On the night of September 12, 1952, something terrifying descended upon the small, West Virginian town of Flatwoods. Precisely what it was remains very much a mystery to this day. All that can really be said for sure is that it was hideous, fear-inducing and downright monstrous. It has, quite appropriately, become known as the Flatwoods Monster. Situated in Braxton County and dominated by a cool, picturesque, forested landscape, Flatwoods is a distinctly small town – that much is apparent from the fact that, today, its population is less than four hundred. Back in 1952, though, it was even less than that. On the night in question, however, the people of the town found themselves briefly added to by one visitor from…well…no-one really knows from where. It all began just as the sun was setting on what was a warm, still, September evening. A group of boys from Flatwoods were playing football in the town’s schoolyard when they were frozen to the spot by the sight of a brightly lit, fiery object that shot overhead, provoking amazement and wonder in the process. All that the boys could be sure of was that the object appeared to be either egg-shaped or circular. Its color fluctuated from orange to a fiery red.

As the stunned children watched in awe, they saw the object begin to descend – and at a high rate of speed, no less – and then appear to come down on one of Flatwood’s largest hilltops. Not surprisingly, being kids, they saw this as a big adventure looming large. The result: they, with a woman named Kathleen May and a recent U.S. Army recruit, Eugene Lemon, headed off for the scene of all the action. It wasn’t long before the group reached the hill in question – and with nightfall rapidly closing in. The first thing the group noticed, as they reached the darkened peak, was something brightly lit within the trees. What it was, no-one had a clue. But, it clearly wasn’t the lights of a farmhouse, truck, or car. Suddenly, the air was filled with a sickening odor – not unlike that of devilish brimstone. That was not a good sign. To their credit, however, they pushed on, determined to figure out the true nature of the source behind the lights. They soon found out: as the air became filled with a strange, sizzling sound, nothing less than a pair of self-illuminated red eyes could be seen getting ever closer. Kathleen May had the presence of mind to bring a flashlight with her and she quickly focused it on the eyes. In doing so, she also lit up the abominable creature that possessed those fiery eyes.

Looming before the now-terrified band of intrepid souls was an approximately ten-feet-tall, floating monster. It appeared to be humanoid in shape and had something almost like a large, black hood-like piece behind its head – that gave the entire thing an “Ace of Spades”-type appearance. Oddly, its lower half was ice-cream cone-shaped and had wires and cables running from it. This issue of the cone-shaped lower portion led flying saucer sleuths to later suggest the monster my actually have been encased within some kind of remotely piloted vehicle. As the creature then turned its attention to the group, and wildly fired laser-like beams from its eyes, the brave band was suddenly brave no more. They didn’t wait to see what might happen next. One and all fled, screaming – possibly for their lives. Mrs. May breathlessly shouted to the boys to follow her to her home, which they all did. On arrival, and possibly as a result of exposure to the noxious odor that hung around the hill, several of the boys became violently ill, feeling nauseous and even outright vomiting.

Kathleen May quickly called the local police, who, rather intriguingly, were busy responding to reports of what was described as an “airplane crash” somewhere in the area. It turns out that no such crashed aircraft was ever found – something that suggests the “airplane” and the brightly lit UFO that descended upon the high hill that night were, almost certainly, one and the very same. As a result of the fact that Flatwoods was, and still is, a very small town, word soon got out about what had happened. The local media was quickly on the scene, and even the U.S. Air Force sat up and took careful notice. Despite intense investigations by the press and the military, the mystery of the Flatwoods Monster was never solved to the satisfaction of everyone: the creature was long gone by the time anyone else was on the scene. It is, however, decidedly interesting to note that Flatwoods is only around 125 miles from the town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, where, from 1966 to 1967, yet another red-eyed monster was seen. Its famous name is, of course, Mothman.

Months after my Roswell-themed-book, Body Snatchers in the Desert, was published in June 2005, I received an out-of-the-blue email from a well-respected Australian UFO researcher, Keith Basterfield. As Keith notes of himself: “I have been interested in the subject of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) since the 1960’s. Over the years I have held a variety of roles in numerous Australian state, national, and international organizations, studying the phenomena. My work has appeared in various state, national and international newsletters, magazine and journals. Between 2003 and 2008 I was involved in a search for Australian government documents relating to UAP with the Adelaide based AURA network.” Keith had a fascinating account to relate that dovetailed very closely with the data given to me by Al Barker, Bill Salter, the Black Widow, and the Colonel – four people who I interviewed for my 2005 book, Body Snatchers in the Desert. Notably, the information was provided to Keith well before Body Snatchers in the Desert was published and when the existence of the book – and the story it told – was still firmly under wraps in the offices of Simon & Schuster in New York. It was specifically after my book was published that Keith realized the data given to him some time earlier was eerily similar to that which I had uncovered. He wasted no time in getting in touch with me. I listened carefully to what Keith had to say.

Tuesday, January 11, 2005, Keith told me, was the date on which he received a story just about as shocking and controversial as the ones I had uncovered between 2001 and 2003. On the day in question, Keith was interviewed on Australia’s ABC 891AM radio station. The subject was the work of the Adelaide-based Australian UFO Research Association, specifically in relation to the issue of so-called “UFO disclosure.” Although Keith did not know it at the time, while he was taking part in the show, a caller phoned in, left his name and number, and asked for Keith to get in touch. He did precisely that. It was later in the day that Keith made the call, in which his source somewhat hesitantly revealed snippets of a dark and dirty secret concerning certain things that went down – as in quite literally down – in the New Mexico desert in the summer of 1947. We’re talking about Roswell. Such was the potential dangerous nature of the information, Keith felt it was much wiser for the pair to meet up in-person, rather than discuss such matters over the phone. Keith was wise to follow his instincts; after all, one never knows who might be listening in.

When Keith related the account to me, he preferred not to use the informant’s name and gave him an alias instead: Martin. Echoing this, Martin said to me that if I ever told his story, his name should never be revealed. It should be noted, however, that both Keith and I know Martin’s real name. As Keith told me, he met Martin at the latter’s home in Adelaide on January 15, 2005 – roughly six months before Body Snatchers in the Desert hit the bookshelves. The story went as follows: Martin’s father – a Brit – had worked for a certain arm of British intelligence decades before Keith got the story. I would later learn that the agency was specifically MI5, which is the U.K.’s equivalent of the United States’ FBI. Martin’s father was sitting upon a secret of epic and grim proportions – one which he had already been silently keeping under wraps for years. Such were Martin’s concerns and worries about sharing the story with Keith, he insisted that the information not be revealed to anyone – at all – without his, Martin’s, specific permission. Or, until after Martin’s death; whichever came first. Keith agreed to the terms and sat back and listened as the dark and shocking tale came tumbling out.

Keith revealed that at the time Martin chose to share the secrets of his father, Martin’s health was far from good. He was seriously ill – with a heart condition. It was possible that Martin was not long for this world, although he was not quite on his deathbed, yet. The upshot was that Martin wanted to reveal to someone the story that his father had told him, while there was still time. Keith agreed to listen and also agreed not to place Martin’s real, full name into the public domain. According to Martin, he was told by his father of the truth of Roswell way back in 1959 – when Martin was only twelve years old. Such were his father’s concerns about imparting what he knew, he asked young Martin never to reveal the story until he was either very old or on his deathbed. Given his serious heart problems that were in evidence in 2005, Martin thought it was a case of possibly now or never – hence his decision to share what he knew with Keith.

Martin’s father had gotten all of the information on Roswell from a source working in the U.S. Intelligence community – who, exactly, we still don’t know. Martin’s father explained that the events which occurred out on the wilds of the Foster Ranch, Lincoln County, New Mexico in July 1947 were born out of early, and highly secret, experiments that had a bearing on the formative years of what would ultimately become the U.S. space program. Keith, in a July 2011 online article, revealed what else Martin chose to share with him: “The Americans were working on getting into space. Their biggest concern was getting back to Earth and landing without killing the people inside the space vehicle. Landing in water was not considered, but a ground landing was the order of the day. The Americans were experimenting with craft they dropped from ‘aircraft’ flying in the stratosphere. Also, gigantic balloons were being flown in the stratosphere to drop craft fitted with retrorockets and a drogue chute. The retrorocket was fitted with an altimeter to fire them close to the ground. Lots of UFO sightings were of these craft. The U.S. released bogus flying saucer sightings and later discredited them.”

Martin recalled – to both Keith and I – how his father had informed him of a series of high-altitude experiments in the United States, in 1947, involving monkeys and pigs, specifically in connection with the prototype aircraft / balloon flights. On this particular occasion, however – the one that spawned the ever-enduring legend of Roswell’s crashed UFO – it was decided that a human crew was finally needed. Keith was told that “Prisoners could volunteer for dangerous missions in return for early release but were not used in these experiments.” This issue of prisoners used in experiments, specifically in relation to radical aircraft-based technology, is not a matter of doubt or a tale born out of folklore or conspiracy-theorizing. In 1948, staff of the Nuclear Energy for Propulsion of Aircraft (NEPA) program practically salivated at the idea of using prisoners in its aircraft-related trials. Official, now-declassified, records on this issue state: “The Committee is not in a position to make recommendations as to where these tests can be conducted other than that they should be carried out at some federal, state, or Armed Services prison, where life prisoners are incarcerated and where arrangements can be made with the prison authorities to cooperate in the experiment.  The selection of the prison is a matter for top military consideration. Continued cooperation of the prison staff and prisoners for a matter of many years will be required [italics mine].”

That somewhat mirrored the words of my own informants in my 2005 book – namely, that prisoners were secretly offered reduced sentences if they were willing to engage in dicey and potentially missions for the military. On this occasion, however, it was not prisoners who were on-board the ultimately ill-fated craft, but physically and mentally handicapped people. As Keith recalled: “Two to three live people were needed. The government got people with hydrocephalus – water on the brain – from a facility.” From the interview with Martin, both Keith and I recalled much more too on the matter of the human guinea-pigs. Keith said that the people roped in had “big heads, tiny bodies, jaundiced color – one even had no eyes. They put these people in the craft – either the balloon ruptured early or blew off course and came down. Retrorockets went off and set fire to it. It landed and a farmer / rancher saw it and reported it.” That “farmer / rancher,” of course, was Mack Brazel; the man who let the Roswell cat out of the bag. Thus was born the legend of the “Roswell ‘UFO’ Crash” of 1947.

Today, and for the last week, as you will have seen, I’ve been digging further into the angle of Roswell having nothing to do with aliens, but everything to do with shocking tests on people. And here’s a bit more of the story. The late Leonard Stringfield, who passed away in 1994, was a UFO researcher who firmly believed that, since the 1940s, the U.S.  Government had secretly recovered a number of crashed UFOs and dead aliens, and which were stored and preserved a variety of military bases across the country – many at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. Stringfield, too, however, was given a number of accounts relative to the issue of secret and shocking human experimentation on handicapped people; experimentation that was tied in with the Roswell affair.  One of those stories came to Stringfield from a highly controversial figure in Ufology. His name: Timothy Cooper, a resident of Big Bear Lake, California and someone who, it has often been said, exited the field of UFO research years ago. Not quite so. Far more than a few people in Ufology have very little time for Cooper, suspecting that many of the documents he supplied to the UFO community in the mid-1990s were bogus, rather than the highly classified papers that they were purported to be. They were bogus; there is no doubt about that. But, Cooper himself was not the forger. It’s the “pre-documents” era we have to take a look at. It paints a very different picture of Cooper to that which many ufologists have accepted.

Tim Cooper said to Stringfield in 1990 that he had numerous sources of the old-timer kind – some of who assured Cooper that, yes, aliens really did crash outside of Roswell in the summer of 1947. Others, however, quietly hinted to Cooper that the truth was far more controversial: a scenario involving human guinea-pigs – Japanese and handicapped individuals – and the creation of UFO-themed disinformation programs and faked, pro-UFO documents to hide the down-to-earth truth of the Roswell enigma. Also in 1990, Cooper supplied Stringfield one specific story which Stringfield decided to firmly keep under wraps until the following year, 1991, when he published it in a lengthy report on tales of crashed and secretly retrieved alien spacecraft. The story concerned a woman who Cooper first crossed paths with in 1989. He described her only as a nurse, and gave her the pseudonym of “Mary.” Decades ago, Cooper’s informant allegedly worked at what is, today, the New Mexico-based Los Alamos National Laboratory.

In Cooper’s own words of 1990, and which Stringfield published: “She casually mentioned to me over coffee that ‘bodies’ were being flown to Los Alamos periodically from late 1945 to sometime in 1947. I asked her if she had seen these ‘bodies’ and she said no, but others had. I asked her where these ‘bodies’ were coming from. She said she did not know but it was rumored that they were human experiments for biological and nuclear medicine research. She thought they may have come from Japan after the war [italics mine]. I asked her why she thought that. She said that they were small bodies with deformed heads and limbs. The eyes were abnormally big, she was told. She did have some view of them in the morgue very briefly for a few minutes at some distance. I asked her why she was allowed to be present at the autopsies. She told me that she was asked to assist in the preparation and cleanup. I asked her again about the bodies. She said they were being flown in on special transport planes equipped with refrigerator units to keep the bodies from decomposing. The flesh was badly burned and charred. There was no hair on the heads and had a grayish-yellow color. That’s all she knew.”

It has to be said this is the part of Ufology that so many people in the UFO scene prefer to ignore. The reason: because it threatens their belief systems when it comes to the issue of what did or did not happen outside of Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. Some may dismiss all of this (or choose to forget about it), but the fact is there are so many threads of this type that push things down a “secret experiments” angle. Don’t close your eyes and ignore it all. Instead, follow the story and dig into it even more – as I have done – and you may well find something that might shock you, but that deserves to be shared with us all. Before, that is, the whole thing is hidden from us to such a degree that we will never know the truth.

Over the last few days I’ve written articles on how and why the Roswell affair of July 1947 had nothing to do with aliens, but everything to do with secret experiments that involved huge balloon arrays, some of which were created by the U.S. military and others that were based on Japanese documents captured at the end of the Second World War. At this stage in the story, I am going to draw your attention to the fact that J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI noted a parallel between the investigation of UFOs in the summer of 1947 and the Japanese balloon wave of a few years earlier, when the Second World War was still raging. The FBI document quoted from below – which surfaced thanks to Freedom of Information legislation – shows that in the summer 1947 there was a mindset that suggested “disk” sightings were not unlike the Japanese Fugo balloon sightings and investigations of a couple of years earlier – at least, in terms of how they should be investigated. 

According to the FBI:

“It is felt that the situation regarding these flying saucers and flying disks is very similar to the situation which was previously encountered by the Bureau during the past war in handling complaints arising out of the sightings of Japanese balloons. You will recall that at the inception of these complaints the Bureau conducted considerable investigation and located numerous balloons as a cooperative measure for the Army then informed that these were military weapons and that they would take over the handling of these completely. This they did and in an extremely short time issued a big press release as to the splendid work of the Army in locating these Japanese balloons. From the information available thus far it does not appear that these disks should be treated other than as a military weapon. Certainly the Bureau has no way to determine what experiments the Army and Navy are conducting and whether such might be arising out of experiments being conducted by them, nor do we have any way of determining how far the Russians have progressed in certain experiments and whether such might be the results of experiments by the Russian Army.”

FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, the keeper of all secrets

As this memo reveals, the FBI was making certain investigative parallels between the Fugo balloons of the Second World War and the flying saucers of 1947. It is most eye-opening that the FBI also noted: “…the Bureau has no way to determine what experiments the Army and Navy are conducting and whether such might be arising out of experiments being conducted by them…” This strongly suggests there was a fair degree of belief, or suspicion, within the FBI that what was being seen was not from some faraway star-system, but from right here. On Earth. That the FBI also stated, “From the information available thus far it does not appear that these disks should be treated other than as a military weapon,” also speaks volumes about where the collective mind of the FBI was then-currently at. In view of what we have seen so far, we can make a good case that in the summer of 1947, the FBI knew – or at least strongly suspected – that UFOs were the product of Uncle Sam. Now, let’s take a look at a certain, central figure in the Roswell mystery who also had a link to…wartime Japanese balloons.

Master Sergeant Lewis “Bill” Rickett – of the Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC) – was someone who many Roswell investigators believe knew exactly what happened on the Foster Ranch in July 1947. At the time of the mysterious event, Rickett was the Non-Commissioned Officer-in-Charge at the Roswell Army Air Field. Years after the event, Rickett admitted to UFO researchers his presence at the ranch site – along with Sheridan Cavitt, also of the CIC – on July 8. Rickett also shared a few other snippets of data, when the mood took him. For the most part, though, he remained very tight-lipped – even cagey at times – on exactly what took place. Rickett did, however, admit that approximately two months after the crash on the Foster Ranch took place, he liaised on the top secret matter with one Dr. Lincoln LaPaz. At the time, he was the Director of the University of New Mexico’s Institute of Meteoritics. He and LaPaz undertook a secret assignment to try and figure out “the speed and trajectory” of the craft that slammed into the heart of Lincoln County. Reportedly, the pair found a “touchdown” location just a few miles from the ranch, as well as a patch of ground that had been exposed to a significant amount of heat. According to Rickett, the object that hurtled to the ground on the ranch was somewhat bat-winged, but certainly not what anyone would call a flying saucer – which is an important point, given that all the talk at the time was of saucers and disks.

There are good indications that Rickett knew a great deal about the Roswell bodies, too. UFO investigator Stan Friedman had the opportunity to speak with Rickett back in the 1980s. It was an absolute cloak-and-dagger-like conversation that was noted not so much for what Rickett did say, but for what he didn’t say. Friedman recalled: “When I mentioned bodies, Rickett clearly reacted and indicated that this was an area he couldn’t talk about. He indicated there were different levels of security about this work; that a directive had come down placing this at a high level. He went on to say that certain subjects were discussed only in rooms that couldn’t be bugged.” Clearly, Rickett was a concerned man – as he certainly should have been. In other words, decades after the mystifying incident, Rickett was still fearful of saying too much to too many – and particularly so on the matter of the bodies. Nevertheless, it may have been a result of opening his mouth just one too many times that finally led Rickett to get what we might call a friendly warning. You know the sort: they are actually anything but friendly. From whom? From Sheridan Cavitt, formerly of the Counter-Intelligence Corps; the man who assured the U.S. Air Force in the 1990s that nothing stranger than a weather-balloon was the cause of all the sensational press-coverage way back when.

One particularly important fact that many Roswell researchers have either not realized or have carefully avoided highlighting, in case – shock, horror – it dares to support my conclusions, is Dr. Lincoln LaPaz’s connection to the issue of Japan’s Fugo balloons. In 1945, the University of New Mexico issued a press-release titled “New Mexican Had Lookout Job For ‘Japanese Germs.'” It revealed a certain, previously secret, aspect of LaPaz’s life, and it reads as follows: “Dr. Lincoln LaPaz of the University of New Mexico was in the thick of the fight against Japanese plans to send disease germs into America by balloon, said President J.P Wernette of the University today. Commenting on stories from the Navy in Washington revealing that use of germs and viruses in the Jap balloon-barrage was an enemy project as the war came to an end, Dr. Wernette said that Dr. LaPaz, head of the department of mathematics and the University’s Institute of Meteoritics, was with the government’s secret anti-balloon project during the war.”

University staff continued: “‘If the war had not ended when it did, in the opening stages of a full-scale balloon offensive which probably would have taken place between October 1945, and now, when the velocity of the west wind at high altitude is greatest, this country would have had unpleasant experiences,’ Dr. LaPaz said today. ‘People most concerned were trained scientists, and stockmen, too, he said. Anthrax spores could have been sent over in the paper balloons in great numbers, and Manchurian sheep pox could have easily struck the hooved animals of this country because the disease has not been found here and there would be no natural immunity, Dr. LaPaz went on.” LaPaz was quoted as saying: “But the Japanese, using radio devices to locate their balloons on the flight to this country, apparently did not realize that we could pick up the signals an find the balloons before they reached the mainland.”

A similar press release issued by the University of New Mexico – also in 1945 – details further information on LaPaz’s Fugo-themed work for the U.S. military: “Observers, watching for meteors, thought they had something when they saw some brilliant lights in the sky from February to May, 1945. And they did, said Dr. Lincoln LaPaz, mathematics department head at the University of New Mexico and director of its Institute of Meteoritics, today. The displays were actually made by Japanese balloons, Dr. LaPaz said, revealing the history of a scientific study of meteors which went on before and during the time that Dr. LaPaz was busy in secret government work of studying and combating the balloon offensive. Nevertheless, a few months later, on Nov. 29, 1945, a great meteorite fell slowly across northern California and Nevada, and observers mistook it for everything from a jet plane to a Hollywood publicity stunt. Members of the Society for Research on Meteorites and the American Meteor Society, thought at first that it was a new type [of] Japanese balloon bomb.”

If, as the interviewees in my The Roswell UFO Conspiracy book asserted, the key event that led to the legend of the UFO crash at Roswell involved a “next-generation of Fugo” balloon of huge proportions that was responsible for launching an experimental aircraft that catastrophically crashed, then who better to enlist into the study of how and why the experiment failed than an expert on those very same balloons? Namely, Dr. Lincoln LaPaz.

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

In the 21st century, we get a lot of our Earth political news on late night talk shows, and now we can get our space news there as well. Renowned physicist, string theorist and popular TV scientist Michio Kaku has been making the rounds lately talking about the James Webb Space Telescope, which is scheduled to be launched in the fall of 2021. Like a good scientist, he’s in favor of using new and better technology, but he’s also cautious about how some of his colleagues will use this particular tool for exploring the cosmos.

He told The Guardian this week:

“Soon we’ll have the Webb telescope up in orbit and we’ll have thousands of planets to look at, and that’s why I think the chances are quite high that we may make contact with an alien civilization. There are some colleagues of mine that believe we should reach out to them. I think that’s a terrible idea. We all know what happened to Montezuma when he met Cortés in Mexico so many hundreds of years ago.”

Montezuma

For those who only know of Montezuma from the bad joke about gastric problems, Moctezuma II (Montezuma) welcomed the alien known as conquistador Hernán Cortés to the Aztec empire, and both he and the empire died as a result. Montezuma reached out in peace, just as many of our SETI messages say “We come in peace,” and Kaku thinks this is a bad idea too because it implies we’re unarmed and could convince extraterrestrials to “come and rule us.” Or, as he said in 2018, come and “develop” our planet – building their own structures, planting their own plants and installing their own government. Gee, that’s never happened on Earth, has it?

“To be honest, I’ve get emails from people that say: ‘You’re wrong professor, the aliens are already here. They’ve been in the flying saucers, they have been kidnapped.”

Kaku followed up his Guardian interview with an appearance on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.” He anticipated and addressed the blowback from many people who believe UFOs are alien spaceships and Earth is already populated with extraterrestrials, both camouflaged and out in the open, abducting humans but returning them seemingly unharmed. How come they haven’t conquistadored us like Cortés?

“I tell them the next time you are kidnapped by an alien flying saucer, for God’s sake, steal something. I don’t care whether it’s a pen or a chip, steal something! Because there is no law against stealing from an extraterrestrial civilization.”

What was I supposed to do?

Obviously, Michio Kaku is a scientist who values facts and proofs over speculations. Of course, stealing a writing quill from Cortés wouldn’t have saved Montezuma – he still had hundreds of troops, dreams of gold, superior weapons and infectious diseases. Kaku says he hopes aliens are friendly but let’s let them show it – don’t reveal our cards to them right up front.

Is he right? There are many who believe we’ve already alerted alien civilizations we’re here and not to bright by our industrial pollution and growing numbers of satellites doing nothing but orbiting – at least from their perspective.

And the biggest sign to aliens we’re not to bright and ready for conquest? We get our science knowledge from late night talk shows.

History is full of odd and eccentric individuals. Countless people have managed to make their mark with their odd behavior, abilities, claims, and achievements, very often scurrying off into the mists of time to leave behind more questions than answers, their stories cut short and incomplete. One such strange individual went out into a desert in South America, built a UFO landing pad, and then vanished off the face of the earth to take any answers to his bizarreness with him to never be known.

Not known is much about the earlier life of the man named Werner Jaisli, and he seems to have been pretty much a nobody until one day in 2008, when he had a life-changing experience. Jaisli had travelled from his native Switzerland to the country of Argentina, where he seems to have been living at the time in the town of Forte Alto. On the evening of November 24, 2008, he was hanging out with his neighbor Luis when the power suddenly cut out and the night fell completely silent. He would say of what happened next:

I was there, at Forte Alto, at midnight on November 24, 2008. Suddenly, everything was silent and the power was cut off. At that moment, two luminous objects advanced about 200 meters above the Calchaquí River. They were solid, circular, and had the color of burnished metal. They stood about 100 meters above our heads and projected a powerful beam of light. The strange thing is that this extraordinary light did not affect our vision at all. At that moment, something began to boil through my brain: it was an order.

This order was telepathically beamed into his head loudly and clearly, nearly seared into him, and it told him to build a landing and launching pad for their spaceships, directing him to a remote area of desert near Cachi, a village in the Argentinian province of Salta. This telepathic message was so strong and compelling that Werner went about purchasing a plot of land in Salta, where he got to work building the vision that had been given to him by the aliens. It was to be a massive, sprawling construction he called the “Ovniport,” and over the next several years he would tirelessly and obsessively construct a huge, a 36-pointed star with a diameter of 160 feet, as well as a smaller 12-point star in the center and others around it, all of it laboriously handmade by himself out of piles of white and brown rocks. As this was going on, Werner became quite the sight wandering around the area wearing Druid robes and sporting a large, bushy beard. When it was completed in 2012, the Ovniport was an undeniably impressive feat which could clearly be seen from the air, and before long it was attracting quite a lot of attention from both locals and visitors alike.

The Ovniport

When news got out about this bizarre UFO landing pad out in the desert, it became a minor sensation, with people flocking in from all over the world to see it. Many of the UFO enthusiasts who came here also reported that there were several UFO sightings made in the area after the construction of the Ovniport, making it quite a mysterious place, indeed. Then, just as his fame was growing, Werner Jaisli just suddenly vanished without a trace. He didn’t tell his neighbor Luis, made no mention of travelling to any of his few friends, he just disappeared into thin air. Authorities searched for him but his house remained untouched, with all of his belongings still there and no hint as to where he could have possibly gone, which started rumors that perhaps he had joined his alien friends and been taken away aboard their spacecraft. More likely is that he simply went back to Switzerland, or that he was worried about the law and fled. It turns out that in 2011 he had a run-in with police when he was arrested for stealing wallets from tourists, so perhaps he was feeling the heat. One person claimed that he had mentioned going to Bolivia on the run, but this could not be confirmed. No one has seen Werner since, and his whereabouts are unknown.

The Ovniport he built is still there, and continues to be a tourist attraction in this remote, desolate area with not much else to see. Why did he toil away in the hot sun building this thing? Was this really due to messages from aliens, or was he just a derailed individual with a strange obsession? Why did he suddenly leave and where did he go? Did he go off with aliens or is he sitting around somewhere having a good laugh about it all? We will probably never know for sure.

The UFO phenomenon is one that goes deep, and extends past what many might at first think. Many cultures around the world have their own legends and tales that feature something that could be seen as UFOs today, no matter whether the original people who told these stories knew what to call them or not. They have variously been attributed to gods, spirits, and other assorted entities, and the main takeaway is that this is a phenomenon that has been taking place in one form or other across cultures and geographical boundaries for a very long time. Native Americans also have their own stories of what in modern lingo would be aliens and UFOs, and even their own story of a crashed alien spacecraft.

One very interesting voice in the UFO field is the author, researcher, and Professor Emeritus at Montana State University, Dr. Ardy Sixkiller Clarke. Coming from Cherokee and Chocktaw heritage, she has been very active in working with the Native American community, raising awareness of their plight, and also writing on their experiences with the UFO and alien phenomena, a point of view that is rarely covered in the field. She has made much mention of the spiritual connection these people give to the phenomena, that UFOs and aliens are just as much a part of the spiritual realm as anything physical, and with some tribes even believing that their souls came from out in space. In an interview with the Skeptiko podcast she mentions of this connection:

It depends on the tribal group, and it’s difficult for me to say, as a general rule, there is this spiritual connection. But there definitely is with some of the tribes. There’s no question about it. Some of the tribes actually talk about the trip across the Milky Way. That when you die you cross the path of the Milky Way. You’ve got a common theme there that the cosmos plays so much a part in afterlife and death and the ability of the deceased that they never really die. They just move on into another dimension and that they can come back and communicate with the living.

She also writes much of what she calls the “Star People,” or ancient entities that came from the skies in their vessels to teach the Native people, and which are present in the lore and legends of many tribes, with some old tales even claiming that they interbred with them. These are not necessarily described as aliens from another world, exactly, but rather as spirits or gods descending from another spiritual realm. She has covered this theory in her book Encounters With Star People: Untold Stories of American Indians, and in some cases it seems that these are far from myth, as there have been tales of meeting these Star People right up to the present. One such tale covered in her book is that of a tribal elder known only as Harrison, a member of one of the Northern Plains tribes and who has quite the bizarre story to tell.

His grandfather took him some distance away, where there was a large gouge or crater in the earth, as if something very big had come to smash into the field. At the bottom of this crater was a metallic craft of some kind, with what appeared to be a doorway hanging open and damaged on the side. The two of them stood there staring for some time before the grandfather decided to go look inside, where he apparently found several entities that were described as being 8 feet tall and wearing green suits, with translucent skin and eyes that changed colors. The strangers seemed to be just as surprised to see him as he was to see them, even appearing to be slightly afraid of him and trying to distance themselves. The creatures seemed to shy away from him, and when he tried to speak with them they apparently vanished into thin air. Since the grandfather and Harrison had no notion of aliens from outer space, they thought of them in terms they could understand, that these were the “Star People” that their ancestors had so often spoken of.

Over the next several weeks these mysterious Star People appeared around the property, always keeping their distance and with the ability to appear and disappear at will. It seemed as if they were curious about Harrison and his grandfather, that they were studying them, but they were obviously very wary at first, never coming too close and vanishing whenever they were startled or scared. They were also seen to sometimes gather rocks, plants, and other things, as if taking samples for study. Through all of this, the grandfather always heartily greeted his enigmatic visitors and even offered them food on some occasions, and as the days went by they would approach closer and closer until one day they invited the grandfather onto their ship, which was still lodged into the earth at the bottom of that crater.

On the ship, the entities then communicated with him telepathically, telling them about their realm, which was described as dry and arid like the South Dakota badlands, the terrain so harsh they were forced to live underground in domed cities. They also told him about their history, and their way of life, and explained that they had been visiting Earth for thousands of years but had rarely ever actually interacted with humans as they were doing now, rather merely observing and studying. According to them there were two other ships they had been with at the time of their unfortunate crash, and that they had been sent by a larger mothership, which they were making attempts to contact with their damaged communications equipment. The grandfather would later tell Harrison that he had seen much wondrous technology aboard the ship while he was there, such as screens that could show all manner of images and a special seat that covered whoever sat in it “like an envelope.”

According to Harrison, one night the mothership finally came, a massive cylindrical object that hovered for some time before shooting off into the night. The next morning when they went to see the crater, the ship was gone, along with its strange occupants. Shortly after this Harrison claimed that U.S. military men had arrived and cordoned off the area. They would allegedly confiscate the grandfather’s entire ranch and create a lake at the site where the ship had come down. The grandfather apparently never equated these creatures or their ship with aliens as we know them, as in being from another planet, but he was very sure they were not from around here nevertheless. There is no way to know if any of this really happened or not, but it is certainly a curious UFO case and an account of possibly crashed aliens from another culture and mindset that we rarely get to see. Real or not, it is truly fascinating all the same.

UFO abductees come in all flavors. Some are highly respected or educated people who seem to have impeccable credentials, some are from more questionable sources. Some come from those who have stories that seem to follow some rational internal logic, while others fly right off the charts into the realm of the completely outlandish. Certainly some reports are way off the meter when it comes to pure bizarreness, and one of these is the time a farmer says he was whisked away to Mars, the Moon, and Venus by aliens.

The man named Buck Nelson was once pretty much a nobody. Born in 1895, he lived on his rural farm in the Ozark Mountains in Missouri, and there wasn’t really much that was remarkable about him. That is, until 1954, when one evening would turn his mundane world inside out. On this night he was out at his farm when his radio began acting up, changing channels on its own and turning on and off. As he tinkered with the radio trying to fix it, his dog began barking uncontrollably outside. The animal was apparently going absolutely nuts, so he went out to see what was going on and was startled by three disc-shaped crafts hovering in the sky above, one large one and two smaller ones. The startled farmer then tried to signal these crafts with his flashlight, and that was when he claimed to have been hit with a beam “much brighter and hotter than the sun.” This apparently did not hurt him, but it left him paralyzed and unable to move, after which the UFOs moved off into the night.

After this strange encounter, he claimed that chronic back pain he had dealt with for years suddenly disappeared and his eyesight improved, but this was only the beginning of the weirdness. The flying saucers would begin to make regular appearances over his farm, and there would also appear two “friendly human spacemen” who called themselves Bucky and Bob, with a large black dog that apparently looked exactly like a regular old Earth dog and which they called “Bo.” These men claimed that they were actually human beings who had long ago been brought to live with the aliens on their home world and that there were other humans up there as well. The spacemen apparently explained to him that they were from the planet Venus, and they then looked around his house and asked him various questions about his life and stuff. Nelson would say of this odd encounter:

They stayed with me for about an hour and they were interested in everything in the house, especially my radio. When I told them a battery on top of it was for power, they smiled and said, with all this power around you in the air?…they went past a picture of Christ and I asked them if that meant anything to them and they said, “yes, we understand but you people don’t.

Before leaving they told him that they would be back again to take him onto a trip to space. The aliens were apparently true to their word, because one night they took him aboard their spacecraft and allegedly took Nelson on a tour of the solar system. They stopped off at the moon, which was described as a manufacturing base, then Mars, which was colorful, vibrant, and similar to Earth, and then Venus, which was a fantastic peaceful utopia where there was no war or crime. On Venus, they apparently showed him a “book machine,” about the size of a TV set, which you could put a book into and it would read the pages and play music. Bucky and Bob also told Nelson about what they called “The Twelve Laws of God,” which are suspiciously nearly exactly the same as the 10 commandments from the Bible with a couple new ones tacked on, explained that they only used solar power, that many of the Venus aliens and abducted humans like them lived on earth, many in important positions and in the space industry, and that they were keeping a careful eye on the increasing development of atomic weapons. According to them, countless galactic civilizations had destroyed themselves with nuclear weapons and they feared Earth was careening along this doomed path.

Nelson would write of all of this in a booklet imaginatively titled My Trip to Mars, the Moon, and Venus, which includes instructions for building a “saucer detector,” and he also began holding an annual “Spacecraft Convention,” all of which made him a bit of a minor celebrity at the time. He would present many pictures as proof of all of this, and even samples of hairs from the spacemen’s dog, as well as alleged recordings of Bucky’s voice, but they are weak evidence at best. Considering that the spacemen looked exactly like humans, pictures of them are useless, and the hairs of the dog were merely dog hairs, prompting Nelson to comment “Dawgs is dawgs. Don’t matter what planet they’re from.” As for the voice caught on tape, although it is eerie, high and oddly shaky, it still sounds an awful lot like Nelson’s voice. Nelson would hold his conventions and bask in his minor fame all the way to his death in 1982, and remains a lesser known, but very odd feature of the 1950s contactee movement.

Nelson’s story is absurd on many levels. For one, we know now that Mars is hardly colorful and vibrant, that Venus does not have an atmosphere conducive to a utopian life, or even life in general, and it all seems to borrow heavily from the science fiction available at the time from writers such as Edgar Rice Burroughs and others. The booklet that Nelson wrote is also poorly written, thin on details, and reads exactly like one would expect from an uneducated farmer spinning yarns about aliens. Despite its quirky charm it reads like hack fiction, in fact, yet Nelson maintained to the last that it was all true. There is nearly zero chance that any element of the story is true, but it is nevertheless a fascinating peek into one of the weirder individuals in the contactee scene that was all the rage at the time, and a strange little tale to add to the lore of such stories.

There was a time when I thought it was at least feasible that cattle mutilations might be the work of aliens. That, however, was more than a few years ago. The more I dug into the mystery, the more I came to believe that the subject had far less to do with aliens and far more to do with government activity. Within in the field of Ufology, there is an acceptance that the first real animal mutilation case (as ufologists see it) was that of Snippy, a horse found dead under bizarre coincidences. As the Denver Library state of the Snippy affair: “On September 7, 1967, near the town of Alamosa in the San Luis Valley, Snippy, a 3-year-old Appaloosa, failed to return to the Harry King Ranch where she was stabled. Two days later, Mr. King (the ranch owner) discovered Snippy’s remains roughly a quarter-mile from the ranch house. According to his account, the neck and head had been completely stripped of flesh, leaving nothing but bare, seemingly sun-bleached, white bone, while the remainder of the mare remained unscathed.”

The problem here is not the story, but the fact that the more I dug into the matter of the mutilations, the more I came to find that secret government studies of the United States’ cattle herds had been going on for decades. In fact, way back. The reason: the U.S. government was quite rightly very worried about foreign nations and agents using deadly viruses to bring the herd down and, as a result, cause chaos in America. So, the government – periodically and careful and quietly – ran tests on cattle to see how such attacks on the U.S. were working or not on the poor animals. If that disappoints you, too bad. And if you think that such a thing couldn’t be done, consider the data contained in the documents I’m about to share with you now. It was back in 2001, while spending about in the National Archives, that I found out the extent to which government agencies were secretly tied to America’s cattle.

Bacteriological Warfare in the United States is a fascinating FBI document – declassified into the public domain via the terms of the Freedom of Information Act – that covers the years 1941 to 1950. Notably, of the file’s original 1,783 pages, no less than 1,074 have been firmly withheld from declassification by the FBI. The file reveals a wealth of illuminating and disturbing data on animal disease and death, and their potential, theoretical links to bacteriological warfare and sabotage by enemy nations and individuals. For example, J.R. Ruggle, the FBI Special-Agent-in-Charge at the Savannah, Georgia office of the Bureau in the early-to-mid 1940s, wrote thus to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover on February 3, 1943: “This office has received a copy of a communication from John T. Bissell, Colonel, General Staff, Assistant Executive Officer, Military Intelligence Service, Washington, D.C., dated December 29, 1942, to directors of intelligence in all Service commands…” Colonel Bissel’s communication read:

“It has been brought to the attention of this division the possibility in the immediate future of an attempt on the part of the enemy to plant bombs containing germs or to endeavor to create an epidemic, such as hoof and mouth disease, among cattle and other livestock. It is requested that should any information concerning the above come to the attention of the Directors of Intelligence of the Service Commands or the A.C. of S. [Assistant Chief of Staff], G-2 [Army Intelligence], Western Defense Command, that the same be transmitted by the most expeditious means to the Assistant Chief of Staff, G-2 War Department.” And what did the government do? I’ll tell you: they very carefully began to take a look at the cattle herd and to determine the extent to which those “enemy nations and individuals” might be. And the secret investigations were undertaken wherever it seemed the cattle were being subjected to viruses by our enemies.

The FBI even found examples of such concerns going back to the First World War: “Anton Dilger, a German-American medical graduate from John Hopkins University, was in Germany when the First World War broke out. He offered his services to the Kaiser, and was promptly detailed by Colonel Nicolai to do secret service work in the United States. Dilger returned to America with a supply of cultures of glanders and anthrax germs. Financed by von Papen, he set up a laboratory in Chevy Chase, near Washington, and started breeding germs on a large scale for infecting mules, horses, and cattle awaiting shipment to the allies. This man then organized a band of some twelve assistants to travel around the country, carrying Dilger’s germs in small glass phials stopped with corks through which a needle extended. This roving band jabbed their deadly needles into the livestock. They also spread germs by placing them in fodder and drink. Thousands of soldiers, as well as horses and cattle, died as a result of Dilger’s germs. At last Dilger revolted against his mission of silent death. He was murdered by German spies a few months before the end of the war. Could it happen here? It did happen here!”

Now, let’s take a trip to 1949. Particularly notable is a July 11, 1949 document that refers to the government’s desire to acquire “world-wide information on animal diseases and animal population” [italics mine]. And, one year later, the FBI was still collecting such data. On October 19, 1950, the FBI prepared a document titled Abnormal Loss of Hogs in Nebraska and Illinois that dealt with an unusually high number of hog deaths in the aforementioned states – as a result of cholera. The files, however, make it clear that, in official, FBI quarters, the nature of the animals’ deaths had been viewed with deep suspicion. It was concluded that the deaths were due to a “variant virus” or “atypical virus”” that stemmed from “local conditions and the physical conditions of the hogs.” The important factor, however, is that this document was found within a file specifically focused upon bacteriological warfare. In other words, the FBI was still looking closely at any and all animal deaths that might not have wholly conventional explanations.

So, we’ve seen that government concerns went back the First World War. Then, in the late 1940s the secret investigations were still going on. And, as was shown above, secret investigations of hogs in the 1950s took place. Then, a decade later, cattle mutilations began. I could have made this article at least a 4-part one, such is the sheer number of documents now available on the subject (if you know where to look). There are thousands and thousands of pages. Had cattle mutilations suddenly surfaced out of nowhere in 1967, I might be a bit more open to the alien angle. The fact is, though, that covert studies of America’s cattle have been going on for around a century. Sometimes with the bodies of the dead left where they were covertly studied. Add to that a bit of government disinformation to the effect that all of this is due to aliens, then it’s very easy to see how government agencies were able to undertake their secret studies and with the real (and far more disturbing) story kept hidden.

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