into the 80s we have another famous and very clear photograph taken by a Mrs. Hannah McRoberts, of Campbell River, British Columbia, Canada. In October of 1981, she was on vacation with her family on the rugged east coast of Vancouver Island, and their weeklong stay would turn out to be far from just a normal family trip. For the first few days, things went normally, they went hiking and took various photos of the surrounding scenery, but then on October 8 they looked out towards one of the mountains and noticed that there was something very odd about it, in that it seemed to have a crown of anomalous looking clouds at its peak, which reminded them of a “volcano issuing steam.” At the time they took a photograph of the strange sight and then didn’t think much of it, thinking it to just be an odd cloud formation. However, things would get very weird when the photos were developed.

When the picture of that cloud-wreathed mountain came back, they were astounded to see that the photograph had also captured an unidentified object to the right of and above the peak and the cloud. It was very clear in contrast to the blue sky, and appeared to be a disc-shaped solid object, not a camera artifact or trick of light, and it was very strange indeed. The photo would find its way to Richard F. Haines, Editor of the Journal of Scientific Exploration for analysis. Haines would deduce that indeed the object was not a result of “emulsion deformity or optical illusion of the camera’s inner mechanisms,” and he would not be able to find any evidence of trickery or of a hoax. Haines would also interview the family in depth and deem them to be reliable and unlikely to be perpetrating a hoax. Haines would say:

Analyses of the original negative included micro-densitometry, computer enhancements, and other measurements intent upon showing a support thread, atmospheric disturbance, or other evidence of a hoax. These analyses suggest that the disc was a three dimensional object located at a distance of at least 30 feet from the camera; the object’s surface albedo was diffuse and of lower luminance than a sunlit cloud. Extensive interviews with the photographer (who never saw the aerial object), her husband, and daughter and site survey tended to support the entire narrative account. If this event had been a deliberate hoax, it is more likely that some overt action to capitalize on it might have been taken soon after the disc had been discovered, and not almost a year later. Of course this is not a conclusive argument to support this contention. The author found the photographer and her husband to be middle-class, hard-working people. Their property was well kept. Nothing could be found which pointed to a deliberate hoax. Both displayed genuine puzzlement about the origin of the disc on the photograph. Mr. and Mrs. D.M. were not defensive nor did they ever attempt to cover up anything as far as could be determined. The identity of the disc object remains unidentified.

The Hannah McRoberts photo

Moving on to 1989 we have another very intriguing photograph supposedly taken by a photographer on the night of July 14, 1989 in Nashville, Tennessee. On this evening, the unnamed witness was driving along a remote rural road when he noticed a a bright illumination beyond the trees. Since this was the middle of nowhere and there was no town there, he stopped the car and got out to investigate this weird light, taking his camera along with him. As he drew closer, the light rose up over the trees around 4 miles away, showing itself to be a bright flying object with some sort of coronal discharge around it, as well as shooting beams or flames of some sort below it, before slowly moving towards him as he began taking pictures of the amazing sight until he was out of film, after which the object flew off and went behind a mountain. A report on the incident by the National UFO Center would say of it:

The photographer states, “I had a feeling that the craft was behind the mountain waiting for me and when it appeared it felt like I was in another world, the sounds were far, far away.” He looked at the object but could not see any definition, the light was far too bright and too far away. When he looked through the lens the craft was sharp and vivid. The craft was visible for more than five minutes, but less than ten. It seemed like forever. He changed the lens package from the T-90 to the AE-1 camera and continued shooting using all his film. He felt he was not in control of what was happening. He remembers constantly pushing the buttons on the back of the T-90, each time he made a change it sharpened the image. There were other witnesses, but they have been reluctant to come forward. They also were taking pictures, but the field around the craft interfered with the film as the craft moved away. They did not have high magnification lens so there was not enough definition to make the craft identifiable. The photographer has had a recent heart attack and an auto accident and does not want his name revealed.

One of the Tennessee photos

The photos would eventually by the photographer to his friend Commander Graham Bethune, of the US Navy, who would examine them and hold to them for a time before handing them over to the National UFO Center for their own analysis. The National UFO Center would deduce that the object was solid, about 100 feet in diameter, and at a distance of approximately 5 miles from the camera. One analysis describes the object in the photos as follows:

Analysis of the film shows unusual colors not normally seen in any lighted object. The colors indicate a coronal discharge similar to the Aurora Borealis (Northern Lights.) The photographs show a craft with approximately 32 red, white and blue perimeter lights. These lights are not used in normal aircraft configuration. At times they appear all red. At other times they are all white. Sometimes outer perimeter lights appear mixed in color indicating they may have the ability to change color. Inside the outer perimeter lights are panels of lights. These also appear to have the ability to change color. Although they are predominantly white they are sometimes seen as partially red or black. Assuming the craft is 100 feet in diameter these outer panels take up about 40 feet or 20 feet on each side. Below the center of craft there appears to be a crystal or lights with crystal like appearance. Generally, these lights appear blue. craft appears to rotate in the photos.

Graham gave me his word that these were authentic photographs of an actual flying craft to the best knowledge. He has known the photographer for 24 years and the man worked for him for ten years. He has always been known to tell the truth and was of high character. The lights themselves have an unusual depth of color. When you look at a colored light it is normally a white light covered by a lens of red, yellow, green, blue etc. The lights on the craft appear as if the light contain the actual color. There is a vividness of color that is difficult to describe that appears to be in these photos. The fog or plasma is penetrated by the powerful lights shining downward. The lights extend down for an estimated seventy-five feet to one hundred plus feet and seem to stop abruptly. Duplication of this capability is exceptionally difficult to accomplish with any normal lights. I have never seen lights that have these properties except on a UFO, nor have I seen comparable photography.

These have just been a selection of some of the more interesting supposed UFO photos coming out of the 1970s and 80s, still in an era when photo doctoring techniques like photo shop were not available and when pictures were taken more seriously than they are now. We are perhaps beyond the days when any photo of a UFO means any thing at all due to the ease with which they can be faked, and indeed those we have looked at here could very well be faked too, but it was an a different era when photos seemed to carry more weight. While those days are over it is interesting to look back at some of these photos and think that there was a time when these types of photos were not so common and not so easily faked. Real or not, they are a glimpse back in time to another age of ufology that is very much gone.

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UFO videos and footage have come and gone over the years, ranging from the somewhat compelling to the downright obviously fake. In more recent times the wide availability of photoshop and other means of doctoring photos and footage has made such evidence all but pointless, but there was a time before the advent of computer trickery, when photos and footage could be taken more at face value, and one of the more astounding of the pieces of footage of a UFO from the time is not only one of the earliest films of a UFO, but also one of the most intriguing and oft-discussed.

On August 15, 1950, an unassuming minor-league baseball manager by the name of Nick Mariana, of Great Falls, Montana, was going about a usual day. On this day he went to the baseball stadium to inspect the site before a big game for his team the Great Falls Electrics, and it was completely routine, no reason to suspect that the day was about to get very strange, indeed. He was there with his 19-year-old secretary, Virginia Raunig, and as they went about their inspection at around 11:30 a.m. a bright flash in the sky caught Mariana’s attention. When he looked up, he saw two bright silvery objects that seemed to be rotating and speeding along at an estimated speed of between 200 and 400 miles per hour, with each of the objects around 50 feet in diameter. Raunig had seen the strange objects as well, and for a few moments they just stared in disbelief. Incredibly, Mariana was able to overcome his awe and fascination to remember that he had a 16mm camera back at his car, and he ran to get it.

Upon returning to the field, the anomalous objects were still up there moving in a formation and keeping a steady distance of around 50 to 100 feet between them. Mariana started up his camera and was able to take 16 seconds of color footage of the mysterious objects, which the very next day was doing the rounds in the news, appearing in the local paper the Great Falls Tribune, and from there it would attract a great amount of attention from all over. The footage went on to get nationwide coverage, with Mariana further spreading the word through private showings at various local community groups. At the time, UFOs were a hot topic, with the late 1940s really kicking off the craze of “flying saucers” and stories about alien invasions all the rage, so what was being called the “Mariana footage” really hit a nerve and sparked much excitement, controversy, and fear. At the time the footage was a pretty big deal. You can see some of the footage here.

A shot from the Marianas footage

Among those who took an interest in the footage was the U.S. Air Force, and U.S. Air Force Captain John P. Brynildsen arrived in Great Falls to interview Mariana on the incident. He would learn that both of the witnesses had also seen two jet fighters fly over the stadium shortly after taking the footage, which they had assumed to be the military perhaps pursuing the objects. This was a curious detail, as it suggested to Brynildsen that perhaps what they had seen were just the two jets. He managed to procure a portion of the footage and send it to Wright-Patterson AFB for analysis, where it was quickly written off as merely the reflections of the two F-94 jet fighters that were officially confirmed to have been flying over at the time. However, this explanation did not sit well with everyone.

In 1952, the United States government had launched an official investigation into unidentified flying objects called Project Blue Book, which evolved from another study of UFOs started in 1949 called Project Grudge. Although Project Grudge had agreed that the Mariana footage was just fighter jets, when Air Force officer Edward J. Ruppelt took the reigns of the newly minted Project Blue Book, he wasn’t so sure, thinking that perhaps the footage had been written off prematurely. Interestingly, as all of this was going on, Mariana would complain that sections of the footage he had submitted to the Air Force were missing, specifically frames which proved that the objects were rotating or spinning, something the military denied.

Ruppelt was not only able to arrange for another, more detailed analysis to be done on the film, but also get Mariana’s permission to resubmit the footage again. This time, analysts came to the conclusion that the objects seen in the film were not birds, balloons, or meteors, and they also ruled out the original idea that these were just F-94 jets. Ruppelt was also able to ascertain that the jets were nowhere near the stadium at the time of the sighting, making it even less likely that they could have accounted for what was seen in the film. Whereas the first analysis had quickly explained it all away, this time the Air Force had no choice but to concede that it was “an unknown.” In 1954 the footage was under the microscope again when it was used in a UFO documentary for Greene-Rouse productions. The documentary hired a scientist and engineer for the Douglas Aircraft company by the name of M.L. Baker, Jr. to take a look at the film, who also rejected the hypothesis that the objects were reflections of fighter jets. Baker would conclude in a Congressional hearing on UFOs concerning the Mariana footage:

Preliminary analysis excluded most natural phenomena. More detailed study indicated that the only remaining natural phenomenon candidate for the Utah film was birds in flight, and for the Montana film it was airplane fuselage reflections of the sun. After about 18 months of rather detailed, albeit not continuous, study using various film-measuring equipment at Douglas and at UCLA, as well as analysis of a photogrammetric experiment, it appeared that neither of these hypothesized natural phenomena explanations had merit.

In the end, in Baker’s opinion, the objects were an unknown. For the next decade the Mariana footage was much discussed and debated, and then in 1966 it became the subject of another official investigation, this time by an Air Force funded study of the UFO phenomenon based at the University of Colorado at Boulder and run by the physicist Dr. Edward U. Condon. Called The Condon Report, the study looked at all manner of UFO reports, and this time they had their sights set on the Mariana footage. Condon recruited physicist Dr. Roy Craig and psychologist Dr. David Saunders to re-examine the footage and they would come up with mixed results. While Saunders thought the footage had merit, Craig was mostly skeptical of the whole thing, doubting several elements of Mariana’s story, including when it was actually taken and his claims that parts of the film had been taken by the Air Force. Another specialist called in by the Condon report was Dr. William Hartmann, an astronomer for the University of Arizona, who also analyzed the footage and could not rule out that the objects seen are airplanes.

Indeed, the identity of the objects in the Mariana footage has never been adequately resolved, and even now it is picked apart and debated. That a piece of footage from so many decades ago is still unsolved and discussed to this day is fairly impressive, especially since these were the days before photoshop and digital manipulation of film, and the Mariana footage is still of much interest in the UFO field. Copies of the film reside at the US National Archives and it still gets heavy play in UFO documentaries and TV shows, and whether real or not, it has earned a high place among the countless pieces of UFO footage out there. Real or not, the Marianas footage has its place in the UFO lore, and has never been fully explained.

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Throughout the decades there have been many photos presented as evidence of UFOs and aliens. Such photos and films are countless, and they go way back through time, to before any sort of the photo manipulation methods we have at out disposal today. Here we will look at a selection of curious photos from the 1960s, which real or not have managed to make their mark.

In 1960 there is a case from the country of Argentina, which would soon become one of the most well-known UFO incidents in a country already considered a hotspot for the phenomenon. On July 3, 1960, Hugo F. Niotti, then a captain of the Argentinean Air Force (AAF), assigned to the Air Force School for Sub-officers located in the city of Cordoba, was out driving from Yacanto toward Cordoba when near the area of Villa General Belgrano he noticed a bizarre object hovering off the side of the road to his right. Niotti stopped his car and had the presence of mind to snap off a single photograph of the object before it suddenly shot off at astounding speed out of sight. He would say of what he had seen;

The object was conical in shape, with a height of 7-8 meters and a base diameter of 3-4 meters, with its axis almost parallel to the ground and its base facing the witness. The color of the object was a uniform dark gray. The surface was perfectly smooth without joints or rivets and had a definite metallic aspect. It was at a distance of 80 to 100 meters from his location and moving very slowly toward the south, perhaps at 10 KPH, always parallel to the ground. It was rotating, also very slowly. It then accelerated very rapidly, attaining a speed of perhaps 200 KPH in 3 or 4 seconds, and disappeared into the low cloud bank. This sudden acceleration without any sound was inexplicable.

The Yacanto photograph

The confused and awed Niotti would continue on to Cordoba, turning over what he had seen in his head over and over along the way, and as soon as he arrived, he had his film processed. What he saw in the picture astounded him, but he was not willing to release it because he did not want to tarnish his military reputation and career, but he eventually was persuaded to release it to the Servicio de Informaciones de Aeronautica (SIA), which deemed them to be authentic and then passed them along to the Air Force. The photos gradually leaked to the public and were widely dissected and discussed. UFO Dr. Willy Smith would conclude that the photograph was very compelling, and would give his own thoughts as follows:

A case with a single witness usually is not even considered, but in this instance we have two circumstances that allow an exception to the rule. First, we have a competent witness, trained by his profession to observe details, who did not lose his presence of mind when confronted with the unknown. On the contrary, he reacted promptly, snatching his camera and jumping out of his car to obtain a unique graphic document. And second, the photograph by itself lends enough credibility to the case to make it deserve serious consideration. Not only has the photo repeatedly been shown to be genuine, but it is inconceivable that the Air Force officer would compromise his career with a fabrication that would bring him nothing but problems and discredit. For those who know Vice-commodore Niotti, this option is unthinkable.

What does this photo show? Is it a hoax, and if so, why would a well-respected, high ranking military official do that? Or perhaps he was hoaxed himself? We may never know for sure. In 1965 there is another piece of photographic evidence from a traditionally reliable source. On August 2, 1965 in Sherman, Texas, a television cameraman named Robert Campbell was interviewing policeman Peter McCollum in the wake of a spate of sightings in the area of a massive glowing UFO that had caused a deluge of calls from panicked residents. Campbell had been alerted to this through scanning short wave radio conversations between two police highway patrols. Before long, during that interview the two men saw it for themselves as the glowing cylindrical object hovered in a stationary position nearby. Campbell was able to get a series of four photographs of the thing before it flew off. Unfortunately, the photos would come out overexposed, but no explanation has been forthcoming. Interestingly, the object was witnessed by numerous solid witnesses, including Highway patrolman Bill Quires and Department of Public Safety Dispatcher Jim Faglia. What does the photo show? It is hard to say.

The Sherman, Texas photo

Rather weirdly, just the following day there was another unrelated case from Tulsa, Oklahoma, where at 1:30 a.m. a Mr. A. L. Smith, his 14-year-old son Alan, and three other witnesses saw a brightly glowing, multicolored object in the sky. The mysterious object moved slowly towards the witnesses, before hovering nearby as if watching them, and it is then that Smith would snap off a photo of it before it shot off into the night. The resulting photo would heavily make the rounds at the time, appearing in Life Magazine and generating a lot of excitement due to its clarity, and many analyses done on it have been unable to conclude what it actually is.

The Oklahoma photograph

The 1960s can also claim perhaps one of the most famous supposed alien images ever taken. On 24th May 1964, Jim Templeton, a fireman in Carlisle in the North of England, was out with his wife and young daughter at a place called Solway Firth. They would report that the day had been a bit odd in that they had been constantly aware of a sort of electrical charge in the air, almost like a storm was coming despite the clear, calm weather at the time. The spent the day there taking various photos but despite that creepy electrical charge they didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. It was only when they got home and had the film developed that things would get weird.

In the photo was seen to be a figure in some sort of silvery white “space suit” looming in the background over the daughter as she sits there holding a bunch of flowers smiling and completely oblivious to its presence. It was completely odd, as the Templetons would insist that there had been no one else there at the time and no rational explanation for it. When police were notified and the photo was examined, it was found to not be a double exposure, making it all very mysterious indeed. Making it even weirder still is that Templeton would claim that he was being visited by shadowy men who would pass by his house wearing black suits and driving a black car, and eventually come to his doorstep. These two men would act bizarrely, refer to each other with numbers, and allegedly ask Templeton about the photograph and the conditions that it was taken under, before telling him that he had merely taken a picture of a guy walking by to essentially photobomb the shot, something Templeton denied. The two mysterious men then became agitated and drove off in their unmarked car.

The Solway Firth Spaceman

The photo has since been widely picked apart and is mostly thought of as a hoax or a shot of someone simply walking by in the background, but what has come to be called the “Solway Firth Spaceman” has nevertheless gone on to be one of the most instantly recognizable and iconic supposed photos of an alien there is.  It joins the ranks of mysterious photographs that have, whether real or not, set the stage for supposed photographic evidence from then on out, and whatever one wants to believe we can expect photos like this to continue coming in for the foreseeable future.

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Photographic evidence of UFOs has always been pretty shaky at best. Among all of the videos and photos of supposed UFOs there are the hoaxes and fakes, and this has only become more pronounced in recent years with the advent of advanced means to fake photos such as Photoshop. Yet controversial photos and video footage of UFOs go way back in time, to the days before Photoshop and computer manipulation, back to the simpler times of the 1950s.

By far the most famous and iconic purported UFO photos from the 1950s were taken by a couple by the name of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Trent, in rural McMinnville, Oregon. On May 11, 1950, Mrs. Trent was out on their farm when she allegedly noticed a strange, disc-like object flying out over their property. She immediately called out in a panic to her husband, who ran over to see it as well, managing to take two photographs of it before it shot off. These photos would hit the media, including Life Magazine and create quite the stir at the time. They were the clearest photographs ever seen of a “flying saucer,” which was a concept that was at the time just starting to really take off in the mainstream. For a long time, these photographs were widely discussed and debated, going on to become iconic in the UFO field, but it wasn’t until nearly two decades later that the Trent photographs would be subjected to any detailed analysis, by an astronomer from the University of Arizona, William K. Hartmann. After performing a painstakingly meticulous investigation of the photos, using various scientific photographic analysis techniques and photometric measurements with the original negatives, he came to the conclusion that they were the real deal, saying:

It appears significant that the simplest most direct interpretation of the photographs confirms precisely what the witnesses said they saw. To the extent that the photometric analysis is reliable, (and the measurements appear to be consistent), the photographs indicate an object with a bright shiny surface at considerable distance and on the order of tens of meters in diameter. While it would be exaggerating to say that we have positively ruled out a fabrication, it appears significant that the simplest most direct interpretation of the photographs confirms precisely what the witnesses said they saw, and that an extraordinary flying object, silvery, metallic, disc-shaped, tens of meters in diameter, and evidently artificial, flew within sight of [the] two witnesses.

One of the Trent photos

Of course, not everyone agreed, with more skeptical photographic analyses coming to the conclusion that the UFO was faked, which is not really hard to guess since looking back on the photos now they are obviously a hoax. However, experts continued to defend them as genuine, including optical physicist Dr. Bruce Maccabee, who did his own analysis and insisted that it was an object “over 1 kilometer away, and about 30 meters in diameter and 4 meters thick,” while also debunking many of the skeptical arguments. The Trent photographs are now widely considered to be faked, but they are an interesting case of early UFO photographs astounding everyone when they were first released.

Another set of photos that made waves in their day were taken in 1952, in Barra da Tijuca, Brazil. On May 7, 1952, press photographer Ed Keffel and reporter Joao Martins were in the area on an assignment when they spotted a strange object in the sky moving very fast at approximately 4:30 p.m.  They at first thought it was a plane, but soon realized that this was something else, as it was flying too fast and in a very odd manner. It looked like some sort of flying disc, and Keffel was able to shake off his astonishment enough to take a series of five photographs of the object before it disappeared. These photos would later appear in O Cruzeiro magazine in its May 24, 1952 issue, where they immediately earned wide acclaim for being among the best photographic evidence of UFOs ever taken. The Brazilian Air Force would even conduct a full analysis of the photos and deem them to be genuine, but of course skeptics say it is all a hoax, citing inconsistencies in the lighting and shadows that contradict the witness claims, but Keffel and Martins have always defended the photographs, with Marin saying:

I herewith confirm that in May 1952, I saw an “unidentified aerial object” at Barra da Tijuca, as was published, with every detail, in the review [magazine] 0 Cruzeiro at the time. Together with me was the photographer-reporter Ed Keffel, an exemplary professional, well-succeeded and well-respected for his honesty and seriousness, who obtained a series of photos of the above-referred object. These photos were also published by the above-mentioned review, for which both of us worked at the time. Besides being a journalist, I am also an engineer; and I also have a large experience and knowledge of meteorological, astronomical, and optical phenomena. I have experience of all known types of aircraft and can state that the referred object cannot be framed in any natural phenomena or aircraft of my knowledge.

Neither I nor Ed Keffel tried to derive any financial profit from the fact. We were at the time exclusively contracted by that review [0 Cruzeiro], and there we handed in our report and the photos, without receiving any extra bonus for either. Neither did we receive-nor did we wish to-any payment from anybody, either for the account or for the photos or for the appearances we were practically obliged to make on different occasions on television… I narrated the fact in free talks to military authorities and university auditoriums. I do not know what that object was, and because of this, I classified it in the category of “unidentified flying object”, commonly called a “flying saucer.” The incident, besides the annoyances it entailed, contrived to call my attention on the subject as an only advantage, and consequently I have done research on the subject with the greatest detachment, both in sightings here in Brazil and abroad.

The Brazil photo

Also from 1952 is an actual color film taken of a supposed UFO in the U.S. state of Utah. On this occasion, Warrant Officer D.C. Newhouse was out with his wife in the vicinity of Tremonton, Utah, when they witnessed a formation of flat and circular disc-shaped flying craft flying across the sky in broad daylight. Newhouse happened to have a 16mm color camera with a 3-inch telephoto lens, with which he was able to film the mysterious objects as they traversed the sky. The excited Newhouse would perhaps foolishly submit the film to the Air force, who later returned the film with sections and frames mysteriously missing. The Air Force concluded that the film was of out of focus seagulls, but if this were the case, then why had portions of the film been removed? This was never explained. Other experts who looked at the film debunked the seabird theory, such as Dr. Robert M.L. Baker, Jr., Douglas Aircraft Corporation, who said:

The motion of the objects is not exactly what one would expect from a flock of soaring birds, not the slightest indication of a decrease in brightness due to periodic turning with the wind or flapping. The evidence remains rather contradictory and no single hypothesis of a natural phenomenon yet suggested seems to completely account for the UFO involved.

What did Newhouse film out there? You can see the footage here and decide for yourself. Another photo of a UFO from the same year comes to us from the country of Peru, where on the afternoon of July 19 of that year a Sr. Domingo Troncoso, then with the Peruvian Customs Office at Puerto Maldonado on the jungle choked Bolivian border, saw a gigantic cigar-shaped object soaring over the rainforest leaving a trail of smoke or mist behind it. Troncoso was able to take a single photo of the object before it shot off out of sight. Apparently at the same time, other witnesses in the region had seen it as well, and one Peruvian UFO researcher would tell the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) of this:

In Lima I met Senior Pedro Bardi, who is an agricultural engineer. On July 19, 1952, while on a farm in the Madre de Dios section of Peru, he and others saw a saucer. It was about 4.30 p.m. and they were talking to Lima by radio. Suddenly, according to Bardi, the radio went dead. They looked out the window and saw a round object going by at high speed. (The witnesses included Pedro Arellano, owner of the farm). The object had passed; it was at an estimated 100 meters altitude and was a little smaller than a DC-3, according to Bardi. It made a buzzing sound as it went by.

The object’s speed was determined by a report that it was seen four minutes later near Porto Maldonado, 120 kilometers distant. This speed was computed at 1117 miles per hour. The photograph was secured from a customs administrator named Domingo Troncosco, who said he had taken it as the object flew near the port. Though the photo shows a cigar-shaped object instead of the round shape Bardi described, this could possibly have been due to an elongated effect caused by speed. It seems obvious to me that the photo is genuine. Incidentally, I strongly doubt if this particular saucer was anything but earth-made. The object traveled from left to right at about airplane speed. When the trail settled to ground it turned out to be a mass of thin fibrous threads.

Troncoso’s photograph

Moving ahead to 1957, there is a curious set of photographs taken from the British ship S.S. Ramsay by a radio officer named Thad Fogl. At the time, the ship was near the coast of California when Fogle was called to the deck by the excited 2nd Officer at around 2:30 p.m. When he arrived on deck, he found other crew members staring in awe at a massive disc hanging in the sky. He would later tell Flying Saucer Review Magazine of what happened next:

Without being told twice, I grabbed my Yashica C reflex camera from my wardrobe and dashed on the side of the bridge. Sure enough, there was a queer looking object hovering in the distance. It was suitable for a shot so I waited. In the meantime, I tried to keep under control my shaking knees and hands, and watched the disc. It made no noise and was not more than a mile away. It was silver and black. There was no smoke or any gases coming from it. However, under the disc, a red light pulsated.

We thought it tried to signal, so the 2nd Officer grabbed the Aldis and flicked back, but there was no response. At last the disc came down near enough and I got one shot. Then it turned and I shot again. The disc was rather thick, and had a flat dome. There were no ports. However, there were some black marks, and I wonder if they were not some sort of exhausts. Then we noticed a ladder! Whether it really was a ladder I can’t say. It could be some depression in the craft. The object moved very slowly and stayed with us for a few minutes. Then it shot with quick acceleration towards a rugged mountain, and the desert coast of sun-baked California.

One of Fogle’s photographs

The photographs would turn out to be incredibly clear and showed something that seemed decidedly otherworldly. These photos would be published in several high-profile publications, including The London Illustrated News and Life magazine, earning Fogle much unwanted publicity, much of it negative. His photos were widely derided as clear fakes, and seeking to avoid any more embarrassment, he would say that he had indeed hoaxed them, although he would later claim that this was just to dispel all of the negative publicity being aimed at him and to get everyone off his back. After that he refused to talk on the matter anymore, even though there were plenty of believers who suspected that the photos were actually real. Indeed, we are left to ask if any of these could possibly be real, but real or not, they form the first stirrings of a wave of the proposed photographic UFO evidence that was to come, and have their own place within the world of Ufology.