The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters

by Story, Ronald

  Druffel, Ann, and Rogo, D. Scott. The Tujunga Canyon Contacts (Prentice-Hall, 1980).

  Fontana, David. The Secret Language of Symbols (Chronicle Books, 1993).

  Fowler, Raymond. The Andreasson Affair (Prentice-Hall, 1979).

  Fromm, Erich. The Forgotten Language: An Introduction to the Understanding of Dreams, Fairy Tales, and Myths (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1951).

  Fuller, John. The Interrupted Journey (Dial Press, 1966).

  Haines, Richard, ed. UFO Phenomena and the Behavioral Scientist (Scarecrow Press, 1979).

  Halpern, James and Ilsa. Projections (Seaview/Putnam, 1983).

  Jung, C.G. Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies (Routledge & Kegan Paul/Harcourt, Brace & Co. 1959; Signet/NAL, 1969; Princeton University Press, 1978).

  Lorenzen, Corl and Jim. Abducted! Confrontations with Beings from Outer Space (Berkley Books, 1977).

  Rogo, Scott, ed. Alien Abductions: True Cases of UFO Kidnappings (Signet/NAL, 1980).

  Rogo, D. Scott, and Clark, Jerome. Earth’s Secret Inhabitants (Temp Books, 1979).

  Walton, Travis. The Walton Experience (Berkley Books, 1978).

  Rosedale (Victoria, Australia) close encounter One of the best physical trace UFO landing cases in Australia, occurred near Rosedale, Victoria, on September, 30, 1980. It is a striking event because of the wide array of physical effects involved and the credibility of the primary witness.

  A property caretaker was awakened in the early hours of the morning by stock disturbances and other strange sounds. Upon investigating he observed, initially only some 200 metres away, an aerial object, approximately 8 metres wide and 5 metres high, moving over the property, at about a height of 2 metres. The object appeared to have orange and blue lights on it, and was domed shaped with a white top.

  It travelled slowly towards a 10,000-gallon concrete water tank. Upon reaching the tank, the UFO appeared to hover directly on top of it for about a minute. The object then landed about 15 metres away from the tank. Within about 5 minutes the caretaker had ridden a motorbike down to within 10 to 15 metres of the object on the ground. It appeared to stay on the ground for a further 2 to 3 minutes, until the persistent noise increased to “an awful scream.” The object then rose up, tilting so the witness could then see its bottom sections. The caretaker was hit with a blast of hot air. Debris consisting of stones, weed and cow dung fell away from the object. It then titled back into a horizon position and slowly moved off into the distance, at a steady altitude of about 3 metres.

  A circular physical ground trace, shaped like an annulus and just 10 metres in diameter, was left behind. Physical and chemical differences were found in soil samples taken at the site by the writer, but no explanation could be determined. The water tank was found to be largely empty of water, despite being verified as full a few days earlier. A small cone shape of silt was evident in the centre of the near empty tank. There were effects on the witness (including headaches and nausea) and his watch (which for 3 days after the incident stopped working every time he put it on). There were also possible independent witnesses of the UFO. A girl on a nearby property may have observed the object approaching the primary witness’ property. A delivery van driver was reported to have seen the UFO on the ground, apparently while the main witness was inside his house preparing to go down the paddock.

  The incident was initially investigated by the Victorian UFO Research Society. The striking nature of the event drew this writer (physical-trace specialist, Bill Chalker) and physical chemist Keith Basterfield to the site. Both of us were impressed with the credibility of the witness and the compelling consistency of the physical evidence.

  No prosaic explanation could be determined. A “plasma vortex”(a controversial hypothesis to explain “crop circles”) was one of a number of explanations put forward. The evidence does not support this idea. The 1980 Rosedale UFO landing is a very striking example of a CE-2 physical trace event.

  —WILLIAM C. CHALKER

  Roswell Incident, The (Grosset and Dunlap, 1980). Charles Berlitz and William Moore produced the second book, after Frank Scully’s in 1950, to allege a crashed spacecraft and alien bodies were retrieved by the U.S. military in New Mexico during the 1940s and kept in storage at an Air Force base. Their version relied on the eyewitness testimony of Major Jesse Marcel who investigated a debris field he could not identify on a ranch outside Roswell. Marcel never claimed to have seen alien bodies, so Berlitz and Moore only “postulate a tentative picture of the sequence of events” to support that prospect.

  —RANDALL FITZGERALD

  Roswell (New Mexico) incident Just two weeks after the famous Kenneth Arnold sighting (of June 24, 1947), which ushered in the modern “flying saucer” era, headlines such as “Flying Disk Captured by Air Force” and “RAAF Captures Flying Saucer” were splashed across the front pages of newspapers across the United States. The front-page story read in part:

  “The many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday when the intelligence officer of the 509th 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 Chaves 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 509th 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.” By the next day, the “flying saucer” no longer existed. It became, instead, a crashed weather balloon. Not until three decades later would the case be reopened by persistent UFOlogists, who eventually pressured the U.S. government into reopening the case themselves.

  Reconstruction of Roswell alien from alleged eyewitness data supplied to forensic artist William Louis McDonald

  On July 8, 1947, the commander of the base at Roswell, then Colonel William Blanchard, ordered his public relations officer to announce they had found a flying saucer. Within hours, however, Eighth Air Force Headquarters announced that the debris had been identified as the remains of a common weather balloon and a Rawin radar reflector.

  The case took on new life in 1978 when Jesse Marcel, Sr., a former air intelligence officer at the Roswell base, told UFO researchers (Stanton Friedman and Leonard Stringfield) that he had picked up pieces of a flying saucer. Marcel provided the location but not the date. He also said that the object was something not of this Earth.

  Composite of the Roswell spacecraft as conceptualized by forensic artist William Louis McDonald

  Although the wreckage was officially identified by Army Air Force officers in Fort Worth, Texas, as a weather balloon, interviews conducted with participants thirty and forty years after the event told a different story. Eyewitnesses, including William Woody and E.L. Pyles claimed to have seen the object in the sky over Roswell, descending toward the ground.

  W.W. (“Mac”) Brazel, a rancher living in the Corona area of New Mexico, found a field strewn with metallic debris. According to his son, Bill Brazel, Mac wanted to know who was going to clean up the mess. He thought the Army might be responsible and traveled to Roswell to alert both the sheriff and the military.

  Those who handled the debris such as Bill Brazel, Jesse Marcel, Sr., Brazel’s neighbors (Floyd and Loretta Proctor), and others suggested the material was lightweight and extraordinarily tough. Brazel, the Proctors, and Marcel all experimented with the debris at separate times by trying to burn it, but it failed to ignite. Bill Brazel said the material was as light as balsa wood, but so strong it wouldn’t break. It was also impervious to his pocket knife. Brazel and others also said there were pieces of material that looked like aluminum foil, but when crumpled into a ball would unfold itself, returning to
its original shape without any signs of a fold or wrinkle.

  Marcel and counterintelligence agent, Sheridan Cavitt, followed Brazel to his ranch. Marcel later told researchers that the debris was scattered over a field in a strip several hundred feet wide and about three quarters of a mile long. Though not mentioned by Marcel, Brazel told investigators that the land had been gouged out in a strip about five hundred feet long. He said it took about two years for the area to grass back over.

  The crashed spacecraft recovered by military personnel as interpreted by forensic artist William Louis McDonald

  Other participants, including Colonel Thomas J. DuBose, Chief of Staff at the Eighth Air Force, told later investigators that the balloon explanation was just a cover story for the real find. DuBose said he had not seen the real debris himself but had been present when some of it had arrived at the Fort Worth Army Air Field on its way to Washington, D.C.

  Others, such as Roswell adjutant Patrick Saunders and Roswell provost marshal Edwin Easley, said they couldn’t talk about the case previously because they had been sworn to secrecy. Still others claimed to have witnessed alien bodies associated with the crash.

  Such statements—coupled with the fact that the original debris had to be flown immediately to Wright-Patterson AFB, in Ohio—suggest that something stranger and more important than a weather balloon had crashed on Brazel’s ranch.

  In 1994, the U.S. Air Force, after conducting their own investigation, claimed the case was explained by a weather balloon with a radar target. This time, however, they claimed it came from New York University’s constant level balloon research project known as Mogul. They implied that the balloons and targets were something special and highly classified. While it is true that the project was classified, the equipment consists of commercial off-the-shelf balloons and reflectors, which should have been easily recognizable as such by the military personnel who first surveyed the wreckage.

  In 1997, the Air Force released another “final report” on Roswell. In this one they explained the alleged alien bodies as anthropomorphic crash dummies used in the testing of aircraft ejection systems and parachutes.

  Almost no one accepted this explanation because these tests hadn’t started until 1953—six years after the Roswell crash. The Air Force seemed to be suggesting they believed those who said they had seen alien bodies recovered in 1947, which would indeed require an explanation.

  —KEVIN D. RANDLE

  ANOTHER VIEW: Nothing dominated the thoughts and provoked the fears of American military planners in 1947 more than the prospect of the Soviet Union exploding an atomic bomb and possessing a nuclear battlefield capability. To provide an early warning system that could detect Soviet nuclear tests, a spying project was authorized in 1946, and given a nearly unlimited budget, to develop an upper atmospheric surveillance device that would acoustically sense reverberations from atomic explosions on the other side of the world. If the Soviets learned that the U.S. had such an atmospheric spy system, they might shift their nuclear weapons tests underground, so the highest possible levels of secrecy would have to cloak Project Mogul, as it was code named. Mogul’s top secret classification became Priority 1A, comparable to the Manhattan Project which less than two years earlier had produced the world’s first atomic bomb. Only a few key high-ranking military officers with a strict “need-to-know” would be aware of Mogul’s existence.

  Equipment used in Project Mogul resembled nothing that had ever been launched in the history of flight. It consisted of a gigantic train of 15-foot diameter meteorological balloons, 23 balloons in all, stretching 650 feet into the air. This balloon train carried aloft three radar reflectors, resembling large metal-foil kites, called RAWIN targets; low-frequency acoustic microphones; metal boxes packed with batteries for the acoustic devices; sonobuoys attached to three and four-inch diameter aluminum rings; tubes holding ballast; and altitude pressure switches. Because a New York novelty company had manufactured the radar reflectors, reinforcing tape used to hold it together had a stylized, flower-like lavender design on it.

  Mogul Flight 4 was launched by a team of scientists on June 4, 1947, from Alamogordo Army Air Field, located to the southwest of Roswell. It ascended into the stratosphere while traveling northeast, shifted in the face of prevailing winds toward the northwest, then as some of the balloons burst from exposure to the sun, it descended back to Earth heading northeast again. Once the signal batteries depleted the power, ground contact with the balloons was lost at a point near Arabela, New Mexico, about 17 miles from where the balloon train eventu ally came to rest on the J.B. Foster ranch. As lower portions of the train, with equipment attached, scraped along the field, balloons still aloft dragged everything through prickly desert brush, snagging pieces of balloon, radar targets, and other equipment along the ground at a southwest-to-northeast angle.

  Ten days later, ranch foreman Mac Brazel was inspecting his sheep herd by horseback when he spotted this line of debris about seven miles from the ranch house. Brazel would later explain that at the time he “did not pay much attention” to what he described as “bright wreckage made up of rubber strips, tin foil, a rather tough paper and sticks.” He was in a hurry to make his rounds of the ranch and finish chores before dark. Besides, twice before he had four weather balloon remnants on the ranch. Maybe this was more of the same.

  Another ten days passed and civilian pilot Kenneth Arnold had an encounter that would be the defining experience of a cultural phenomenon. While flying in western Washington State on June 24th, he saw nine shiny objects over the Cascade Mountains, moving “like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water.” In subsequent news media accounts the term “flying saucer” was born. Over the next two weeks sightings of unidentified flying objects were reported in 39 states, igniting widespread, excited speculation about whether it was space aliens or Soviet communists who had invaded our skies.

  On a visit to Corona, the closest town to the ranch, Brazel heard conversation from relatives about these flying disk reports and rumors of a reward to whoever captured a disk. He began to wonder if what he had found might be wreckage from one of the mysterious craft, since there seemed to be much more debris and of a wider variety this time than he had seen left by the two previous balloons. On July 4, Brazel returned to the debris field accompanied by his wife and their 14-year-old daughter, Bessie, and together they filled several gunny sacks. Bessie would describe years later what they found: “The debris looked like pieces of large balloon which had burst.” She picked up foil-like material, some which had kite sticks attached with two-inch wide tape. On the tape we “flower-like designs in a variety of pastel colors.”

  Needing to buy a new pickup truck, Brazel drove 75 miles into Roswell on July 6, carrying along several pieces of the debris. “He certainly wouldn’t have made the trip just on account of the stuff he had found,” his son Bill Brazel remembers. Once in town Mac Brazel stopped by the office of Sheriff George Wilcox and showed him the pieces. Thinking it might have military significance, Wilcox phoned Roswell Army Air Field and was referred to an intelligence officer, Major Jesse Marcel, who he interrupted while eating lunch.

  Marcel contacted his base commander, Colonel William Blanchard. “In my discussion with the colonel, we determined that a downed aircraft of some unusual sort might be involved,” Marcel later recounted. Col. Blanchard ordered Marcel and a counterintelligence officer, Captain Sheridan Cavitt, to follow Brazel back to the ranch and investigate. They arrived after dark and camped out. The next morning they viewed the debris field.

  Though Cavitt claims he immediately knew the material was from a weather balloon, Marcel remained unconvinced. There was simply too much debris, and it looked too unusual, to have come from any known weather balloon. Brazel described the debris field for reporters a few days later as being about 200 yards in diameter, while Cavitt would remember it four decades later as only about 20 feet square. By contrast, Marcel told me in an interview in 1979 that the debris had been sca
ttered a distance of one mile and measured hundreds of feet across. These vast discrepancies in the various accounts, and Marcel’s disturbing tendency toward exaggeration, would prove to be a recurring pattern in events surrounding the Roswell incident.

  With Marcel’s Buick and Cavitt’s jeep crammed with wreckage, both men drove back into Roswell, not arriving until late at night. Marcel drove straight home and awakened his wife and their eleven-year-old son, Jesse Jr., who remembers his father being excited and “saying something about flying saucers.” Major Marcel spread some debris out on the kitchen floor and pointed to a foot-long balsa-like beam with violet images on it, marveling at how the indecipherable symbols might be an alien language. “Dad brought home a quantity of black, brittle plastic material that had either melted or burned, and a lot of metal foil. Some people say they tried to tear it or fold it up and it would unfold on its own. I didn’t see that.” The material resembling plastic were pieces of neoprene balloon which had degraded in the sunlight. After 15 minutes of show-and-tell with his family, Marcel bundled the debris up and drove it to the air base.

  Though no record exists of Marcel’s meeting with Colonel Blanchard, it seems reasonable to assume that at first both men might have thought the wreckage could be from a Soviet surveillance device sent to spy on American nuclear installations, especially the Roswell home base for B-29s used to carry atomic bombs. That might have prompted Blanchard to suggest using flying disks as a convenient cover story to buy time while superiors in Washington, D.C. and Wright Field in Ohio were analyzing the debris. It may also be that Marcel had become so convinced the debris “was out of this world” that he either persuaded Blanchard of that prospect, or he took the rash step of releasing information about the finding without proper authorization. What we do know, however, is that on the morning of July 8, the same day that Colonel Blanchard took a scheduled leave of absence, the base’s public information officer, Walter Haut, distributed a press release announcing the acquisition of a flying disk.