The range of types of UFO encounters is wide, and for the most part they tend to inspire awe and wonder as to what could be behind it all. Yet, in some cases this awe turns to dread and even terror, as it seems that not all UFO phenomena are friendly in nature. Within the annals of UFO incidents there are some that inspire dread and a definite sense of foreboding, and one of these is certainly the time aliens apparently invaded a small island in Brazil.

Beginning in the spring of 1977 a very strange and ominous phenomenon began at a little known place called Colares Island, in the remote Brazilian region of Pará. Frightened locals began to report an intense amount of UFO activity in the skies, describing all manner of luminous spheres, glowing orbs, balls of fire, saucers, cigar shaped metallic objects, and more, but what really stood out was how aggressive these objects seemed to be. There were numerous reports that these unidentified objects were actively chasing and attacking people, shooting vivid thin rays of light that would leave injuries such as burns or holes in the skin, as well as other instances when they were reported as approaching to actually suck blood from victims. In many cases the beams projected were described as being “always sharply defined, directed with perfect precision towards any target – houses, people, boats, trees, even the Brazilian Air Force’s helicopters deployed over the island during the investigations.”

Some of the accounts were quite spectacular, as with a boat full of fishermen near Ilha dos Caranguejos who would claim that an intense ball of light had positioned itself over their boat and fired off beams at them, burning several of them and even supposedly killing a man. Another such such frightening report would come from a local man named Carlos Cardoso de Paula, who says one evening an orb of light entered his room and tried to get blood from him. He says of his surreal experience:

Everybody else was asleep. I was just still having my last smoke when suddenly a ball of fire entered our house up near the ridgepole of the gable. It started shooting round and round the room, and then finally came right close to my hammock. It ran up my right leg as far as the knee (without touching my skin). I watched with much curiosity as it then moved across to the other leg. Then I started to feel feeble and sleepy. My cigarette fell from my hand and I came to and let out a yell. The fireball quickly vanished and everybody woke up. I think it had been searching for a vein in my body but didn’t manage to do so. As its brightness grew, I felt a sort of heat coming from it.

Many of the people targeted by these mysterious lights described a wide range of negative physical injuries and effects, such as fainting, nausea, tremors, migraines, giddiness, shortness of breath, muscle weakness, burns, anemia, bruising, blistering, perforations in the skin, paralysis, searing pain, and blood loss. In fact, terrified residents were so convinced that the lights were trying to suck their blood that the phenomena were being called the Chupa-Chupa, or “sucker suckers.” In the meantime, hospitals were soon experiencing a deluge of people claiming to have been attacked by the UFOs. Also odd was that many of the patients were found to indeed be missing blood, and their blood tests also showed certain anomalies common to all of them such as anemia and dehydration, and it was all quite baffling for medical personnel. One local doctor Wellaide Cecim Carvalho would explain of these patients:

All of them had suffered lesions to the face or the thoracic area. The lesions began with intense reddening of the skin in the affected area. The injuries varied in extension. First it started with an intense reddishness in the hit area, known as hiperemia. Later, the skin of the affected region started to fall (alopecia) and days later the skin peeled off. Later the hair would fall out and the skin would turn black. There was no pain, only a slight warmth. One also noticed small puncture marks in the skin. The victims were men and women of varying ages, without any pattern. With the increase of hurt people, I started to give more attention each time in the existing injuries. I saw things that do not exist in my medical books.

In most of these inexplicable cases, the strange symptoms would linger for days or even weeks, requiring hospitalization, and others would not recover at all, with some deaths even reported. In the meantime, reports kept flooding in nightly, increasing in intensity as the months went on, until by August of that year it is estimated that thousands of people all over the island had either seen or been chased or assaulted by the mystery UFOs, which seemed to always come from the north and in some cases were described as detaching from a “mother ship” or even coming from below the waters of Marajo Bay. People were in a hysteria, afraid to go out at night and huddling into large groups where they sought safety in numbers. Some people would light bonfires or launch armed patrols in an effort to scare the Chupa-Chupas away, and it was eerily quiet on the streets, as noise was thought to lure the hungry UFOs in. One local mayor would say of the tense situation:

Yes, indeed I can tell you, there wasn’t a moment of peace. The people were terrified by that “Chupa-Chupa” affair. I even managed to see one of the injured victims myself – Dona Mirota, a lady who was receiving medical treatment at the Health Clinic. The people were terrified because this beam of night light had already assaulted several people. The whole community was packed in only three houses, praying, sometimes singing some religious songs!

There were even reports of people apparently seeing the actual occupants of these craft, who were apparently quite hostile. One local resident named Claudomira Paixao claimed to have had just such an encounter after waking one evening to find everything bathed in a greenish glow, which would steadily become red. It was at that point that she realized it was a beam being directed right at her, and she then saw something very weird indeed, of which she says:

In one of these days, after midnight, I woke up because of a strong flash, a sort of focused bright green light ray that came down from the top roof to my left chest. I tried to shout, but my voice did not function. I felt an exquisite heat… Later, that beam of light diminished and I saw that I was burnt. I could see a creature, like a man, wearing a jumpsuit just like a dive suit. He pointed it at me, and the object shone three times, striking my chest during the three occasions, almost in the same place, it was hot, it wounded me, it seemed that I had needles pierced at all three points. I was terrified, I could not move my legs! It was hot, and it hurt. It was like a needle stick. My health never came back to be the same since that night.

Of course, considering that these reports and the panic they caused were becoming national news it was only a matter of time before the military would be drawn to this remote locale. In late October of 1977, the Brazilian Air Force would launch an investigation under Captain Uyrange Bolivar Soares Nogueira de Hollanda Lima, which would take it even further into the realm of the bizarre. They would investigate the injuries of the victims, gain eyewitness accounts, and even collect a good amount of purported photographic evidence of the phenomena. Even weirder is that during the military presence on the island it would be alleged that that even the Air Force would come under attack by the lights, one such incident of which one resident Sra. Alba Câmara Vilhena would say:

On one occasion some people saw one of the craft. It was round, and all luminous. Just at that moment, a helicopter of the F.A.B. (Brazilian Air Force) was flying quite near to our house. Then we saw the UFO direct a very powerful beam on to the helicopter, obliging it to land on the São Pedro Airfield. That happened at about 8.00 pm one evening. The helicopters that appeared from time to time, bringing materials and personnel, attempted to chase the UFOs but without much success. Indeed, on the contrary, it was the UFOs that chased them!

The military would do its study and then pack up and leave in January of 1978 without offering the populace any sort of explanation, and labelling the whole investigation as classified. At the time there seemed to be some efforts to explain it all away as weather balloons or atmospheric phenomena, but this was obviously not really bought by the people who claimed to have been attacked by the craft and left with injuries. There seemed to have been some cover-up going on, and making this all the more sinister was that Captain Hollanda would turn up dead three months later, allegedly by suicide, although no further details were given, making some wonder if this was really a suicide or not. After 1978 the incidents would die down, but not stop with sporadic accounts coming in throughout the decades since. What was going on here? It is all so spectacular and dramatic that one is left to wonder just what all of this entails. Were these actual UFOs, and if so what did they want and why did they attack people? Was there a government cover-up? Or was this all just mass hysteria and seeing things? Without a doubt, the “Cloares Invasion” remains a very harrowing, and yet remarkably obscure case of the darker side of UFO encounters.

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A Secret Property is a thinly-veiled, fictional version of what happened at Rendlesham Forest, Suffolk, England in December 1980. It’s author: the late Ralph Noyes who rose to a significant position in the U.K. Ministry of Defense. Consider the following: in Noyes’ story we have a Colonel Hoyt, a military base called Bentbridge, and mysterious action deep in the woods. And, Noyes had the absolute gall to deny that his story was a roman-à-clef. The Grammarist says: “A roman-à-clef is a novel which depicts real-world people and events, with fictional names. Usually, details concerning the people and events are changed in minor ways in order to sustain the pretense of fiction. The amount of fictionalization in a roman-à-clef can vary widely.”

In Noyes’ case, the amount was huge. Most important of all, it is not the matter of how much data and material Noyes chose to fictionalize in A Secret Property. Rather, it’s the theme of Noyes’ story that is so important and relevant to us – more than thirty-five years after his book was published. In her 1991 book From Out of the Blue, Jenny Randles said of Noyes’ story that it involved a technology that “produces etheric visions of aliens and spaceships” and that can “effect the real world in various hazardous ways.” We’re talking about the Rendlesham event being a secret experiment undertaken by military personnel, intelligence agencies and more.

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In her third book on the subject of Rendlesham – UFO Crash Landing? – Randles got right to the heart of the matter, pointing out something that has been largely overlooked by so many in Ufology. Jenny said that Noyes’ scenario in A Secret Property brought together “sophisticated computer-controlled technology with the power within human consciousness and the natural forces of the Earth itself. Blending both mind and electronics together, it endeavored to forge a powerful ‘psychic’ weapon.” Just about everything Noyes wrote about in his 1985 novel – and that Randles discussed in relation to Noyes – smacks of classified operations, visionary experiences, and strange technology; all of which are at the heart of the overall “secret experiment” scenario for what happened at Rendlesham Forest more than forty years ago. Randles may not have realized how close she came to penetrating the truth of the matter. I would say she was right on the cusp of one of the most important parts of this overall story. Unfortunately, yet predictably, in the 1990s mainstream Ufology was still way too excited – years after Rendlesham occurred – by tales of aliens and extraterrestrial spaceships. Much of that was prompted by the influence that the hugely popular show The X-Files had on the U.K.’s ufology.

Noyes knew something of what happened in the woods – or, at the very least, he had his suspicions about the genuine scenario. Perhaps, those suspicions came via government sources – possibly, even, from retired colleagues from the MoD, who may have provided a few snippets of information and strategically-placed clues. In all probability, though, Noyes never knew the full story, but learned enough of it to allow him to blend the shocking truth into a readable page-turner. Noyes did us all a service by trying to get the truth of Rendlesham into the open, and without causing himself problems with his old employers at the Ministry of Defense. He was, after all, on a government pension, something that would certainly have led him to tread very carefully.

Ralph Noyes was interviewed by Andy Roberts and Dr. David Clarke, who have both taken an interest in the Rendlesham case. Noyes told the pair: “In the several capacities which brought me into touch with UFO reports during my 28 years in the MoD, I encountered several reports, particularly those from military establishments, which indicated ‘high strangeness.’ I, and military colleagues, had little doubt something had taken place for which we had no explanation.” On the matter of what happened in those woods – or what didn’t happen, depending where you’re coming from – Noyes offered the following to Clarke and Roberts: “There is no doubt at all that the MoD played a thoroughly dishonest game over the Rendlesham affair…The case itself is complex. I have given my own views about it–essentially that Halt and several others came face to face with a striking manifestation of the ‘UFO phenomenon’ whatever that may be, in the December of 1980.”

Noyes also made this highly valid statement: “Unless Lt. Col. Halt was out of his mind, there is clear evidence in his report that British airspace and territory were intruded upon by an unidentified vehicle on two occasions in late December 1980 and that no authority was able to prevent this. If, on the other hand, Halt’s report cannot be believed, there is equally clear evidence of a serious misjudgment of events by USAF personnel at an important base in British territory. Either way, the case can hardly be without defense significance.”

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When it comes to UFOs, most people accept the eyewitness accounts of astronauts, military and professional pilots over sightings by the general public. That may explain why a sighting by a Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) pilot and crew on a domestic flight over Pakistani airspace is getting intense scrutiny worldwide. It helps that someone in the cockpit captured the UFO on video and the sighting was in bright daylight against a clear blue sky. With that many witnesses, including reports from the ground, Pakistan International Airlines felt obligated to issue a statement. What did all of these people see? What did the airline think?

“The video was shot over Multan-Sialkot region by Captain Faisal Qureshi and his First Officer Captain Talha while piloting the Karachi-Lahore flight at an altitude of 35,000 feet.”

The Express Tribune reports that the UFO was spotted by the crew of domestic flight PIA flight PK304 from Karachi to Lahore. At about 4 pm on January 23 near Rahim Yar Khan, the pilot saw the UFO about 1,000 feet above the Airbus A-320. According to the records, Captain Qureshi immediately reported the sighting back to the control room. After landing in Karachi, the pilot shared the video with officials of Pakistan International Airlines. They were sufficiently concerned that a spokesperson made a statement to the public:

“It is too early to say what that object was. In fact, we might not be able to tell what the object was at all. However, something was spotted and it was reported in accordance with the required protocol.”

Better call the tower on this one.

Somehow, as usual, the 41-second video appeared on social media. (Watch it here.) Speaking in English, the pilot can be heard saying “It’s not a balloon, it’s not an aircraft.” Some of the video was censored due to language, but reports say the pilot was also heard commenting “The UFO was extremely bright despite the presence of sunlight” and speculating that it was not a planet but could be a “space station” or an “artificial planet.” One report also stated the pilot saw what looked like a metal ring surrounding the UFO and a brilliant light coming from its center.

Despite the pilot’s expert opinion that the object was not a balloon, that was the prevailing comment on media posts. The Express Tribune contacted Pakistan Meteorological Department spokesman Khalid Malik, who explained they have some balloons that fly at an altitude of 6,000 to 7,000 feet, and Radiosondes balloons which can reach 70,000 feet. However, private weather station operator Jawad Memon pointed out that Radiosondes, which he claims the Meteorological Department no longer uses, are non-reflective rubber while the UFO was obviously very shiny. Some commenters and media sites referred to the UFO as an alien Foo fighter, but that term – first used during WWII – has been explained to be either electrical discharge from the wings of a plane or reflective ice crystals – both of which follow the plane and are close to it, unlike the Pakistan UFO. And, since it was recorded on video, it’s not a hallucination due to fatigue or stress.

Foo fighter?

“A similar incident was also reported in January 2019 by PIA pilots in Karachi. A UFO was spotted by the flight crew flying 105 feet above the aircraft, while the plane was flying at an altitude of 2,500feet. The flight captain suspected it could be a drone. The incident was immediately reported to the Air Traffic Control (ATC) in Karachi.”

Was this one a drone too? The altitude rules out commercially available drones, but it could be a military drone, although the pilots didn’t make that connection. That puts this object solidly in the “unidentified” category with a slight lean towards “balloon” but a contrary pull towards UFO because of the inability of the pilots to identify it.

Which way do YOU lean?

Just a couple of weeks ago I was asked about the famous April 24, 1964 UFO case involving police-officer Lonnie Zamora. My view is that what was seen was a device of the U.S. military. And, I’ll explain why. First, some background on the case for those who may not be fully aware of it all. It was on the afternoon of the day in question that local police-officer Lonnie Zamora broke off from pursuing a teenager in a speeding car and headed to a nearby dynamite shack. The reason? A sudden roaring sound coming roughly from the area where the shack was positioned. Quite naturally, Zamora thought that there may have been an explosion at the site. He was wrong. What Zamora came across – many UFO researchers believe – was nothing less than a landed UFO, piloted by two smallish humanoids dressed in white. A close encounter? For many, yes. For me, too – but I just don’t think the incident had anything to do with aliens. Bear in mind that the location was barely any distance from White Sands, where, for decades, new devices and technologies have been flown. But, there’s another issue. For me, the most important angle.

One of the key things that Zamora said was that the craft spewed flames out of it. That suggests the craft was rocket-powered. As NASA state: “Rocket engines are distinguished b the type of mechanism used to produce exhaust material. The simplest ‘engine’ is a compressed air bottle attached to a nozzle. The exhaust gas is stored in the same form as it appears in the exhaust. Ejection of compressed air, or other gas, from a nozzle is a perfectly satisfactory rocket operation for some purposes. The most common rocket engine is the chemical type in which hot exhaust gases are produced by chemical combustion. The chemicals or propellants, are of two types, fuel and oxidizer corresponding to gasoline and oxygen in an automobile engine. Both are required for combustion. They may be solid or liquid chemicals.”

In light of all the above, I find it very difficult to believe that aliens from a faraway world (or even a far away solar-system or galaxy, even) would be using rocket-powered craft, even in certain stages of their time spent on our world – namely, when landing and taking off. Surely, by 1964, their technology would have been way ahead of ours by then? My line of thinking applies to another famous case, too. The Cash-Landrum incident of December 1980. Now, let’s have a look at that one.

When, shortly before 9:00 p.m., Vickie Landrum, her grandson, Colby, and Betty Cash exited the restaurant where they had just eaten a fine Texan dinner, they couldn’t imagine what was just around the corner. As they headed towards the town of Huffman, they were terrified by the sudden sight of an unknown object in the sky. Worse, it was descending on a flight-path guaranteed to ensure it landed on the road they were on. As they got closer, they could see the aerial thing was giving it out flames and shaped not unlike a diamond.

It reached a perilously low level of around twenty-five feet, something which ensured a screeching of brakes and the car brought to a shuddering standstill. The interior temperature of the car suddenly reached intolerable levels. The three jumped out of the vehicle and could only stare in awe and fear. Then, out of the blue, around two dozen, double-rotor helicopters were on the scene, clearly intent on caroling the UFO. Or, perhaps they were escorting it. Cash was sure they were Boeing CH-47 Chinooks. They watched as both the UFO and the helicopters left the area and were finally lost from sight. Within days, all three fell sick: nausea and vomiting were at the forefront. Betty Cash was the one affected most of all – which may be explainable by the fact that she was the one member of the group who got closest to the object. Her hair started to fall out, her skin was covered with pustules and blisters, and the nausea got worse.

Despite attempts to force the US Government to come clean on what went down, there was nothing but denial after denial from the authorities. The case is a puzzling one, with some UFO researchers believing the three encountered a real UFO, while others suspect they were unfortunate enough to cross paths with a top secret prototype aircraft that was in deep trouble. This makes me think it was not an extraterrestrial craft – because, again, “rocket-ships” would be way too primitive for an alien civilization far ahead of us. I should stress I don’t think the cases were hoaxes at all. I think the witnesses described exactly what they saw. But, that what they saw did not come from another world.

Are you frustrated with the quality of UFO/UAP sightings these days – the lack of details, the blurry photos, etc.? Do you fancy yourself as a Fox Mulder who would like to search for the truth that’s out there … if you only had the time, the training or the financial wherewithal? Good news, friends – you can now take the ‘wanna’ out of your ‘wannabe’ dreams and become part of a worldwide UFO-watching group with do-it-yourself equipment.

“Our mission is straightforward: connect a network of civilian-owned sensor arrays, use machine learning to catalogue anomalous events, and share this data with researchers.”

Credit: Sky Hub

Sky Hub is the project of Chris Cogswell, host and creator of The Mad Scientist Podcast with a doctorate in chemical engineering and an interest in UFOs, and a team of hardware and software experts with an interest in UFOs. He explained recently to Space.com that Sky Hub’s recommended hardware – three do-it-yourself sensor kits based on the Jetson Nano and Jetson Xavier NX computers designed for running multiple neural networks – is in alpha testing and Sky Hub is looking for early adapters to help test them. The sensor or “tracker” kits – which run from $700 to $1400 — collect high-resolution data and upload it to an eventual worldwide, digital UFO database accessible to the public with Sky Hub’s open-source software.

“There are lots of reports of objects in the sky that we don’t know how to categorize that I think are interesting and worthy of study.”

Sky Hub is not in this for the money – while it sells the enclosure shell and asks for a monthly subscription to maintain the database and software, the rest of the components can be purchased off-the-shelf and it recommends to shop around for the best prices. The Jetson computers are easy to use and Sky Hub’s website has excellent instructions and chat services available for both setup and usage.

“In my opinion, there is something interesting happening here that’s worth investigating. You can’t deny that there are people who still make reports of UFOs every year. If it’s all fake, in my mind, that’s almost more interesting. How did something untrue become such a social phenomenon like this?”

Credit: Sky Hub

Cogswell’s observation is interesting – there hasn’t been such strong interest in UFOs since the late 1950s and early 1960s — and prescient as well. Space.com points out that there are already a number of projects searching for UFOs, plenty of meteor trackers, astronomers and militaries all searching for UFOs and UAPs with far more sophisticated equipment – and those people have logical explanations like space objects, drones, secret test aircraft and the like. However, Cogswell is right – there are a few UFO/UAPs that have defied all explanation attempts … and coverups are indeed as interesting as actual sightings. That sounds like something one has to go to his podcast to discuss.

If nothing else, the Sky Hub do-it-yourself UFO/UAP kit sounds like a great project for riding out the pandemic lockdown.

The small town of Wytheville, Virginia, sits up against the Blue Ridge Mountains and is at first glance a peaceful, somewhat rural slice of small town America. Not much typically happens here, and it is mostly a quiet place with historical buildings and quaint streets. Yet back in 1987 this normally placid town would be beset with a series of strange sightings of things in the sky that have remained unexplained to this day, peppered with bizarre accounts, tales of cover-ups, and very sinister goings on.

It all seems to have begun with a man named Danny Gordon, who at the time was a local radio reporter and news director for the station WYVE. On October 7, 1987, Wythe County Sheriff Wayne Pike called in his usual police report, but this time it was a bit more bizarre than usual, in that he told Gordon that four police officers had seen a UFO. At the time, Gordon thought it was a sort of tongue in cheek news story that he could share for laughs, so he reported it on the air as almost like a big joke, but it would soon turn out that this was very serious, indeed. As soon as the report went out, the station was deluged with people calling in the give their own UFO reports from the area, which shocked Gordon because it had been merely meant to be a sort of light, throwaway report. He would later say of his astonishment:

It was a filler piece that came on at the end of the news which I usually relegate to something that’s may be unusual, like we had one police officer who killed five chickens at once with two shots, and that was a story that ran as kind of a ‘ha ha’ piece, and this was another ‘ha ha’ piece and being a very skeptical newsman, it was definitely not in my lead part of my news.

Wytheville, Virginia

Despite the phones ringing off the hook and people talking about alien spaceships, Gordon was skeptical. For one, the descriptions of the objects people were seeing were varied, with some reporting an egg-shaped object, while others were saying it was cigar-shaped or more like a huge, cylindrical object. Gordon believed that people were probably just seeing things after his initial news report, or that they were misidentifying airplanes refueling or maybe an experimental aircraft, but his calls to the nearby air base showed that nothing of that sort was going on in the area at the time. In the meantime, over the following days the reports continued to flood in, and one reporter Paul Dellinger, with The Roanoke Times, would say, “All of a sudden, everybody started seeing things.”

Gordon was still skeptical, thinking there must be some rational explanation for this wave of sightings, so out of curiosity he decided to go check things out for himself. On October 21, Danny and a friend, Roger Hall, went out to the area where most of the reports were originating from, in the southern part of Wythe County, to see if they could see a UFO themselves, bringing along a 35-millimeter still camera and a video camera for good measure. At first it was a bust, they saw nothing, but as they were leaving they noticed an anomalous light in the sky, which caused them to stop the car and get out. When the object approached them, they could see it was some sort of dome-shaped craft with a flashing light on top, and the right side of the object adorned with multi-colored strobing lights. As they stared in disbelief trying to figure out what it was, a smaller red light apparently approached it to merge with the domed object as if docking, before the whole of it flew off to leave the two witnesses spellbound. Gordon would say of what they saw:

We were headed home, after two hours of fruitless searching… And I just happened to look to my left and saw a very unusual object coming across the horizon. I pulled off to the side of the road in a hurry, jumped out, he got out of the right side, and as he got out I noticed the craft coming at me was very large, it had a dome shape to the top of it, and no wings, and had what appeared to be a strobe putting out multi-colored lights on the right side of the craft. As I watched the sky, from the left came the red ball. As the big mothership went into a small skiff of clouds, the red ball docked with the craft. We looked at each other and realized, no pictures. The camera was not in my hand, the camera was not in his hand, and we both knew we blew it.

Frustrated that they had dropped the ball on taking any photographic evidence, the two ventured out to the same spot the following evening, this time mentally prepared to take photos. Much to their astonishment, they were able to witness the UFO once again, this time taking a series of photographs, and that evening Gordon would claim that he had received a call from an anonymous man who told him that the federal government was interested in the UFO flap, and warned him not to report on what he had seen as it was a matter of national security. Gordon would receive several more calls along these lines that night, with his wife becoming increasingly worried. Despite these menacing calls, the next day Gordon excitedly held a press conference that propelled the story into national news, but things would get very intense from there, as that very evening he would return to find his home ransacked. It would appear that nothing had been stolen, leading Gordon to believe that someone had been looking for the photos he had taken.

Danny Gordon

Even in the face of these ominous new developments, Gordon continued his crusade to get to the bottom of what was going on, and reports continued to come in from all over the area unabated. Some witnesses reported seeing something that looked like “a spinning carousel,” another said they had sighted what appeared to be “a cross between a helicopter and an airplane,” and many others. Gordon would also get a chance to photograph the objects again, when he and his wife and daughter all saw a huge object that broke into four smaller objects above the parking lot of a mall, a sighting which was made by over 100 other witnesses at the scene, including a whole school bus full of children. Once again, Gordon was able to take some photographs before the objects sped off into the night. The reports continued on well into 1988, by which time there had been at least 3,000 confirmed sightings of the UFOs, from people of all walks of life including numerous police officers, pilots, and others. Gordon followed it all with great interest, personally collecting many of the reports himself, but things were about to get even weirder.

On March 19, 1988, Gordon had been invited to a broadcasters’ conference in Virginia Beach in order to discuss the amazing photographs he had taken of the mysterious objects. Up until then, the menacing anonymous phone calls had ceased, and he was daring to think that whoever had been threatening him had perhaps backed off and resigned themselves to the fact that the story had been blown wide open. He was wrong. That evening as he packed for his trip the phone rang, and on the other end was a man claiming to be a retired military intelligence officer, who had a rather ominous message for Gordon. He would say of the mysterious call:

I received a phone call at home from a retired military intelligence officer, and first he told me to make sure that I taped the conversation so he could put the date, and everyone to be aware, and I said, why do you want to tape this? And he said, I want your friends to know, that if something happens to you, that I forewarned you. He told me that because of his investigations into the UFO field that they had hit his son and caused his son to die with some kind of virus connected to leukemia. He said that he had information that the federal government was not very happy with my UFO investigations. He said, ‘they want to quiet you…’

Unsettling indeed, and it would only get stranger. Possibly unconnected but still rather odd is the fact that during that same period while Gordon was in Virginia Beach the area was gripped by an epidemic of hepatitis. Coincidence or not? Then, one month later, two men arrived at Gordon’s home, well-dressed and identifying themselves as newspaper reporters who wanted to interview him for an article. At first Gordon believed them, allowing them inside, but somewhat suspicious when one of the reporters wandered around the house taking photos as the other questioned him about the strange events in town and his photographs. It sent up a red flag for Gordon, so when they were gone he called the newspaper they claimed to have been from to ask about it, but the paper denied having any knowledge of the article in question or the two men who had gone to his house. Curious. Even more curious was that the following month when he was looking through the photos he had taken he noticed that four of the original negatives were mysteriously missing. Why those four? No one knows, and Gordon has said of it:

When I got to the canister which had the UFO negatives, I quickly opened it up and found some UFO negatives, but the one negative with the shots from the shopping mall was missing. Now I felt like maybe there was something in those photographs that I was not seeing, so I took the photographs to some other people to look at. We used magnifying glasses and we measured angles trying to find out why these photographs were so important. And we’ve yet to discover why anyone would want to steal that… a set of four in a series of photographs of the UFOs.

One of Gordon’s photographs

Less than a month after this, the stress this was putting Gordon through took its toll, and he collapsed from a heart attack. Although he survived, he decided that it was in both his and his family’s best interests to back off from the story. There had been too many spooky calls, intruders in his house, and that sense of constant foreboding in the background, that he was being watched all the time, and so he dropped his pursuit of the sightings and indeed UFOs in general, warning others who would do the same, “Don’t look up. Because once you look up and you tell somebody what you saw, your life is changed forever.” Danny Gordon’s story and the mass wave of sightings in Wytheville in 1987 and 1988 have been made into the book Don’t Look Up: The Real Story Behind the Virginia UFO Sightings and feature in the documentary Strange Country: A Different Kind of UFO Documentary, directed by Sean Kotz and Chris Valluzzo. Co-director and producer of the doc, Valluzzo, has said of the his film and the remarkable case it covers:

Most of the time, UFO documentaries focus on the most outlandish aspects and are often marked by wild speculations or unfounded assumptions. Instead, we are interested in the human story which is typically forgotten in these cases. What happened to the town and in particular, Danny Gordon, whose life was turned upside down by the ensuing attention and excitement? It is a compelling case because there were hundreds, if not thousands, of individual witnesses and a variety of craft over the course of several months. The witnesses were reliable people. In fact, the National Enquirer sent a reporter who decided not to run a story because the people were just not weird enough!

The UFO wave came and went, it has largely been swept under the carpet, Gordon kept his head low to hide from the perceived parties stalking him, and we are left to wonder what was going on here. What were all of these people seeing during that time period? Was this aliens, atmospheric phenomena, experimental aircraft, or what? Who were the creepy people threatening Gordon, what did they know, and what did they really want? It is all quite the intriguing sequence of events, and whether we ever get answers or not, it certainly ranks high among some of the more compelling mass UFO sightings out there.

Since the 1980s, sightings of large, triangular-shaped UFOs, usually described as being black in color, making a low humming noise, and very often with rounded rather than angled corners, have been reported throughout the world. The sheer proliferation of such reports has led some ufological commentators to strongly suspect that the Flying Triangles (as they have come to be known) are prime examples of still-classified aircraft, the development of which was secretly begun in the 1980s by elements of the U.S. Department of Defense. Largely, UFO researchers are split into two camps: that the Flying Triangles are the creations of the American military or that they were flown by extraterrestrials. There is, however, another theory for all of this mystery. We’ll get to that shortly.

In 1982 a wave of encounters with the Flying Triangles began over portions of New York State, specifically in Hudson Valley. In their 1988 book, Night Siege, authors Dr. J. Allen Hynek, Philip J. Imbrogno and Bob Pratt wrote: “Can 7,000 eyewitnesses be wrong? They were there to witness the huge, hovering object in the sky, the flashing lights, the eerie silence. They are ordinary people from all walks of life: stay-at-home moms, kids, business people, engineers. They tell their stories here, and they all agree on one thing: they saw the same massive object cruising over their backyards. And it was like nothing they had seen before…”

In 1989, Chris Gibson had what can accurately be termed the encounter of a lifetime. An engineer with an Honors degree in geology and someone who’s worked focused on oil-exploration, Gibson was also attached to the U.K.’s Royal Observer Corps. The work of the ROC – which closed down in December 1995, after seventy years of work to help protect the United Kingdom from attack – required its volunteers to keep a careful watch on the skies above and what was flying in those same skies, too.  As luck – or fate – would have it, and at the time when the Aurora program may very well have been compromised, Gibson was working on an oil rig in the North Sea. The name of the rig was the Galveston Key.

It was August 1989, specifically, when one of Gibson’s colleagues, a friend named Graeme Winton, who went to university with Gibson, excitedly told Gibson to come with him to the deck. There was something Winton needed to show him. A startled and amazed Gibson caught sight of something incredible in the skies above. A pair of General Dynamics’ F1-11 aircraft were shepherding a very strange-looking, completely black aircraft. And, a Boeing KC-135 Stratotanker seemed to be fueling it. It was in the form of a triangle. Now, we get to a fascinating theory for the origins and natures of the Flying Triangles.

The late Omar Fowler, an English UFO expert who died in 2017, had a theory that the Flying Triangles just might be nothing less than the aerial vehicles of time travelers. Fowler had a good reason for that. On one occasion, in September 1992, over a large area of woodland in central England called the Cannock Chase, Omar secured a piece of testimony from a man named Alan Ball. He agreed to meet Ball on the Cannock Chase one morning. Incredibly, Ball claimed that he was taken on-board a huge, black, Flying Triangle late one night – and while he was driving home – when he was “beamed into” the craft and subjected to a series of medical experiments by three small, humanoid figures in what “looked like a medical lab.”

Ten or fifteen minutes into the experimentation, Ball claimed that his mind was flooded by images of the U.K., in ruins. It was a definitive Armageddon: buildings, in all directions, were destroyed; charred human bodies lay everywhere; and it was clear that a nuclear event occurred. And the assumption was that the event was not alone. That the U.K. – and possible everywhere else – had been destroyed. After having the terrifying vision, Ball was dropped off the craft – literally, from a door about five feet above the woods. Ball was in a state of terror – and for several days. Particularly of interest is the fact that Fowler had in his files two extremely similar cases – and also at the Cannock Chase woods – of people taken onto Flying Triangles and exposed to images in their minds of a massive apocalypse in the future. Fowler was still open on the idea that the Flying Triangles could be extraterrestrial in nature. However, he wasn’t able to shake off the disturbing possibility the craft were piloted by time travelers, and that what Ball and the two other people were seeing was a future still to come – and that all three victims had been taken to the future and then returned to in 1992. Thoughts?