Officer Stevens quickly obtained a Polaroid camera from the trunk of his cruiser and took a hasty photograph of the object, the only photo taken by any of the observers. Unfortunately, the quality of the photo was low, given the cold conditions at the time, which interfere with chemical development of Polaroid film.
The last police officer to observe the object was an unnamed officer from the Dupo, Illinois, Police Department. He observed the object to the east of Dupo, at a relatively high altitude at the time, he thought, and traveling now generally toward the north-northeast, where it quickly disappeared from his view.
Among the many interesting aspects of the case are: (1) the peculiar appearance of the object, (2) the unorthodox manner in which it was observed to maneuver, (3) the almost unbelievable rate at which it could accelerate, and (4) its apparent huge size. In addition, the case is made even more interesting by both the large number, and high quality, of the observers, most of them experienced, on-duty police officers, who reported the incident over their radios at the time they were observing it.
Another interesting aspect of the case is the fact that in passing near the town of Shiloh, Illinois, the peculiar object passed within as estimated two miles of Scott Air Force Base, which is thought to maintain personnel in it control tower on a 24-hour basis. However, when asked whether any of the tower personnel had witnessed the object that morning, the base personnel stated that the tower had not been staffed for several hours on the morning of the sighting, due to an unexplained suspension of operations. No explanation for the shut down was ever revealed by Air Force personnel.
—PETER B. DAVENPORT & DAVID MARLER
San Carlos (Venezuela) incident Jesus Paz and two friends had dined at a restaurant at San Carlos, then proceeded home. According to their tale, when the party neared the Exposition Park of the Ministry of Agriculture, Paz asked the driver of the car to stop while he went behind some bushes, apparently to relieve himself. His friends, still in the car, heard a piercing scream, which literally raised the hair on their heads.
They rushed toward the spot where Paz had entered the brush, came upon their friend unconscious on the ground, and were just in time to see a hairy dwarf running toward a flat, shiny craft which hovered a few feet from the ground. One of the men, Luis Mejia, a national guardsman, reached for his gun, but remembered it was back in his barracks at Guard headquarters. Mejia then picked up a stone and futilely threw it at the craft, which had taken the dwarf in and was rising into the air with a deafening buzzing sound.
A rendering of the San Carlos incident by artist Hal Crawford
At last report, Paz was under the care of doctors and all three men were telling a convincingly hair-raising story to the authorities. Paz was not only suffering from shock but had several large, long, deep scratches on his right side and along the spine, as if clawed by a wild animal.
—CORAL & JIM LORENZEN
Schwarz, Berthold E. (b. 1924). Since 1955, Dr. Berthold Schwarz, a psychiatrist, has been in private practice in Montclair, New Jersey, and since 1981 in Vero Beach, Florida.
Originally from Jersey City, New Jersey, Dr. Schwarz received his diploma in medicine from the Dartmouth Medical School in 1945. He graduated from the New York University College of Medicine in 1950, interned at Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital, Hanover, New Hampshire, in 1951; and was a fellow in psychiatry at the Mayo Foundation from 1951 to 1955. He received an M.S. in psychiatry from the Mayo Graduate School of Medicine in 1957.
Berthold Schwarz
Dr. Schwarz has studied various forms of psychic phenomena since a World War II telepathic experience involving his mother, when his brother was killed in action.
In his professional career he has studied telepathic communications in the parent-child and physician-patient telepathic communications in the parent-child and physician-patient relationships. Dr. Schwarz has also studied a number of extraordinary paragnosts (or psychics), abductees, and contactees.
Dr. Schwarz is the author of Psychic-Dynamics, published in paperback as A Psychiatrist Looks at ESP (1965), The Jacques Romano Story (1968), Parent-Child Telepathy (1971), Psychic Nexus: Psychic Phenomena in Psychiatry and in Everyday Life (1980), UFO-Dynamics: Psychiatric and Psychic Aspects of the UFO Syndrome (1983), Into the Crystal: the Miracles of Peter Sugleris (1993), and Psychiatric and Paranormal Aspects of UFOlogy (1998). He is coauthor with B.A. Ruggieri, M.D. of Parent-Child Tensions (1958), and You CAN Raise Decent Children (1971). Dr. Schwarz has authored more than 130 articles, appearing both in medical journals and in the UFO literature.
Address:
P.O. Box 4030
Vero Beach, FL 32964
U.S.A.
POSITION STATEMENT: The outstanding features of many closeencounter UFO experiences are the psychic aspects. These often appear freakish, fantastic, paradoxical, and—to the untrained observer—psychotic.
Despite the abundance of UFO-associated psi material, and the not infrequent existence of past similar related events for those who have had close UFO encounters, serious study of the psychic aspects of UFOs has often been neglected. Notwithstanding, considerable public ridicule of those who claim contact with UFOs, this negative attitude has not caused reports of these experiences to disappear. On the contrary, numerous UFO-contact cases and/or their related psi phenomena are “repeaters.” Although UFO publications give many details about the physical and astronomical parameters of UFOs, they have often side-stopped the psychic segments of this equation.
I believe that these UFO-related psychic experiences constitute subjective reality for many of these people, and that what they report is similar to paranormal material in general. These UFO contactees and abductees should be studied by behavioral scientists who are also thoroughly experienced and knowledgeable in psychic matters. An inability to understand these UFO events does not mean they did not happen.
Whatever the final explanation for the UFO mystery, there has been a noticeable shift from the more respectable extraterrestrial hypothesis to the psychic hypothesis, which mandates a greater awareness of the complexity of the issues, the significance of the personal-human attributes, and the apparent mind-matter interface. In our present state of technology and science, the psychic hypothesis could be a most practical one for exploration and discovery.
—BERTHOLD E. SCHWARZ
science fiction and UFOs A longstanding symbiotic relationship has persisted between UFO beliefs and science fiction (SF) literature and movies. Jules Verne embodied the expectation of a successful flying machine in his novels, Robur the, Conqueror (1886) and Master of the World (1904), during a time when people began to report phantom airships and other nonexistent flying devices in anticipation of their invention. Countless dime-novel productions took up the same theme of successful aerial navigation. The spirit of the turn-of-the-century world was one of boundless confidence in human inventiveness, a faith that all things were possible and all human limitations could be overcome. Both literature and UFO reports of the period reflected this belief.
Jules Verne’s airship in 1886
Extraterrestrial visitors also entered literature in the 19th century. H. G. Wells wrote the most famous invasion novel in 1897, The War of the Worlds. He drew on scientific speculation about life on Mars and imagined the Martians as inhabitants of a dying planet who “regarded this earth with envious eyes,” then attacked it with advanced technology in preparation for colonization. Another 1897 novel, Two Planets by Kurd Lasswitz, again created an invasion from Mars. only this time the Martians were of human form. Not long after, a short story told of a Martian who worked at the Lowell Observatory and destroyed any photographs showing the canals of Mars—an early version of the alien secret agent amongst us.
The alien visitor theme has remained popular ever since. In fact it nearly defines science fiction in the minds of most people. Reports of crashed Martian spaceships appeared as early as the 1870s and 1880s, while both speculation and a number of airship reports from 1896-97
included references to Martian visitors. Needless to say, this theme of alien visitation has dominated explanatory ideas about UFOs from the early days of flying saucers to the present.
As soon as the heavens became a scene of action, they also became a source of danger in SF literature. More than any other invention, the flying machine represented an almost magical potential for freedom and power. Ambivalence toward this potential is evident in Verne’s novels where flight is indeed wonderful, but Robur turns his machine to conquest and destruction. In his poem, “Locksley Hall,” Alfred Lord Tennyson looks into the future and sees a terrible time when wars will be fought by aerial navies, but he tempers this vision with the prophecy that in a more distant future universal peace and world union will follow from the abolition of distance by air travel. Arthur Conan Doyle raised the possibility that the air itself may contain unknown dangers. He wrote a story about a pilot attempting to set a high altitude record, who discovered that vicious snakelike creatures inhabited the upper atmosphere. Yet more than anything else, the idea of aliens lent a sense of foreboding to the sky. Other worlds could hold an almost infinite variety of threats, and their capacity to endanger the Earth was limited only by imagination. They could descend at any time. The panic following the Orson Welles radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds in 1938 indicates that some sense of potential peril had settled into public consciousness. Throughout the UFO era, a wariness about alien motives has persisted.
A second important formative era began in the 1920s with the advent of pulp science fiction magazines. During this golden age of the 1920s to the 1940s, stories proliferated of aliens, their craft, and their often evil motives. On the eve of flying saucers and during the early days of the mystery, cover art and articles in such magazines as Amazing Stories promoted “ancient astronaut” ideas decades before Erich von Däniken.
Fictional flying saucer in 1930
Subtler ideas about the nature of alien beings developed in such novels as Eric Frank Russell’s Sinister Barrier. Drawing on suggestions from Charles Fort, Russell postulated that we shared the Earth with hordes of usually invisible globes: beings who fed on human emotional energies and goaded us into wars for the sake of an occasional feast. Once in a while these beings became visible as luminous objects in the sky. Without this popular literature to foster space consciousness and promote the idea of extraterrestrials, an association between UFOs and aliens might have been much slower in coming.
In the mid-1940s an even more paranoid idea took hold as the Shaver Mystery appeared in the pages of Amazing Stories. Richard S. Shaver claimed that caverns beneath the Earth contained two races left over from ancient Atlantis and Lemuria. The good beings were the teros and the evil beings were the deros. Using the high technology of these elder civilizations, the two races were locked in a conflict to manipulate and control humankind.
The idea of advanced races within the Earth has a history of its own with such milestones as Bulwer Lytton’s 1870s novel, The Coming Race. Hollow Earth ideas go back even further, and tales of remnant civilizations from lost continents equipped with flying machines and other wonders have precedent in such mystical literature as A Dweller on Two Planets (1899). Yet for many people Shaver’s stories struck a sympathetic chord, and editor Ray Palmer fostered the Shaver Mystery until it cost him his job with Amazing Stories. When Kenneth Arnold reported flying saucers, Palmer took an immediate interest in this new mystery. He saw in it another facet of a larger mystery and never accepted the extraterrestrial hypothesis as the full or final solution for UFOs. Links between UFOs and the Shaver Mystery have appeared time and again in the UFO literature.
Not all science fiction casts alien visitors in an unfavorable light. Sometimes the aliens come as saviors rather than destroyers. as in Harold M. Sherman’s story, “The Green Man,” which appeared in the October 1946 issue of Amazing Stories. A sequel, “The Green Man Returns,” appeared in December 1948 and depicts the alien as a Christlike figure. A familiar movie from 1952, The Day the Earth Stood Still, also presents an alien on a mission to help keep the people of Earth from destroying themselves. The first contactees, whose stories also contained saintly visitors and messages of peace, followed suspiciously soon after this movie.
Flying saucers entered into popular culture from the late 1940s onward through science fiction literature, comic books, advertisements, rock and roll songs, and television shows—but nowhere as strikingly as in the movies. Many of them borrowed images and ideas from actual reports. Donald Keyhoe’s books became a source of technical background for Earth Versus the Flying Saucers (1956) and J. Allen Hynek was an advisor for Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).
Fictional abduction in 1930
The vision of future spaceship design in Forbidden Planet (1955) and exemplified by the Enterprise in Star Trek shows earthlings borrowing the saucer design. Invasion has remained a common theme, especially in the Cold War-haunted 1950s, either overt as in George Pal’s version of War of the Worlds (1953) or surreptitiously as in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). Many films echo the notion that the aliens have fled a dead or dying planet and seek a new home, as in I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958) or have come to exploit the Earth as a way to same their home planet, as in This Island Earth (1955). A contrasting view of aliens as friends, if not outright saviors, appears in E.T.: The Extraterrestrial (1982) and Cocoon (1986). Aliens as age-old visitors to Earth and important influences in the course of human civilization figure in The Thing (1951). Anyone familiar with abductions cannot help but be impressed by the parallels in such movies as Invaders from Mars (1953) and Killers from Space (1953).
Science fiction has anticipated much of UFO lore and UFO lore has found its way into science fiction time and again. The relationship has been a busy two-way street. An examination of the science fiction literature cautions that whatever the nature of UFOs, the beliefs people have and the stories they tell about these objects reflect cultural expectations and concerns as well as objective observation. Reports combine both cultural beliefs and perceptual experience. An intriguing trend toward magic and the supernatural, as opposed to mechanical wonders, has lent a fairy-tale quality to much recent fiction. A similar trend is apparent in UFO reports as abductions and other sightings seem to involve nonphysical objects and surrealistic experiences. Perhaps a new mystical consciousness is in the making.
—THOMAS EDDIE BULLARD
Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects (Bantam Books, 1969). For two years, thirty-seven scientists and researchers under the direction of Dr. Edward Condon, a University of Colorado physicist, examined UFO reports and issued a 958-page report constituting this book.
—RANDALL FITZGERALD
Scientist: A Novel Autobiography, The (Lippincott, 1978). Pioneer dolphin intelligence researcher John C. Lilly writes about his belief that he can psychically tune into an intergalactic communication channel with solid-state alien intelligence. These aliens inhabit another reality and operate Earth Coincidence Control, a message center in which a few special humans and all whales and dolphins receive telepathic interstellar communications.
—RANDALL FITZGERALD
Schirmer abduction The following events allegedly occurred near Ashland, Nebraska, on the morning of December 3, 1967. Police Patrolman Herbert Schirmer said he sighted a football-shaped object encircled by red, flashing lights, which, after a few moments, “shot straight out of sight.” Schirmer claims to have gone through a twenty-minute amnesic period immediately following the sighting, which was later “unlocked” during timeregression hypnosis.
At around 2:30 A.M., Patrolman Schirmer, in his police cruiser, had just checked a livestock barn, where he found the cattle making noise and kicking in their stalls. Minutes later, he approached the intersection of highways 6 and 63 on the outskirts of Ashland. About a quarter-mile in front of him, near the highway, appeared a series of red, flashing or blinking lights that shone through the oval portholes of a landed, football-shape
d craft. The object was further described as having what appeared to be a polished, aluminum surface, a catwalk around its periphery, and tripod legs underneath. Suddenly, the object rose, emitting a siren-like sound and a red-orange flame from its underside.
Upon returning to the police station, Schirmer noticed the time to be 3 A.M. This seemed odd, since he was sure that only ten minutes had elapsed since the sighting. He filed a standard police report, which read in part: “Saw a flying saucer at the junction of highways 6 and 63. Believe it or not!”
Following a news release of his sighting, Schirmer was interrogated by members of the University of Colorado UFO Project, headed by Edward Condon. After a preliminary interview in Ashland, he was taken to the university headquarters for further psychological testing. When placed under timeregression hypnosis by Dr. R. Leo Sprinkle, a psychologist from the University of Wyoming, Schirmer related what he believed had happened during the twenty-minute “timeloss.”
The following details are given here in Schirmer’s own words:
“The craft actually pulled me and the car up the hill, toward it; and then as I was going up the road, and the car came to a dead stop, a form came out from underneath the craft and started moving toward the car! And as the one being came to the front of the car, another one was coming out, and the one that was standing in front of the patrol car had sort of a box-like thing in his hand and kind of flashed green all around the whole car. And then one approached the car and reached in and touched me on my neck, at which I felt a sharp amount of pain—and then sort of stood back and sort of moved his hand and I just came right up out of the car, standing right in front of him, and he asked me, ‘Are you the Watchman of this town?’ And I said, ‘Yes, I am.’
The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters Page 94