After writing articles in the last few days on UFO researchers being the subjects of government files, getting knocks on the door from “The Man,” and strange phone calls, there’s one more aspect to this particularly sinister part of Ufology: namely, those mysterious black cars that the mysterious M.I.B. drive. The number of reports that fall in this category are huge, and I don’t exaggerate. Indeed, I could write an entire series of articles on the “Cars in Black” phenomenon. One of the people whose M.I.B. experiences feature in my 2015 Men in Black book is a friend of mine, Steve Ray. After reading the book, and just a few days after it was published, Steve experienced something unusual. In his very own words to me: “I read the whole Kindle version of the book Sunday and Monday. Monday night I came home and found two black cars parked – headlights out – in non-assigned spaces directly facing my assigned parking space. When I came upstairs, I found my living-room lamp had been switched from its normal setting to the spookier black-light setting – which I have no memory of doing, and I was the last one here.” I told Steve I was not surprised. He was not comforted by my words; not at all. He wasn’t meant to be. I tell it as it is: good, bad, or worse still. Now, let’s take a look at some more cases.

Nick Redfern and one of those black cars

Dr. Josef Allen Hynek, a well-renowned UFO authority who died in 1986, was provided with the details of a fantastically-strange MIB encounter that occurred in a small Minnesota town in late 1975, and that falls firmly into just such a category. Ironically, no UFO was seen on this particular occasion, but the chief witness was harassed by the driver of a large, black Cadillac on a particular stretch of highway, and who nearly forced the man into an adjacent ditch. The irate man quickly righted his vehicle and headed off in hot-pursuit, only to see the black Cadillac lift into the air and, quite literally, disappear in the blink of any eye. Moving on: Gareth Medway has put together an excellent document on M.I.B. cases, some of which involve those black cars. As Gareth notes: “George Smyth of Elizabeth, New Jersey, went to visit two teenagers who had seen a mysterious green entity [in 1966]. The boys were surrounded by a crowd. He noticed two men emerging from a large black car, leaving a third behind the wheel. They had a slight slant to their eyes. Later, when Saucer News investigators went to visit one of the lads, Smyth noticed the same black car parked nearby, and the same two men get out and watch the house while the interview was going on. Two weeks later he received a phone call telling him to give up UFO investigation.”

Now, onto a story given to me in September 2016 at the annual Mothman Festival: one of the people who came to chat with me, as I sat at my vending table, was Irene, a woman who related a very bizarre story; one with clear M.I.B. / Women in Black overtones attached to it. As Irene revealed, she is now-retired and had a very strange experience while living in Pasadena, California in the late 1970s – in either 1978 or 1979. In the early hours of the particular morning in question she inexplicably woke up and felt compelled to go to the bedroom window. On doing so, she was shocked to see a car-sized, oval-shaped UFO – of a bright blue color – that hung in the air for a few seconds, before vanishing into the dark sky above. She raced back to the bed, terrified by what she had just seen. On the following evening, however, something even stranger occurred.

There was a knock at the door. It was a very pale-faced woman in black who claimed to work for a company that offered aerial photographs of peoples’ homes – taken by an expert photographer, then framed, and that would look very nice on the living-room wall. There was, however, something that made Irene think things were just not quite right, not at all. Her instinct proved to be right on the money. When the woman, somewhat oddly, offered to show Irene one of the cameras that the company used, she agreed to see it – although why she would need to see it at all makes very little sense. If any sense at all. The woman proceeded down the drive and got in the backseat of the black car she had arrived in. In a few seconds, however, she was back out of the car. Irene could see the camera, but was very surprised by what happened next: the woman quickly took a photograph of the front of Irene’s house, jumped back into the car, and in seconds was out of sight.

Now, onto another Irene. This one being Irene Bott, who, in the 1990s, ran the U.K.-base Staffordshire UFO Group. Shortly after establishing her group in 1995, Irene found herself plunged into a situation involving a witness to a UFO encounter – a witness who believed they had a period of so-called “missing time.” Expressing a desire to learn more about what occurred, the witness contacted Irene and related the details that surrounded his viewing in the early hours of a 1995 morning, a brightly lit aerial object. The witness was certain that there was far more to the case than he could consciously recollect, and expressed a keen desire for help in unraveling what had taken place. As a result, Irene referred the witness to a colleague in her group and the two discussed the details over the telephone. Crucial to the issues under discussion, however: shortly after returning home from work on one particular day, the witness found that a note had been pushed through his letterbox warning him not to proceed any further with his investigation.

Naturally concerned, the man asked his neighbors if they had seen anyone lurking in the vicinity of his house that might have conceivably been responsible for the strange and somewhat unsettling note. Fortunately, one such neighbor had seen something unusual on that very day. Shortly after the witness had set off for work, a black car had pulled up outside his house. A man dressed entirely in black and carrying a briefcase exited the vehicle, marched up the driveway, shoved a piece of paper through the letterbox, returned to the car and drove off at speed. One of our mysterious characters had struck again. And, no doubt, those mysterious drivers will be with us as long as the UFO phenomenon is around.

In 1992, in a privately-published paper titled: Have You Checked Your File Lately? Robert Durant, a UFO researcher and pilot, discussed the theme of an all-encompassing, Government-sanctioned-and-controlled operation designed to covertly monitor the activities of the public UFO research community: “You, the reader, are among the approximately 4,000 Americans who subscribe to ufological journals or newsletters, buy UFO books through the mail, attend conferences, or spend time with others who engage in such activities. Not a large group. We are only 3% of the total number of citizens the government admits to watching with intense care. A very easy group to track. Building your file is so much easier than compiling one on a Russian spy or a Mafioso. There is a file on you at the Internal Revenue Service, the Social Security Administration, the driver’s license bureau of the state in which you are licensed, the commercial credit card companies that do business with your bank and your lenders, your doctor’s office, and so forth and so on. Is it really unreasonable to suspect that a UFO file would be created?” With that said, read on:

My previous article here at Mysterious Universe was titled “In the U.K. Government, it’s not just the Ministry of Defense that is tied to UFOs.” In part, I revealed how, in the mid-1990s, English ufologist Robin Cole was visited by government agents because he dug a bit too deep into the UFO connection to the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the U.K.’s equivalent of the United States’ National Security Agency. With that in mind, I thought I would share with you other examples of UFO researchers getting knocks on the front-door from “the man.” Back in the early 1950s, the FBI opened a file on “Contactee” George Van Tassel, who created the Integratron and ran an outdoor UFO event for years – an event that attracted thousands of people. Van Tassel’s file runs to 319 pages and has now been declassified. But, what about Mrs. Van Tassel? It wasn’t just George who got a visit. His wife did, too. In a face-to-face meeting at the Van Tassel home, the FBI recorded the following:

“Relative to her husband and herself, Mrs. Van Tassel claims that she and her husband practice a metaphysical religion. She declared this religion is based on an occult principle in that she and her husband sit in a room in dead silence and receive thought transfers from one another and from other individuals who are not psychically present in the room. She declared that it was through this type of practice that her husband has learned or prophesied the coming of World War III and a gigantic explosion on the East Coast. She mentioned that at the present time she and her husband have undertaken a special project. This project is the founding and organizing of the College of Universal Wisdom. The purpose of the college is to promote and carry out interplanetary communication and the dissemination of Universal Wisdom gained through the median of space beings.” The two agents thanked Mrs. Van Tassel and left, satisfied with what they heard.

As the CIA note, in a very amusing fashion, in 1955, two elderly sisters in Chicago, Mildred and Marie Maier, reported in the Journal of Space Flight their experiences with UFOs, including the recording of a radio program in which an unidentified code was allegedly heard. The sisters taped the program; and other ham radio operators also claimed to have heard the “space message.” The CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence duly became interested and asked its Scientific Contact Branch to obtain a copy of the recording. Field officers from the Contact Division, one of who was a man named Dewelt Walker, made contact with the Maier sisters at their home, who were “thrilled that the government was interested,” and set up a time to meet with them. In trying to secure the tape recording, the Agency officers reported that they had stumbled upon a scene from Arsenic and Old Lace. “The only thing lacking was the elderberry wine,” Walker told Headquarters. After reviewing the sisters’ scrapbook of clippings from their days as entertainers on the stage, the bemused and amused officers secured a copy of the recording. OSI analyzed the tape and found it was nothing more than Morse code from a US radio station.

Moving on: In 1977, the late Graham Birdsall – editor of the now-defunct British-based UFO Magazine – and his brother, Mark, investigated a major UFO sighting near to Harrogate, North Yorkshire, England, that involved a number of witnesses who had viewed strange, aerial objects in the vicinity of Menwith Hill – a vast “listening-post” controlled by the American National Security Agency. The Birdsall brothers duly approached the staff at Menwith Hill for comment and, at one point, were actually allowed on base. This led to a curious series of events. Soon after visiting the base, Graham received a telephone call from a Mr. Mills, the senior NSA security officer at the base, who had just taken up his post at Menwith Hill and was keen to cement good, local relations. Graham engaged the NSA official in conversation for approximately one hour – something that few civilians can claim. Not only that, Graham was visited by an NSA employee who asked him more than a few questions about “motivations” when to came to UFOs – as well as Graham’s beliefs in the UFO phenomenon. The man soon left.

One of my own particularly memorable experiences occurred in 2001. After writing an article on MI5 whistleblower, David Shayler, for Mark Birdsall’s Eye-Spy magazine, I received a telephone call from a highly concerned and nervous Birdsall. He informed me that he had been visited – at his home – in North Yorkshire by “two lads from the Metropolitan Police.” Mark advised me that the two officers informed him that while publication of the article was not deemed to have harmed the national security of the country, there was a pressing need on their part to obtain the tape-recording of the interview I had conducted with Shayler. For a while I mused upon this and did nothing. Not long after, however, I was contacted by a representative of Special Branch, who advised me, in no uncertain term}s that I would hand over the tape, like it or not. Based upon what I was told, I was left with little choice, and I did indeed hand over the original recording. I should stress, though, MI5 were fine with the text of the interview being included in the pages of Eye-Spy. It was a surreal situation.

In light of all the above, the day may come when you, too, get that ominous, slow knock on the door.

The Vietnam War, also known as the Second Indochina War, was fought between the years of 1955 and 1975, officially between North Vietnam and South Vietnam, but as most know America was pulled into it starting from 1964. The catalyst for America’s entry into the war revolves around a mysterious and disputed incident that happened in early August 1964 in the Gulf of Tonkin, also known as the USS Maddox Incident, in which a U.S. destroyer was said to have been put under attack by with North Vietnamese fast attack craft. It would help serve to force the U.S. Congress to pass the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and give President Lyndon B. Johnson great authority to increase American military presence in Vietnam. This would result in a horrific trial of attrition in the jungles of Vietnam that would see an estimated 58,220 U.S. service members killed in the conflict and a further 1,626 remain missing in action by the time they pulled out in 1973, but what really happened during this initial incident has long been wrapped in mystery and controversy, and one of the weirder ideas is that this might have been the doing of underwater UFOs, also called USO (Underwater Submersible Objects) or even mysterious sea beasts.

The official version of the Gulf of Tonkin incident is that on August 2, 1964, the American destroyer the USS Maddox had been out  performing a signals intelligence patrol as part of DESOTO operations when they were aggressively approached by three North Vietnamese Navy torpedo boats. In the ensuing melee, the USS Maddox was assailed by machine gun fire and torpedoes, and when the smoke cleared one U.S. aircraft was damaged, three North Vietnamese torpedo boats were damaged, and four North Vietnamese sailors were killed. This first attack is not in dispute, but there would then be an alleged second incident on August 4, 1964 that would really rile the Americans up, this time involving the USS Maddox and another destroyer called the USS Turner Joy, which furthered the U.S. resolve to enter the conflict, but there has long been some amount of doubt that the US forces had ever been under fire at all, or whether this had just been an excuse to escalate the efforts to enter the war.

USS Maddox

The North Vietnamese immediately denied that a second attack had ever happened, and in later years former United States Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara also admitted that there was never any second attack. Indeed, it was found that there were not even any North Vietnamese vessels in the area during the August 4 incident, but personnel aboard both the USS Turner Joy and USS Maddox begged to differ, insisting that it had happened, so what was going on here? According to some testimony from aboard the vessels involved, some pretty weird stuff.

In 1966, a Navy sonar engineer assigned to the destroyer USS Turner Joy came forward with a rather odd version of the events of that day. He claimed that on the day of that supposed second Gulf of Tonkin attack, he had picked up signatures on his radar that appeared to be enemy torpedoes, but which behaved erratically and as if under intelligent control, approaching the ship, even going under it, only to dart off. Both vessels reported detecting small, fast-moving objects on radar, both above and below the surface, which they took to be torpedoes and torpedo boats, but visibility was low due to a storm that had brought heavy clouds and fog. There would apparently by over 20 signatures of torpedoes on sonar, but they did not behave like torpedoes, seeming to move about at will rather than a straight line, and none of them actually hit. Some frightened crew members reported that the torpedoes seemed to be illuminated, while others swore they had seen the cockpit lights of the enemy vessels out in the gloom. Others saw what they took to be the wakes of torpedoes and there were even strange sounds heard that sounded a lot like the propellers of torpedoes, yet no impacts ever occurred.

Taking no chances at all, the two American destroyers allegedly performed evasive maneuvers and unloaded almost 650 cannon shells and several depth charges, blowing the area to absolute hell, yet when the smoke cleared there were found to be no enemy vessels, no wreckage or debris, nothing. This was despite the accounts of crew aboard the destroyers who were adamant that there had definitely been something out there and that they had been under attack. At the time it was convincing enough to propel America full on into the war, only in later years being found to have been perhaps a phantom attack that had no evidence of ever having happened at all. In 2005, the National Security Agency would declassify a trove of documents that revealed there was no second Gulf of Tonkin attack, and the at the time U.S. Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara himself would concede that there had been no enemy attack on that day. Even then president Johnson would say “For all I know, our navy was shooting at whales out there.”

Despite this, crew members aboard the two destroyers have continued to insist that there was something out there menacing them, leading to all sorts of theories. One of the main ideas is that a combination of weather, schools of fish near the surface, birds, or sensor problems had all conspired to make them misidentify phantom targets as actual ones. Another idea is that these ships were being circled by USOs, or underwater UFOs, and just as strange is the idea that the signatures and sightings were caused by underwater creatures. Todd Newberry, a professor emeritus of marine biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, believes that this can be blamed on bioluminescent cousins of sea squirts called giant pyrosomes, which are basically massive colonies of filter-feeding organisms that form long blunt-ended tubes that can propel themselves along and reach up to 60 feet in length. They also tend to light up when disturbed, and the idea here is that the crews of these ships were freaked by these giant, decidedly torpedo shaped colonies of organisms shooting about. Newberry has said of this:

These things are the size of torpedoes, so they produce the same sonar image. It all fit together, as far as the character of the colony and its behavior. They could certainly have shown up on sonar. I can totally see that if you didn’t know that something like them exist and you were looking at them in the water, your imagination could go pretty crazy with what you were seeing. Imagine telling your commander who thinks you’re being attacked by torpedoes, ‘No sir, those are Pyrosoma!’ You’d be put in the brig immediately. Here’s an angle that was never picked up at the time. It could be a perfectly natural phenomenon. It was a misunderstanding by people who had never heard of pyrosomes. It’s an irresistible story to bring up.

Whatever the case may be, this alleged second Gulf of Tonkin attack is undeniably one of the reasons America entered the Vietnam conflict. Was this just propaganda spun by a government eager to staunch the spread of communism? Or was it something else? What happened to those men out there? What were they picking up and even seeing zipping around out there in those dark waters? Was this all just a misunderstanding, USOs, sea creatures, or something even more mysterious still? Whatever the answers to these questions, it all had heavy weight on the history of war, and remains a curious historical oddity that has never seen any real concrete answers, leaving it to the realm of speculation.

There can be few people reading this who have not at least heard of the legendary Mothman of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, who so terrorized the town and the surrounding area between November 1966 and December 1967, and whose diabolical exploits were chronicled in the 2002 hit Hollywood movie starring Richard Gere: The Mothman Prophecies, so named after the book of the same title written by Mothman authority John Keel. A devil-like, winged monster with glowing, red eyes, Mothman’s appearance came quite literally out of nowhere and, some say, culminated in high tragedy and death. But what was the Mothman of Point Pleasant? And how did the legend begin?  To answer those questions we have to go back to the dark night of November 12, 1966, when five grave-diggers working in a cemetery in the nearby town of Clendenin were shocked to see what they described as a “brown human shape with wings” rise out of the thick, surrounding trees and soar off into the distance.

Three days later, the unearthly beast surfaced once again. It was at the highly appropriate time of the witching-hour when Roger and Linda Scarberry and Steve and Mary Mallette – two young, married couples from Point Pleasant – were passing the time away by cruising around town in the Scarberrys’ car. As they drove around the old factory, the four were puzzled to see in the shadows what looked like two red lights pointing in their direction. These were no normal lights, however. Rather, all four were shocked and horrified to discover that, in reality, the “lights” were the glowing, self-illuminating red eyes of a huge animal that, as Roger Scarberry would later recall, was “…shaped like a Mothman, but bigger, maybe six and a half or seven feet tall, with big wings folded against its back.”

Nick Redfern at Point Pleasant

Not surprisingly, they fled the area at high speed. Unfortunately for the Scarberry’s and the Mallette’s, however, the beast seemingly decided to follow them: as they sped off for the safety of Point Pleasant, the winged monster took to the skies and shadowed their vehicle’s every movement until it reached the city limits. The four raced to the sheriff’s office and told their astounding story to Deputy Millard Halstead, who later stated that: “I’ve known these kids all their lives. They’d never been in any trouble and they were really scared that night. I took them seriously.” And even though a search of the area by Halstead did not result in an answer to the mystery, the Mothman would soon return. Early on the morning of November 25, yet another remarkable encounter with the mysterious beast took place, as John Keel noted:  “Thomas Ury was driving along Route 62 just north of the TNT area when he noticed a tall, grey manlike figure standing in a field by the road. ‘Suddenly it spread a pair of wings,’ Ury said, ‘and took off straight up, like a helicopter. It veered over my convertible and began going in circles three telephone poles high.'”

Keel reported that Ury quickly hit the accelerator. Nevertheless, Ury added: “It kept flying right over my car even though I was doing about seventy-five.” Over the next few days more sightings surfaced, including that of Ruth Foster of nearby Charleston – who saw the winged monster late at night in her garden, and who said: “It was tall with big red eyes that popped out of its face. My husband is six feet one and this bird looked about the same height or a little shorter, maybe.” Needless to say, the local media had a field day with the story. Tales of what were referred to as the “Bird-Monster” hit the headlines; while both the skeptics and the police ensured that their views and opinions on the matter were widely known. Dr. Robert L. Smith, Associate Professor of Wildlife Biology in the West Virginia University’s Division of Forestry, expressed his firm opinion that Mothman was nothing stranger than a large sandhill crane. This hardly satisfied the witnesses, however. In response to Dr. Smith’s assertion, Thomas Ury said: “I’ve seen big birds, but I’ve never seen anything like this.”

As for the local police, they offered stern warnings to any and all would-be monster hunters contemplating seeking out the mysterious creature, as the Herald Dispatch newspaper noted: “Sheriff [George] Johnson said he would arrest anybody caught with a loaded gun in the area after dark [and] warned that the scores of persons searching the abandoned powerhouse in the TNT area after dark risked possible serious injury.” In the weeks and months that followed, further encounters with the bizarre beast were reported; however, they were overshadowed by a tragic event that occurred on December 15, 1967. It was on that day that Point Pleasant’s Silver Bridge (so named after its aluminum paint) that spanned the Ohio River and connected Point Pleasant to Gallipolis, Ohio, collapsed into the river, tragically claiming forty-six lives. Interestingly, after the disaster at the Silver Bridge, encounters with the Mothman largely came to a grinding halt.

And while a down-to-earth explanation most certainly circulated – namely, that a fatal flaw in a single eye-bar in a suspension chain was the chief culprit – many saw, and still continue to see to this very day, the cause as being directly linked with the ominous and brooding presence of the accursed Mothman. Finally, John Keel titled his book, The Mothman Prophecies, for a reason. Keel himself foresaw a terrible disaster enveloping the city and the result being terrible carnage and death.

Located within the Chihuahuan Desert in northeastern Presidio County of far West Texas is the dusty desert city of Marfa. Founded as a water stop in the early 1880s, Marfa sits like an oasis surrounded by sprawling desolate desert, but despite its inhospitable location it has become a sort of center for minimalist art, and is known for its galleries, artisan shops, and historical architecture. Yet the town has become famous for something else as well, and here out in the desert badlands there has long been a mysterious, possibly paranormal light show that has never really been explained.

Marfa, Texas

What have come to be known as the Marfa Lights typically appear as orbs of light about the size of a basketball, that materialize out in the desert wasteland of Mitchell Flat looking towards the Chinati Mountains, to hover, fly, and dance about in the night before vanishing. They come in many colors, including white, yellow, pink, blue, and red, and can be very bright or faint, steadily illuminated or twinkling or flickering. The lights feature a wide range of movement and behaviors, either flying in a straight line or conversely bobbing up and down, darting about erratically, doing aerial acrobatics, accelerating or decelerating, or even merging together into larger orbs or disappearing and reappearing. They sometimes move slowly, at other times hovering stationary, or on other occasions travelling at great speed, often all of the above. One local by the name of James Bunnell has said of the Marfa Lights:

You might just see mysterious orbs of light suddenly appear above desert foliage. These balls of light may remain stationary as they pulse on and off with intensity varying from dim to almost blinding brilliance. Then again, these ghostly lights may dart across the desert or perform splits and mergers. Light colors are usually yellow-orange but other hues, including green, blue and red are also seen. Marfa Mystery Lights usually fly above desert vegetation but below background mesas.

The lights also don’t seem to follow any rhyme or reason to their appearances, emerging at all times of the year and in all kinds of weather, and they have been baffling those who see them for a very long time. Although the Native Americans had long known of the lights, perhaps the first historical record of the Marfa lights by settlers was in 1883, when a rancher named Robert Reed Ellison reported seeing a group of glowing orbs as he drove his cattle through Paisano Pass. He assumed that they were Apache campfires, but no evidence of any fires or campsites could be found the following day. After that, more and more people began reporting the mysterious lights, and over the decades there would be so many sightings that during World War II there was even an air search conducted by pilots from nearby Midland Army Air Field to find the source of the lights, but they came back empty-handed and puzzled. On some occasions there have been reports that the lights seem to show some sort of intelligence, sometimes coming closer as if out of curiosity or seeming to investigate certain areas, or to react to sound, and there are even stories of people lost in the desert being led to safety by the lights. But what are they and where do they come from? That depends a lot on who you ask.

There have been numerous theories as to what the lights may be. One is that they are some sort of atmospheric phenomenon, in particular one called a Fata Morgana, which is an optical illusion that causes far away objects to appear closer and distorted through light passing through air layers of different temperatures in a steep thermal inversion, in which a defined layer of warm air is resting on a layer of much cooler air. Another idea is that these are the similarly distorted lights car headlights on the nearby Highway 67, made to look fuzzy and wavering by light scattering due to the air being unevenly heated by the ground, but this would not explain why they are most often seen well away from the highway, why they display such erratic and aberrant movements, why they have so many different appearances, or how they would have been seen so much back in 1883. Other ideas include static electricity produced by geological activity, ball lighting, illuminated gases from the natural gas and other petroleum hydrocarbons in the area, and of course alien UFOs and even ghosts, perhaps even all of the above. No one really knows for sure.

In the meantime, Marfa has embraced the lights and sought to turn them into a tourist attraction. There is a roadside parking area nine miles east of Marfa on U.S. Highway 90 specifically built for passing motorists to view the curious phenomenon, complete with a Marfa Lights viewing platform, and there is even an annual Marfa Lights Festival that features live music, food and a parade. What is going on with these lights? What are they? Are they just distant car headlights morphed into something more mysterious by atmospheric phenomena or are at least some of them something stranger? For now the Marfa lights still occasionally come out to do their dance, and no one is entirely sure of what they truly are.

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Over the decades, numerous people in the UFO field have become the subjects of government files. And no, that’s not a case of being paranoid. Dozens upon dozens of well-known people in the UFO scene really have had their lives scrutinized, and all in the name of little green men. Well, not quite. Yes, the files do exist. But, the reasons for why such dossiers have been put together might surprise you. Indeed, most of the people in the subject have been watched because of something far more inflammatory than aliens: politics. Take the most controversial Contactee of all, George Adamski. He claimed to have had meetings out in the wilds of California with peace-loving ETs. He even claimed flights in Flying Saucers. Yeah, right. And, his FBI file runs to hundreds of pages. And I’m not kidding. The FBI, however, wasn’t particularly bothered about Adamski’s claims of extraterrestrial contact. What the Bureau was concerned about , however, was his politics. In the early 1950s, in his usually packed lectures, Adamski said that communism was the way of the future and that Russia could destroy the West, if it chose to. The fact that all of this was influencing the minds of hundreds upon hundreds of gullible people was of deep concern to the FBI. Hence, the reason why the “Adamski file” was opened.

Likewise, fellow Contactee George Van Tassel had a lengthy file opened on him. It ran to 319 pages. Again, the Bureau cared not a bit about Van Tassel’s alleged alien contacts. They were very interested, though, in Van Tassel’s words on American politics, religion, the U.S. government, the economy and more. For years, literally thousands upon thousands of people headed out to Giant Rock, California to hear Van Tassel talk. And the FBI listened carefully. Now, onto George Hunt Williamson. Certainly, he was a well-known figure in the world of the Contactees and the Space Brothers. And, an FBI file was opened on the man. The reason? Nothing to do with aliens. The primary reason why Williamson had a file on him was because he was suspected of smuggling ancient artifacts over the Mexico border and into the United States. Something like that is all but guaranteed to ensure a file will be opened on you. For a while the FBI deeply pondered on whether or not they should get further involved in the pursuit of a potential crime that had occurred outside of its jurisdiction and in another country – Mexico – but finally dropped the matter; rather fortunately, it must be said, for Williamson.

Now, let’s jump forward almost half a century after the antics of the “Three Georges.” Certain people in Ufology laughed and were highly skeptical when, in 2006, I wrote a book called On the Trail of the Saucer Spies, in which I mentioned how a retired British police source told me that, back in the 1990s, the British Police Force’s Special Branch opened files on two UFO researchers in the UK, namely Matthew Williams and Robin Cole. Those same certain people should have kept their mouths firmly shut. The files on Cole and Williams (or, rather, some of the files; others still remain classified to this day) were finally officially released in 2012, showing that Special Branch was indeed watching both men, demonstrating that the data provided to me years ago was accurate. When, in 2012, the documents were declassified, the National Archives prepared the following statement concerning their contents:

“File DEFE 24/1984/1 (p294) contains a 1996 Parliamentary Question from Martin Redmond MP asking on how many occasions MI6 and GCHQ have monitored UFO investigations. This was interpreted to mean ‘have the agencies been keeping watch on UFOlogists.’ A background briefing says ‘neither agency in fact undertakes such activity, though GCHQ cannot rule out the possibility’ they had monitored ‘in other contexts individuals who have made a study of UFOs’. The MP was told the government do not comment on the intelligence and security agencies (p298). File DEFE 24/1987/1 (p262-65) reveals that in 1997 Special Branch took an interest in a UFOlogist who became obsessed with rumours of a secret UFO facility beneath RAF Rudloe Manor in Wiltshire. The base had become known as the British equivalent of the secret US military airbase ‘Area 51’ among conspiracy theorists. An internal note said ‘Special Branch…do not believe he poses a specific threat to security, but they are alert to the risk that others may use him as a conduit for their activities.'”

Well, since the summary failed to note the names of the people in question, I will. They were, of course, Cole and Williams – as I had been told during the course of writing On the Trail of the Saucer Spies. Back in 1997, Robin Cole, of Cheltenham, England – the home to GCHQ (the Government Communications Headquarters) – wrote a fascinating report on the agency’s involvement in the UFO phenomenon. And, for those who may not be aware, GCHQ is the UK equivalent of the US National Security Agency. After Cole’s report was published, he was visited by two representatives of the UK’s Special Branch. And since the pair announced their visit in advance (via a phone-call), Robin had the good sense to clandestinely and quickly set up his tape-recorder in his living-room and taped the entire conversation, much of which revolved around Special Branch’s interest in a UFO researcher and Crop Circle maker named Matthew Williams – who just happens to be the “UFOlogist who became obsessed” with RAF Rudloe Manor, as referenced by National Archives staff above. Special Branch’s concerns that both the UFO controversy and the people that investigate it could be used as tools of manipulation by hostile groups with controversial, political agendas.

Since the 1950s, files have been opened on Ufologists. On every occasion, though, UFOs were shown not to have been the primary cause for concern on the part of government agencies. But, politics, in particular, was. In all likelihood, it still is.

It was in the summer of 1947 that something crashed on the Foster Ranch, Lincoln County, New Mexico. Whatever it was, it left huge amounts of strange debris across the ranch. There was talk of strange, small bodies also having been found in the area, thrown out of the craft that exploded on impact. Within no time at all, personnel from the Roswell Army Air Field were on the scene, preventing anyone outside of the military from getting anywhere near the crash site.  Cordons were created and people were warned never to talk about what they had seen. The problem (in fact, a very big problem) for the military, though, is that the rancher who found the materials, William Brazel, had told fellow ranchers in the area, and friends, about his find before the military was informed – which meant that at least parts of the story were out there before the military’s cover-up began. That was not a good thing. There was even confusion at the Roswell Army Air Field: before orders were put into place to prevent anyone talking, the press-office at the base issued a statement saying that a flying disc (as UFOs were known back then) had been recovered and was due to be inspected.

One such statement, from Associated Press, read as follows:

“The many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday when the intelligence office of the 509^th Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force, Roswell Army Air Field, was fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc through the cooperation of one of the local ranchers and the sheriff’s office of Chavez County. The flying object landed on a ranch near Roswell sometime last week. Not having phone facilities, the rancher stored the disc until such time as he was able to contact the sheriff’s office, who in turn notified Major Jesse A. Marcel of the 509^th Bomb Group Intelligence Office. Action was immediately taken and the disc was picked up at the rancher’s home. It was inspected at the Roswell Army Air Field and subsequently loaned by Major Marcel to higher headquarters.”

The military quickly knocked that statement down, claiming that what had been recovered was nothing stranger than a weather-balloon. As for the bodies, the Air Force would not even address that matter until 1997, when they claimed that the bodies were, in fact, crash-test dummies used in high-altitude parachute experiments. It was also in the nineties that the Air Force changed its mind again on what came down on William Braazel’s ranch. It was no longer a weather-balloon, but a Mogul balloon, designed to monitor for Soviet atomic bomb tests. In 1993, all of this chopping and changing caught the attention of the late Steven Schiff, at the time the Congressman of New Mexico – the state in which the Roswell event occurred. Far from happy by what he saw as some kind of cover-up, Schiff approached the Government Accountability Office (at the time, it was known as the General Accounting Office) and asked them to look into the Roswell affair and see what might be found. The GAO was enthused about the idea of looking into Roswell. It was, however, not so much what the GAO found that intrigued them, but what they couldn’t find.

As the GAO dug deeper and deeper, they learned to their amazement and concern that every single outgoing message from the old Roswell Army Air Field, from 1945 to 1951, could not be located. The files were gone. All of them. The GAO approached the Air Force and the National Archives for answers. There were no answers. Only puzzles. The National Archives checked their files: no luck. The Air Force came up blank, too. Rumors began to surface that when Steven Schiff approached the GAO in 1993, someone who was sitting on the Roswell story quickly realized that the truth of the 1947 incident was now in danger of being compromised, so a decision was quickly taken to have the original papers – wherever they were stored – destroyed. There is a very good reason for that: the GAO is an extremely powerful office of the U.S. Government and certainly had the power and ability to demand access to just about anything it wanted access to. Shredding the old Roswell Army Air Field papers may have been the only way to have ensured that the GAO didn’t get what it and Congressman Schiff wanted. It was just another layer of conspiracy in the quest to understand what really happened at Roswell. The outcome: the GAO concluded the files had been destroyed. Congressman Schiff was irate. The cover-up remained in place. It still does.

It was in the summer of 1947 that something crashed on the Foster Ranch, Lincoln County, New Mexico. Whatever it was, it left huge amounts of strange debris across the ranch. There was talk of strange, small bodies also having been found in the area, thrown out of the craft that exploded on impact. Within no time at all, personnel from the Roswell Army Air Field were on the scene, preventing anyone outside of the military from getting anywhere near the crash site.  Cordons were created and people were warned never to talk about what they had seen. The problem (in fact, a very big problem) for the military, though, is that the rancher who found the materials, William Brazel, had told fellow ranchers in the area, and friends, about his find before the military was informed – which meant that at least parts of the story were out there before the military’s cover-up began. That was not a good thing. There was even confusion at the Roswell Army Air Field: before orders were put into place to prevent anyone talking, the press-office at the base issued a statement saying that a flying disc (as UFOs were known back then) had been recovered and was due to be inspected.

One such statement, from Associated Press, read as follows:

“The many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday when the intelligence office of the 509^th Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force, Roswell Army Air Field, was fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc through the cooperation of one of the local ranchers and the sheriff’s office of Chavez County. The flying object landed on a ranch near Roswell sometime last week. Not having phone facilities, the rancher stored the disc until such time as he was able to contact the sheriff’s office, who in turn notified Major Jesse A. Marcel of the 509^th Bomb Group Intelligence Office. Action was immediately taken and the disc was picked up at the rancher’s home. It was inspected at the Roswell Army Air Field and subsequently loaned by Major Marcel to higher headquarters.”

The military quickly knocked that statement down, claiming that what had been recovered was nothing stranger than a weather-balloon. As for the bodies, the Air Force would not even address that matter until 1997, when they claimed that the bodies were, in fact, crash-test dummies used in high-altitude parachute experiments. It was also in the nineties that the Air Force changed its mind again on what came down on William Braazel’s ranch. It was no longer a weather-balloon, but a Mogul balloon, designed to monitor for Soviet atomic bomb tests. In 1993, all of this chopping and changing caught the attention of the late Steven Schiff, at the time the Congressman of New Mexico – the state in which the Roswell event occurred. Far from happy by what he saw as some kind of cover-up, Schiff approached the Government Accountability Office (at the time, it was known as the General Accounting Office) and asked them to look into the Roswell affair and see what might be found. The GAO was enthused about the idea of looking into Roswell. It was, however, not so much what the GAO found that intrigued them, but what they couldn’t find.

As the GAO dug deeper and deeper, they learned to their amazement and concern that every single outgoing message from the old Roswell Army Air Field, from 1945 to 1951, could not be located. The files were gone. All of them. The GAO approached the Air Force and the National Archives for answers. There were no answers. Only puzzles. The National Archives checked their files: no luck. The Air Force came up blank, too. Rumors began to surface that when Steven Schiff approached the GAO in 1993, someone who was sitting on the Roswell story quickly realized that the truth of the 1947 incident was now in danger of being compromised, so a decision was quickly taken to have the original papers – wherever they were stored – destroyed. There is a very good reason for that: the GAO is an extremely powerful office of the U.S. Government and certainly had the power and ability to demand access to just about anything it wanted access to. Shredding the old Roswell Army Air Field papers may have been the only way to have ensured that the GAO didn’t get what it and Congressman Schiff wanted. It was just another layer of conspiracy in the quest to understand what really happened at Roswell. The outcome: the GAO concluded the files had been destroyed. Congressman Schiff was irate. The cover-up remained in place. It still does.

If one follows the waters of Loch Ness as they flow into River Ness, they next move into Beauly Firth (an inlet), then Moray Firth before entering the North Sea. Along the way, they pass the ancient fishing town and current seaside resort of Nairn. While it doesn’t have a loch monster, Nairn has a monstrosity of its own that has been plaguing residents for decades without an explanation or resolution – a mysterious hum similar to those plaguing people in other towns around the world. The Nairn Hum is back in the news again – will this time be any different or are Nairners doomed to continue to suffer from a monster that doesn’t help tourism or their nerves at all?

“It’s an absolute nightmare. We are getting tortured in our own house. It’s a low frequency pulsing noise and it’s incessant. My husband thinks it could come from an electricity substation and it’s also been suggested it could be coming from as far away as Invergordon. We just don’t know. One of our neighbours a couple of fields away hears a droning pulsating noise all the time too. We can’t even go into our caravan at the bottom of the garden because of the noise.”

Blan Bremner and her husband Robert told The Inverness Courier this past week about the “incessant” droning Nairn hum which tortures and puzzles them and their neighbors. Robert claims it has given the couple headaches and “I have nose bleeds,” yet the hum has not gone away nor been explained since they first reported it, according to an archived article in the Scottish Daily Mail in 2018.

“We started hearing the noise on February 9 when we moved into our home. Then when our new chimney was put up it seemed to act like an amplifier for the noise. It’s everywhere around Ardersier and Nairn.”

For decades, some residents of Largs on the Firth of Clyde have reported being plagued by a low, unexplained droning sound which has been dubbed the "Largs Hum".

PIC: Dave Souza/Wikipedia/Creative Commons.

That article reports that environmental health officials were called and they were unable to link the noise to any physical cause like the local airport, electricity substations, ferries or wind farms. A Highland Council spokesperson said they’ve received only one report and an inspector heard nothing. However, the hum report sounds similar to many in Largs, North Ayrshire – another seaside town about 170 miles south – which date back to the 1980s and have never been explained to frustrated residents.

“As a member for these areas I have investigated fully, but frankly it remains a mystery. I can only surmise that it must be something to do with recent developments in the area. I have visited homes myself and these are very real complaints. I’ve heard it for myself. As a council we have carried out tests by our environmental health department but we can’t pin down where it’s coming from. I’ve done everything I can. We’ve had our staff at the council and SEPA (Scottish Environment Protection Agency) investigating, but I just don’t know how some of these poor souls live with this. You can’t avoid the noise and it’s having a terrible impact on their wellbeing.”

That frustration is felt by Culloden and Ardersier councillor Glynis Campbell-Sinclair, who represents Nairn. She tells The Inverness Courier that factory expansions and new sewer works have been ruled out, and she’s obviously at a loss to comfort or help her constituents.

Where’s Saint Ninian – patron of Nairn?

If it’s not physical, is the Nairn hum something paranormal – perhaps linked to its close proximity to Loch Ness, where paranormal activities have been proposed to explain the mysterious appearances and disappearances of its famous monster?

Blan and Robert Bremner and their neighbors probably don’t care what it is – even if it’s a paranormal cause that could help local tourism – they just want the Nairn hum gone.

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