As I have mentioned here at Mysterious Universe on a few occasions, I’m not a big fan of sci-fi. Violent horror is far more my thing. But, there are a few sci-fi-based TV shows I did like, such as The Invaders, The X-Files (for a while, until it got crap) and Dark Skies. In other words, sci-fi with a lot of conspiracy attached to it is something I like – when it’s done well. As for sci-fi-driven movies, I thought the first installment in The Matrixseries was very good. The two sequels were just “meh.” Dark City was a good one, too. I guess, with the Area 51 conspiracy connection, I should have liked Independence Day. But, no, I didn’t: it was just a bunch of swaggering, high-fiving, kick-ass bullshit. All of which brings me to the matter of two more sci-fi movies with conspiracy aspects attached to them. And both of them were released in the latter part of 1988. There is a specific reason why I mention the date.

Both movies led to rumors that their combined release amounted to a case of “the Government” preparing us for “the truth” behind the UFO phenomenon. Yes, we’re talking about UFO disclosure – another subject that I have no love for. As I have also stated here previously, I’m sick and tired of all the garbage along the lines of, “I have an insider source who tells me that disclosure is coming at noon three weeks from tomorrow. But, if it doesn’t, don’t worry. It will turn up next year. Or the next. Or the…” My words for these people: “Put up, shut up, or just go away and die.” If the latter, preferably slowly. As for those two 1988 movies they were They Live and Alien Nation.

The former was written and directed by John Carpenter (of The Fog and Halloween fame – two of my favorites). They Livestarred Roddy Piper, Keith David and Meg Foster. It’s a witty, watchable movie of how aliens are secretly taking over the planet in a very unusual and alternative way – and how the human global elite is totally selling its collective soul to the ETs. In fact, it’s very much a satire on 1980s-era society and the “greed is good” phenomenon. At first glance, the aliens look just like us. Identical, in fact. Put on a pair of special sunglasses, however, and you’ll see how they really look: like decaying corpses.

As for Alien Nation, it’s Lethal Weapon, but with extraterrestrials instead of Mel Gibson and Danny Glover. The leading cast are James Caan, Mandy Patinkin (who is now in the excellent Homeland show), and Terrence Stamp. Set in the early 1990s, Alien Nation tells the story of what happens when more than a quarter of a million ETs – “The Newcomers,” as they are termed – reach the Earth and are assimilated into human society. And with varying degree of success and failiure. There is prejudice, fear and extraterrestrial racism. If you haven’t seen the movie, I won’t spoil things by revealing the plot, except to say that there is an unforeseen conspiratorial angle to the story which ensures you’ll keep watching. So, what does this have to do with UFO disclosure? Well, I’ll tell you.

I started attending UFO/Fortean/paranormal conferences and lectures in the U.K. probably around 1985/1986. Something happened in 1989 onward in the U.K. which I had not seen at conferences before. Namely, parallels with today’s disclosure farce. On at least four or five times at various events around the country, I heard people speculating that the releases of both  Alien Nation and They Live – which surfaced in the United States just four weeks apart, the former on October 7, 1988 and the latter on November 4, 1988 – was the work of – who else? – that aforementioned ” the government.”

The truth was just around the corner. People really did want to believe. With the public acclimatized to more and more fictional ET-human interaction (good, bad or somewhere in between), it would surely only be a matter of time before we would finally have the answers. I can recall hearing such rumors throughout the year; the final time – and the most vocal – being at the annual UFO Magazine conference held in Yorkshire, England in September 1989.

Of course, the fact that I’m now writing these words shows that no such disclosure ever came. There was never a plan to use They Live and Alien Nation as a means to initiate disclosure. Thirty years on, though, people are still going on about disclosure and plans to prepare the public. All of these claims and scenarios (in 1988/1989 and now) have one thing in common: they never, ever amount to anything. They didn’t in the late eighties with a pair of fun movies. And they won’t now.

March 12 this year marks the 25th anniversary of the release of Fire in the Sky, Hollywood’s controversial take on the famous Travis Walton UFO abduction case of 1975. Walton, a logger from Snowflake, Arizona, famously claimed to have been taken aboard a flying saucer and to have interacted with two different species of aliens—the now iconic ‘Grays’ and the attractive human-looking beings known in UFOlogy as ‘Nordics.’ What distinguishes Walton’s story from innumerable other accounts of cosmic kidnapping is that his apparent abduction was witnessed, in part, by the six other men on his logging crew. They sped back into town that night to inform bemused authorities of how a UFO had zapped Travis in front of their very eyes. Assuming he was dead, the terrified loggers had left their colleague where he lay, the saucer looming above his lifeless body.

D.B. Sweeney as Travis Walton, and Robert Patrick as Mike Rogers.

A swirling storm of confusion, anger, and allegations was soon to descend on the sleepy town of Snowflake. The loggers, having reported to police that their friend had been taken by a UFO, immediately were considered suspects in Walton’s disappearance and possible murder. After no less than five days, Walton returned. He was found in a telephone box some three miles outside of Snowflake, huddled and shivering. He had five days’ growth of beard and was visibly malnourished. As he was taken back into town he began babbling about strange creatures with large eyes. He assumed he’d been gone just a couple of hours and was stunned into prolonged silence when he was told almost a week had passed. Today, the case remains one of the most famous on record, and this is thanks in no small part to Hollywood.

The movie

Featuring solid performances from D.B. Sweeney as Travis, and Robert Patrick as logging-crew-leader Mike Rogers, the Fire in the Sky movie was a reasonably faithful accounting of the Walton experience—that is until its final act, which notoriously pummelled the meat of Walton’s encounter out of all recognition. The Nordic beings described by Travis and their walkabout with him in a spaceport were nowhere to be seen in the movie. Walton’s skittish Grays were replaced with frightful goblin-like beings who literally drag the logger like a sack of spuds through their pestilent, rotting spaceship—all dank tunnels and dripping embryonic sacks—before gluing him to a table with a suffocating membrane and subjecting him to graphic torture with a thick needle to the eyeball. It’s a horrific sequence, so powerful as to erase almost all memory of the events that precede it. This marked the point in time when alien abduction truly entered the horror genre. The film would go on to influence abduction-themed fright-fests such as Altered(2005), The Fourth Kind (2009), Dark Skies (2013), Alien Abduction (2014), and, in particular, Extraterrestrial (2014), to name but a few.

The UFO community was outraged by Fire in the Sky, and all fingers were pointed at screenwriter Tracy Tormé. In a 2014 interview, Tormé explained to me his writing process for the movie, the cultural climate in which it was written, and the circumstances which led to the movie being so creatively distorted.

Reaching out

Tormé had already successfully explored the subject of alien abduction in his 1992 CBS miniseries, Intruders, which took inspiration from the work of researchers Budd Hopkins and John Mack; now, the screenwriter wanted to tackle abduction through cinema. Tormé had reached out to Walton as early as 1985:

When I first met him over the phone, it was ten years almost to the day since the incident had happened. I told him that I had a lot of respect for his story and I really wanted to make a movie, but first I wanted to investigate the story more and see how I felt about it. Travis was very, very reticent. He felt like no one had really treated him fairly in the past. Especially people from Hollywood. So he was not inclined to do this.

Tormé agreed that they should meet in Snowflake, Arizona, so that screenwriter and experiencer could get better acquainted. Tormé recalled:

I spent three days with Travis. I went up to the site where it happened, and I took him and Mike Rogers with me and had them re-enact the incident. They had not been back to the site in nearly ten years at this point, and they were both extremely haunted to be up there again. It’s a very lonely place and it had changed hardly at all. There was even a wood pile on the ground that had been there ten years ago when they were there.

William Keeble / Onwinges Prod.

Tormé returned to Snowflake at least six times over the next six years: “I just tried to learn more and more about the case every time I went. I got to know Travis and Mike very well. All the ideas for Fire in the Sky really formulated out of those trips.” Selling the script to studios, however, was an uphill struggle for Tormé:

On several occasions I thought we’d found a buyer, then I would have to go back to Travis and tell him the sad news ‘no, they’re not going forward.’ The studios at the time found the subject of abductions strange and unbelievable, and really, ultimately, not satisfying. If the aliens had come here and invaded the Earth and blown up the cities or something they might have been more open to making the movie.

Tormé emphasizes that abduction movies in general were a hard sell in the late-1980s-early-1990s:

At that time there was not a lot of interest in this subject. People wonder why it was such a struggle to get Fire in the Sky made. But the public really did not know about the abduction phenomenon. They weren’t following it, they weren’t reading about it. It had not broken through in a big way in the mass media. I really believe these two projects [Fire and Intruders] were part of the process of people becoming aware of how these things allegedly work.

Screenwriter Tracy Torme.

When eventually Paramount Studios bought Tormé’s script, it had been six-and-a-half years since the screenwriter had first approached Travis Walton. The dream would now become a reality. But the reality would be compromised…

Script changes

“The original script was, I would say, close to one-hundred-percent accurate to Travis’ memory of the events,” Tormé told me:

I literally used his memory of waking up on the table and then everything that happened to him up to the point that he’s put back on the highway. I followed his story to the tee. I felt an obligation to these guys to tell the story in the truest way that I could. And I thoroughly believed him by this point, too. I had come to the conclusion that the case was real, and that he was not a liar, that’s for sure. So I originally wrote exactly what he said.

One day, Tormé received a phone call in his office at Paramount Studios: “It was a panicked Paramount executive who just happened to have seen Intruders on TV the night before. He was unbelievably put-off and worried because he’d seen little gray men with big eyes standing over a table doing experiments on someone, therefore it’d ‘been done before,’ therefore he had no interest in doing the Walton movie and was going to kill the project if I didn’t come up with something else.”

Tormé was shell-shocked. “They were serious,” he stressed, “they were firm on it. They were going to shut the project down and not make it. We were going to have to start back at square one.” Tormé had no other option but to re-write the abduction sequence: “I got together with the director and with Travis and we devised the fictional sequence that is seen in the movie.” Tormé did at least attempt to maintain the essence of the encounter:

I insisted that if we’re going to fictionalize this, let’s at least mirror his real occurrence. So one example would be, when Travis said he’d had trouble breathing when he came to in the strange environment, we put a scene in where they put a mask over his face. That’s an example of the type of thing we tried to do. Yes, we were creating something wholly fictional, but we were going to try to maintain somewhat the feel and integrity of the terrifying experience that he had. So we tried our best to write a scary, disturbing sequence. But it was entirely fictional. I knew very early on that a lot of UFO people were going to be very upset about this.

Reception

Despite its divisive ending, Tormé is proud of Fire in the Sky, first and foremost on its undeniable strength as a human drama. The movie made back its budget, but little more. It received mixed reviews from the critics, although, ironically, the legendary Roger Ebert praised the film’s final sequence for its believability, writing: “The scenes inside the craft are really very good. They convincingly depict a reality I haven’t seen in the movies before, and for once I did believe that I was seeing something truly alien, and not just a set decorator’s daydreams.” However, Ebert was left deflated as the credits rolled, adding: “The movie ends on an inconclusive and frustrating note.” Film critic James Berardinelli described Fire in the Sky as a “muddled-up mess,” saying “It can’t make up its mind whether it wants to be horror, drama, or science-fiction. As a result, it ends up being ineffective as any of the three.”

These criticisms, essentially describing the movie as a mishmash of genres with an inconclusive ending, in fact speak to its overall authenticity as an abduction story. The phenomenon, as experienced in reality, does not comfortably lend itself to any one genre, encompassing as it does an array of complex facets straddling drama, sci-fi, fantasy, horror, and others besides. Walton’s real-life experience had no satisfactory resolution, and neither did the film. In this sense, ‘true’ abduction movies arguably will always struggle to make sizable dents at the box-office. Extreme ‘Hollywoodization’ is deemed essential to bringing these stories successfully to a mass audience.

Ball lightning is a mystery of atmospheric science that has fascinated researchers and laymen alike for centuries. While a range of theories exist that suppose how and why it may form, to-date we have no real clear explanations for the phenomenon, despite the accumulation of a wealth of scientific data over the last several decades.

Due to its curious nature, there have been several attempts to recreate ball lightning in a laboratory setting in recent years. Business Insider reported in 2013 that a group of researchers at the U.S. Air Force Academy managed to create “a ball-shaped flash of plasma” in a laboratory setting that “closely resembles” ball lightning as it occurs in nature.

According to a recent paper in Science Advances, an effect similar to ball lightning has once again been produced in a lab setting … although this time, it occurred on the quantum level. The study, co-authored by researchers Wonjae Lee1, Andrei H. Gheorghe, and several others is titled “Synthetic electromagnetic knot in a three-dimensional skyrmion.” The study observes the behavior of particular groupings of atoms, called Bose-Einstein condensates, which consisted in this case of rubidium atoms that were operating near absolute zero (thus presenting conditions where the movement of particles is very minimal).

According to the paper’s abstract, the experiment led to the observation of a theoretical phenomenon which had never been observed before in a lab setting, and which may present new clues about how ball lightning is formed:

“We experimentally realize a simulation in which a charged quantum particle interacts with the knotted electromagnetic fields peculiar to a topological model of ball lightning. These phenomena are induced by precise spatiotemporal control of the spin field of an atomic Bose-Einstein condensate, simultaneously creating a Shankar skyrmion—a topological excitation that was theoretically predicted four decades ago but never before observed experimentally. Our results reveal the versatile capabilities of synthetic electromagnetism and provide the first experimental images of topological three-dimensional skyrmions in a quantum system.”

Writing for Gizmodo, science writer Ryan Mandelbaum explains Bose-Einstein condensates as systems that are “able to demonstrate strange quantum effects on macroscopic scales, and they allow researchers to create otherwise impossible-to-study phenomena, like magnets with only one pole, supersolids, Rydberg polarons, and in this case, strange, knotted magnetic fields.”

Hence, the researchers liken the observation of the mysterious Shankar skyrmion, in this case, to being essentially a “topological model of ball lightning,” produced in a controlled setting.

The enduring question, of course, is how (and why) such things may occur in nature, and presumably on a scale that is orders of magnitude greater than that observed when being induced in a lab setting. More importantly, what natural phenomena could constitute the unusual, self-contained luminosity of ball lightning, which sometimes appears to erupt spontaneously into an environment, and in the absence of weather systems and other meteorological phenomena associated with “normal” lightning?

Photo of possible ball lightning-like manifestation over Table Rock, North Carolina in 2009 (photo by Bill Fox).

There are some unusual occurrences of ball lightning that have been reported over the years, which may provide some clues about what causes it to form. Examining a few of these, one such report (albeit an early one) comes from Michael W.Rowe’s 1983 article in the British Journal of Meteorology, titled “Unusual Ball Lightning,” wherein it was described that a ball lightning manifestation occurred with what appeared to one observer to be “chains”:

“It happened in the afternoon in 1924. There came a large ball of fire — or so it looked — but the thing was that it had chains all the way round. It lasted about five minutes, then all the chains clashed together with a terrific bang; then we had a terrible thunderstorm which lasted quite a long time.’ In a second let ter Mrs. Revell drew the ball lightning as a red globe with 16 rays, composed of links like a chain, issuing from it; the rays were rather longer than the diameter of the ball. She said, ‘You asked the size. From the ground it looked about four to five yards across, which would be larger than that in the sky. The chains opened from the top to the bottom with a terrific bang.”

Four years before the account presented above, we have a similar incident from Parkside, Australia, where another unusual ball lighting manifestation was observed after a loud noise was heard some distance away. The account given is as follows:

“It wasn’t long till we heard a hissing noise and, looking up to the western sky, saw an object about 12 inches in diameter slowly moving through the air down toward us — about 12 feet away. It was travelling eastward and came down over Mrs. Harris’s wooden fence landing on the cement porch floor about 3 feet behind us. It gracefully bounced along the cement floor in a straight path covering the 30 foot length of the verandah at a walking pace. It bounced three or four times rising to a height of 18 inches on each occasion. Each time the spherical ball touched the cement it was flattened at the point of contact, and deformed, but it quickly resumed its globular shape when it left the ground. It was not transparent but, rather, like a ball of smoke with glowing ‘comma-shaped’ electrical ‘worms’ wriggling about — sizzling, hissing and flickering. It flattened by 1/4 into the egg shape on each bounce. On reaching the far western end of our verandah it accelerated rapidly and rose at a steep angle of about 45 degrees clearing the apricot tree, wires, and the house next door. At this stage my mother rushed in the back door of the house where we huddled for about 30 seconds before hearing a resounding crash some 250 yards away off to the east. It had hit Green’s house at the far eastern end of Campbell Road. It apparently then bounced all the way to the Salvation Army home and demolished the whole house somewhere near Dawson and Florence Streets at Fullarton.”

Another peculiarity of ball lightning, in addition to its association with unusual forms and loud noises, is its occasional appearance in a metallic, or even glass-like form (such reports often occur in the daytime). In an incident dated June 1, 1984, a Mrs Elsie Haigh of Nottingham, England, observed the following, which again was featured in the British Journal of Meteorology the same year the incident occurred:

“…at approximately 5.45 p.m., I was in my kitchen. The window and door were both closed. I was standing with my back to the window when I heard a ‘boiling noise’ and a noise which sounded like glass splintering — a crash sound. I was very scared and turned around to face the window and saw a large glass-looking ball, approximately 10 inches in diameter (25 cm), slightly oblong (oblate), with a white filament in the middle. This was floating on a bowl of water which was in the sink. I ran to the bathroom, and seconds later I heard an explosion and splintering glass. When it was quiet — I think a few seconds elapsed — I returned to the kitchen. The ball had gone and there was no damage. I can only describe it as a miracle.”

By far, the most peculiar report involving a ball lightning manifestation occurred on August 17, 1978, in a region of the Caucasian Mountains in Russia. The incident involved a man named Victor Kavunenko, who was camping with four other individuals at an altitude of 3900 meters when a luminous phenomenon manifested within their tent during the night:

“I woke up with the strange feeling that a stranger had made his way into our tent. Thrusting my head out of the sleeping bag, I froze. A bright yellow blob was floating about one metre from the floor. It disappeared into Korovin’s sleeping bag. The man screamed in pain. The ball jumped out and proceeded to circle over the other bags now hiding in one, now in another. When it burned a hole in mine I felt an unbearable pain, as if I were being burned by a welding machine, and blacked out. Regaining consciousness after a while, I saw the same yellow ball which, methodically observing a pattern that was known to it alone, kept diving into the bags, evoking desperate, heart-rendering (sic) howls from the victims. This indescribable horror repeated itself several times. When I came back to my senses for the fifth or sixth time, the ball was gone. I could not move my arms or legs and my body was burning as if it had turned into a ball of fire itself. In the hospital, where we were flown by helicopter, seven wounds were discovered on my body. They were worse than burns. Pieces of muscle were found to be torn out to the bone. The same happened to Shigin, Kaprov and Bashkirov. Oleg Korovin had been killed by the ball — possibly because his bag had been on a rubber mattress, insulating it from the ground. The ball lightning did not touch a single metal object, injuring only people.”

This incident is arguably the most sensational of the collection examined in this article; it is always wise to treat such cases with caution, although Kavunenko’s testimony certainly shouldn’t be ruled out (and while speculative, the events described in Kavunenko’s narrative certainly bear a passing similarity to some of the events surrounding the mysterious deaths of a group of Russian hikers in 1959, known as the Dyatlov Pass incident).

With little doubt, even the newest discoveries detailing ways ball lightning is formed leave much to the imagination. It is one of those rare, enduring mystery that remains in the modern era, and one that is sure to fascinate and perplex us for many more years to come.

Lying within the Tualatin Valley of Oregon, in the United States, just 25 miles from the major city of Portland, is the rustic suburb of Forest Grove. Originally sprouted from a farming community, the quiet town has a population of just over 20,000, and is usually a peaceful place outside of major news and the noise of the city. However, in 2016 the usual quiet was rudely broken when terrified residents of the rural town began to report hearing an unearthly loud shrieking noise piercing out from the surrounding countryside at night that no one could explain, and which would go on to generate national news and baffle experts.

To those who heard it, the sound was described variously as being a shrill squeal, a flute-like blare, the screeching of car brakes, a steam whistle, a mechanical scream, metal scraping against metal, an off-kilter siren, or a banshee like moan, but it was agreed by all that no matter what exactly it sounded like it was a truly intense and nerve-wracking racket which purportedly kept people awake and was said to drive pets nuts. The weird noise was also described as coming from the trees, from backyards, and even from the middle of the street, and no one could quite figure out where or what it was emanating from. The story was propelled even further into the mainstream consciousness when a video made by resident Paula Lynch was released purporting to contain one of the mystery shrieks, and the Internet went nuts trying to figure out what it was. One Dave Nemeyer, fire marshal of Forest Grove Fire and Rescue, investigated and said of it:

It’s definitely a horrendous noise. I have no idea what the noise is. [The resident] described to us that it was coming from the middle of the street. To me, it sounds like the sound of train tracks, that metal screeching sound, but there are no train tracks near her home … so that’s obviously ruled out.

Forest Grove, Oregon

Several other people began to come forward with their own recordings of the anomalous noise, which supposedly typically lasted from 10 seconds all the way up to several minutes, and the whole mystery deepened further. It was widely thought that the sound perhaps came from some broken pipeline or leak, but when this was checked out it was found that the sound did not really match this audio signature. For their part, Forest Grove Public Works and the gas company Northwest Natural denied that the sound could be coming from them or a ruptured gas line, and that even if it had it would have absolutely released a strong odor of gas, and the fire department also put to rest the idea that it was coming from a fire alarm somewhere. The Department of Forestry also said that whatever it was did not originate from them. Additionally, the nearby train tracks are rarely used, and authorities explained that this could not be the origin of the sound either. Some suggested that pranksters could have been behind it, but there was no evidence of this. Forest Grove Police Capt. Mike Herbs said of the noise:

There would be a city ordinance violation if somebody was creating a noise like this, that late at night, on purpose to annoy people. At this point, we don’t have information that would lead us to believe that’s the case. It sounds to me like some kind of release valve or some kind of pipe that’s under pressure. We’ve had different suggestions from folks that it’s an alien mother ship or a warning sign of something to come.

Yes, of course aliens come into the picture. The wilder theories included that the sound was made by UFOs or that it was the wailing of some strange creature or entity like a ghost or Sasquatch, or even the portentous trumpeting of angels from Heaven. Indeed, whole forums were dedicated to the unexplained noise, where there were theories ranging that it was produced from vast underground bases and government mind control experiments, to the inscrutable activities of government installations or more paranormal explanations like ghosts and UFOs. Whatever it was, the mystery shriek of Forest Grove was all over the news on websites, in newspapers, on news shows, and on TV programs such as Inside Edition and World News Tonight.

Then, almost as suddenly as it appeared the noise stopped and the town was quite again. In the void of silence left by the lack of the mysterious squeal, the speculation has continued and theories remained rampant, with people of all opinions sticking fast to their own ideas on what it could have been. The most rational explanation is still that tis was some sort of problem with a pipe or a valve, and a physics professor at Forest Grove’s Pacific University, an Andy Dawes, has thrown in his two cents by saying:

An audio analyst from Florida emailed me a fairly detailed report that certainly agreed well with the hypothesis that it came from a faulty valve within an HVAC (or heat pump) unit. If the original source was a failing valve, then it may have gone away completely when the failure was complete.

Is that all this was, some leaky pipe? Or was there something more to this? Was it perhaps something beyond our ability to rationally explain? Whatever it was, the mystery shriek of Forest Grove has never been solved, and continues to baffle all who hear it. Considering that it has not been heard since, there is the very real possibility that we may never know what caused it, but for now it seems as if the residents of the area can rest easy. At least for now.

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