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

Since its founding in 1974, the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC) has served as a non-judgmental hub where you can share—via hotline or written report—any potentially otherworldly experience you’ve had. The online archive contains thousands of these stories, which range from UFO and alien sightings to other unexplained phenomena. The NUFORC doesn’t question the veracity of the reports, and it doesn’t always speculate about possible causes, either. In fact, the organization encourages a healthy skepticism about what you read on its site.

Decide for yourself whether each eerie tale below is the result of extraterrestrial intervention, military experimentation, a scientific anomaly, or just a misunderstanding—that is, if you believe them at all.

1. TOO MUCH HAIR, TOO LITTLE TIME // 1969

On a weekend trip to Boulder, Colorado, in 1969, a young member of the Air Force was in bed when his motel room suddenly darkened, “followed by a bright flash of light.” The next day, he realized his half-inch-long hair was now almost two inches long, a mystery that his roommate “totally freaked out” about when he returned to the base in Aurora, Colorado. “He wasn’t sure what to think of my story, but did realize there was glaring physical evidence,” the airman recalled. Though he didn’t remember anything else from that night, he speculated in his report that he had been abducted (and presumably taken to a place where time passes more quickly than it does on Earth). “I still have trouble remembering many things, as it has always been very ‘foggy’ since that time,” he said.

2. THE LONG-ARMED COLLECTOR // 1971

At about 10 p.m. one summer night in 1971, two teenage girls crept from their houses in Sunnyvale, California, and met up for a neighborhood stroll. All was still and silent for an hour or so, until they came upon a 20- to 30-foot flying ship hovering as low as the streetlights “probably a full five-minute walk ahead” of them. The friends watched it drift toward some nearby apartment buildings and appear to survey them, bobbing slightly up and down. “It had these great enormous arms on the sides that slowly swiveled around and they had lines on the ends, like ropes, but they weren’t ropes,” one of the friends explained in her report.

It didn’t make noise or light up, and it looked more like wood than metal. She got the impression it was “collecting things,” though she couldn’t see what was inside. The girls fled in terror when the aircraft abruptly turned its attention on them, and they tried in vain to convince the one friend’s father that they had seen something truly extraordinary. “He dismissed it and said it was probably just a weather balloon,” the witness wrote. “If I am sure of anything, it is that that thing was no weather balloon.”

3. COWS GONE WILD // 1975

Scared now, brown cow?

KMATIJA/ISTOCK VIA GETTY IMAGES

Two friends were driving along the quiet country roads of La Fontaine, Indiana, after a fishing trip one evening in 1975. About a quarter mile away, a flying disc “with white lights revolving around it” appeared and lowered itself gradually until it was completely obscured by a nearby house. They followed it behind the house, but found only “cows running all over the road, frightened and mooing.” The cows had apparently torn right through the electric fence, and a neighbor soon showed up to see what all the fuss was about. “He asked if we knew what had happened because cows just don't break down an electric fence for nothing,” the witness said. “We didn’t say anything about what we had just seen.”

4. THE VANISHING SILVER SHIP // 1979

From his front step in Wenatchee, Washington, a man watched a silver triangular aircraft with “no discernible fuselage, no wings or other protruding control devices” coast slowly over the tops of 150-foot-tall poplar trees. “A jet liner could not have stayed airborne at such a sedate rate of speed,” he recalled, and this was significantly larger than a Boeing 747. There wasn’t much time to wonder about the physics that kept the craft in flight, because it was drifting straight toward Burch Mountain. “My immediate thought was that a monstrous crash was imminent,” the witness explained, but it never came to pass. Instead, the UFO just disappeared.

The NUFORC actually vouched for this particular onlooker. “One of two excellent reports from [the] same witness,” they wrote in a note below his report. “We know this witness, and have spoken with him on several occasions. He formerly served in the U.S. military, and held a high security clearance.”

5. THE GLOWING GRAY NIGHTTIME VISITOR // 1982

A man in Leicester, England, awoke one night in 1982 to find a soft light illuminating his room. It was coming from the face of a 4-foot-tall gray creature that resembled the classic aliens from 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The witness, “overwhelmed with a feeling of calm and peace,” pinched himself several times to make sure he wasn’t simply dreaming and scanned the room in vain for some other explanation. Knowing he’d have a tough time convincing anyone he was telling the truth, he nudged his wife awake so she could bear witness, too. But as soon as she stirred, the room went completely black and the visitor vanished. “Did I imagine or dream the whole thing?” he wrote in his report. “Absolutely one million percent no.”

6. THE DISEMBODIED SEARCH BEAM // 1988

Three friends were on their way home from an INXS concert in Pittsburgh when they encountered a ball of light sweeping a “very bright beam of light” over the dark road and its surroundings. They promptly pulled over, and two of them exited the car so they could get a better look. (The third friend “remained in the car, screaming.”) Though the light resembled a helicopter’s search beam, “there was no hint of any craft or body emitting the beam, even when it faced away from us.” Furthermore, the whole scene was completely silent. They quickly returned to the car when the beam drew closer, and it suddenly darted away and disappeared into the night. When they resumed their journey, the radio played static before cutting out completely. “We heard a commentator say ‘…further evidence that there is life on Mars…’ and then it went back to static,” the witness reported.

7. A FIERY HOBERMAN SPHERE // 1991

A normal Hoberman sphere.

MEMBIO/ISTOCK VIA GETTY IMAGES

Late one evening in 1991, a young man and his girlfriend parked the car in a peaceful spot overlooking the port of Olympia, Washington, and passed about half an hour “talking about life and random things.” Suddenly, what they thought was one abnormally bright star split into a sphere comprising roughly 20 points of light—much like a Hoberman sphere expands ("I found out many years later what a Hoberman Sphere is, and just about crapped myself the first time I saw one in motion its movement looked so similar," the witness noted)—and rotated rapidly before contracting back into a single bright light. That light then glowed red and spit out five identical red lights, one by one, which pulsated in a synchronized manner as they flew through the sky in a straight line and eventually vanished. The witness actually managed to capture video footage of the event, but the camera only showed “a blank screen with a few strange flickering whitish dots on it that seem to come and go.”

“I am (after seeing it) hard pressed to believe it to be anything of ‘known’ terrestrial technology,” he wrote. “I have resigned to the likelihood that I will never know what it was at all.”

8. THE IDES OF MARCH SIGHTINGS // 1995

On March 15, 1995, the NUFORC received an influx of calls across several states from witnesses who saw a bright object flying through the night sky. The first of these so-called “Ides of March sightings” was reported by two men in Florida, who described it as “luminous,” “white,” and “disc-shaped,” though subsequent descriptions from others varied. A Tennessee caller thought it was more of a “blue-green 'cloud of light'” that emitted sparks before vanishing, and a Missouri State Highway Patrol sergeant said it was a green light that turned yellow and suddenly snuffed out “like a light being switched off.” He also explained that many people called the patrol’s 911 dispatch line to report their own sightings, and one person claimed his cell phone and car radio both died when the UFO got close. Other reports came from Virginia, West Virginia, and Missouri.

“In summary, it appears that one or more egg-shaped objects, radiating intensely bright green, blue-green, and yellow light, and periodically spewing out a cloud of sparks, streaked over at least seven states, stopping from time to time, and the whole event occurred in a matter of minutes,” the NUFORC summarized in a case brief.

9. THE PHOENIX LIGHTS // 1997

In March 1997, Arizona played host to what the NUFORC dubbed “perhaps the most dramatic UFO sighting” reported in a few years. Dozens of people from all over the state phoned the hotline to report having seen a group of white or red lights in a V formation flying across the sky. One man with flight experience estimated that the lights were about 1000 feet from the ground, and multiple people claimed the display was totally silent—making it unlikely that airplanes were responsible. When that same observer phoned Luke Air Force Base about the event, the operator told him they had received calls from many other witnesses, too. But according to the NUFORC, the base later claimed that nobody had called them about it.

After these “Phoenix Lights” received national media attention several months later, the military finally offered an explanation: The lights were just leftover flares that the Maryland Air National Guard had dropped at the end of an operation in Arizona. But some people remain unconvinced.

10. ELK, ABDUCTED // 1999

Please do not beam up the elk.

ERICFOLTZ/ISTOCK VIA GETTY IMAGES

Three foresters were planting seedlings in Washington’s mountains when a gently wobbly disc-shaped aircraft appeared and drifted toward a herd of elk. Nearly all the animals fled together, but one set off in a different direction. The UFO positioned itself over the lone elk and beamed it right off the ground, though the observers couldn’t discern any “visible means of support,” attached to it. The UFO wobbled more, seemingly struggling with the weight of its prey, and eventually rose so high that the witnesses couldn’t see it anymore. They assumed the elk had somehow ended up inside the aircraft.

When NUFORC director Peter Davenport traveled to Washington to conduct an investigation, he was shown the carcass of a pregnant elk that had been found dead just a few miles from the UFO sighting. As for whether that was the same sorry creature that the UFO had supposedly targeted, we’ll almost definitely never know.

11. HIGH-FLYING REAL ESTATE // 2000

Shortly after 4 a.m. one morning in January 2000, Ed Barton, a police officer in Lebanon, Illinois, heard a dispatch about a strange UFO sighting at a neighboring police station. He looked up and saw the object for himself: two extraordinarily bright lights that seemed to merge into one even brighter light. He sped off in the object’s direction until it was almost overhead, and ballparked its altitude somewhere between 1000 and 1500 feet. It was triangular, with a light on each corner and many more along one end. The object abruptly shot through the sky so fast that Barton concluded it couldn’t possibly have been created by humans.

Other Illinois residents witnessed it, too. A Millstadt police officer named Craig Stevens thought it was between one and two stories tall, and “perhaps three stories long.” Highland resident Melvern Noll also likened it to a house. “There were big windows, about two and a half feet wide and five or six feet high, two stories, one on top of each other,” he told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 2010. “I still believe it was something from another planet.”

Though a spokesman for the nearby Scott Air Force Base is said to have claimed that the base’s radar had been shut off at the time and nobody had seen the UFO, other reports allege that the government was involved. The NUFORC received one report from “a highly reliable source” who said the Air National Guard jets "may have been 'scrambled" to take a look at the object,'" and several other people even told the NUFORC that federal government employees visited police departments and citizen witnesses to ask that they “curtail all their statements to the press."

“Bacteriological Warfare in the United States” is a fascinating FBI document that was declassified into the public domain in 2006, via the terms of the Freedom of Information Act. It covers the years 1941 to 1950. Notably, of the file’s original 1,783 pages, no less than 1,074 were firmly withheld from declassification by the FBI (since 2006, however, more of those pages have surfaced). The file reveals a wealth of illuminating and disturbing data on animal disease and death, and their potential, theoretical links to bacteriological warfare and sabotage by enemy nations and individuals. In a strange and winding way, the story the file tells has a bearing on the theme of this book. Much of the dossier is focused on a series of mysterious and suspicious outbreaks of disease – and attendant death – in Lincoln County, New Mexico in the 1940s, which is the very same county where the Roswell event occurred in early July 1947. Not only that, as will soon become clear, there is even a Japanese balloon link to the Lincoln County outbreak.

In late 1950, the New Mexico State Public Health Laboratory sent a memo to the FBI which read as follows: “Possibly some of you saw headlines in newspapers published in the States during August, such as ‘Black Death Stirs Albuquerque,’ ‘Black Plague Hits Two in New Mexico,’ and ‘Dark Age Plague Found in Two.’ It is unfortunate that we must still seriously discuss plague, for we already know so much about its cause and mode of spread; but as long as such headlines do occur, it is necessary that we who are interested in Public Health and Preventive Medicine do seriously consider plague and acquaint ourselves with the plague of today, its prevalence, and its potentialities.”

Nick Redfern

The FBI was particularly worried about the New Mexico outbreaks and recorded the following: “The New Mexico Public Health Authority has been on the alert for cases of plague since 1938 when the U.S. Public Health Service first reported plague in the wild rodents of one of our counties. There was no suggestion of human infection until August 1, 1949, when the Laboratory received a request for aid in the diagnosis of two cases. A slide made from material aspirated from an axillary bubo [swelling of the lymph nodes] of a ten-year-old boy of Taos County was first received. Late on August 1, 1949, the pathologist at the Veteran’s Hospital in Albuquerque called stating that a man from Placitas, Sandoval County, had been admitted to the hospital and his clinical symptoms resembled plague. The cases were from areas 200 miles apart with no connection. The little boy of Taos probably received his infection from a bit of a flea escaped from the body of a prairie dog which he killed by throwing a stone. The man from Sandoval probably received his infection from fleas from ground squirrels that he had killed while working on his farm.

“These two New Mexico cases of human plague are good examples of what might be expected considering the reservoir of plague infection in the wild rodents of the western states. Very possibly there are undiagnosed human cases in New Mexico and other states with widely scattered population.” A further document from this particular collection of formerly classified papers provides this: “Since this report was written, a 7 ½ year-old-boy in Lincoln County died, possibly of plague. The boy was taken to a physician at Fort Stanton, November 4. Apparently he was not in a very serious condition and was sent home. He was returned to the Fort Stanton Hospital November 5 in the morning; his temperature was somewhat higher; by noon he was markedly worse, and by 2:30 he was dead. A post mortem examination was made and the doctor in charge diagnosed the case as being bubonic plague with pneumonic and septicemic complications. Portions of the organs were sent to [name deleted] at the Western Communicable Disease Laboratory in San Francisco; and he confirmed the child was probably infected by ectoparasites from tree squirrels. A clear history could not be obtained, but dead tree squirrels were found in the barn and near the dwelling of this child.”

As a result of all this disturbing activity, the FBI turned its attention towards securing as many newspaper articles as possible that had been published on the subject of plague and other, potentially fatal, conditions in New Mexico. There was, for example, “Lea Rabbits Suspected Bubonic Plague Carriers,” which appeared in the pages of the Albuquerque Journal on June 21, 1950. Now, we come to an even more eye-opening series of revelations on this issue. So concerned was the FBI by these various outbreaks of plague in New Mexico in 1949, J. Edgar Hoover took secret steps to share all of the pertinent medical data – and media articles, too – with a fistful of agencies of the government and the military. They included the U.S. Air Force’s Director of Special Investigations, the Director of Naval Intelligence, the Acting Director of the Division of Security of the Atomic Energy Commission, and the Director of the CIA. The most important point of all will now be revealed. It demonstrates precisely why a wide and varied body of intelligence agencies were carefully, and secretly, monitoring this situation.

Polyethylene hot air balloon

Additional files on this issue surfaced after the FBI’s release of material in 2006; this time, from the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. There was a school of thought within certain factions of the AFOSI that while the plague deaths very likely resulted from flea bites and attacks by infected animals, the plague itself may have been deliberately released in Lincoln County, New Mexico, by nothing less than…a Japanese balloon. Probably in 1945, it was surmised – which was when the Fugo raids were at their height. The theory was that due to the small, isolated, human populations in some of the areas where plague broke out, it may have taken several years before the plague took hold in the animal population and then jumped to people – and also a couple of years for the wreckage to be found in the massive wilds of New Mexico. The shared, secret files also reveal that some authorities believed – years later and with the benefit of hindsight – that the initial outbreak in Lincoln County was caused by the Hantavirus, which was first acknowledged by the West in the early 1950s and at the height of the Korean War.

Of greatest importance, however, is a document titled “Japanese Balloon Raids – 1945” which was found in the archives of what, in the 1940s, was called Camp Detrick. Today, it goes by the name of Fort Detrick. Located in Maryland, the facility is at the forefront of research into bacteriological warfare, chemical warfare, and lethal viruses. The document postulates that in 1945 a Japanese Fugo balloon came down somewhere in Lincoln County and unleashed a deadly cargo of plague-infected insects – such as fleas – and which eventually took hold, leading to the unfortunate death of the young boy at Fort Stanton, four years later.

Now, we come to another aspect of the Fort Stanton connection. Moving into the 1970s and the 1980s, we have intriguing information from John A. Price, of the Roswell-based UFO Enigma Museum, and the author of a 1997 non-fiction book, Roswell: A Quest for the Truth. On one particular day in 1978, Price – who was employed as a roofer at the time – was working outside on a particular property in Hagerman. It’s a town situated approximately twenty-four miles from Roswell. The property held a number of physically handicapped children – this much was clear to Price, as several such children exited the property and stood on the patio, watching him as he worked. He thought, “this must be a home for the mentally impaired.” That was not all, however. Price had more to say: “Suddenly, I almost choked on my coffee as two more children, or at least I think they were children, walked out and stood behind the others.” According to Price, they were all around four- to four-and-a-half-feet in height. They had oversized, hairless heads, and their ears and noses were noticeably smaller than normal for a young child. Things came to a sudden end when, Price recalls, “a lady came to the door and ushered the kids back into the house.” He did not see them again.

More than a decade later, Price received a letter from “an acquaintance” who he had known for some time. Price said: ““In the letter he told me that the aliens I was looking for were at Fort Stanton.” For those who may not know, Fort Stanton is a facility that, during the Second World War, held a number of Japanese “enemy aliens” (as they were termed) and is barely spitting distance away from the Foster Ranch. As this, and the data in my 2017 book, The Roswell UFO Conspiracy, shows, there is a complicated connection between all of these issues: handicapped people; secret, high-altitude balloons; and top secret post-Second Wold War programs to bring German and Japanese personnel into the USA. A grim story is getting even more so.