The Andreasson Affair

by Raymond E. Fowler

  “I was unable to move,” Mr. Roberts told the investigator. “My wife was in a panic. My mind was not at all affected. I just couldn’t move!”

  When he did not respond to her screams, she slid across the seat and tugged at his jacket through the open window. He could hear her begging him to come back inside, but he couldn’t move a muscle. He was totally paralyzed from head to foot.

  Mr. Roberts recalled, “I was there 30 to 40 seconds before the object moved away. It moved quickly at an ever-increasing speed, not instantly.” Abruptly, their car’s lights and radio came back on. The humming object had accelerated upward and out of sight above the dense fog patch. (On the following day, at Andover, Massachusetts, witnesses would sight a strangely lit silent object hovering about one thousand feet above the grounds of a country club.)

  Incredible reports by credible people poured in. Later on in the year—on July 27, about 1:00 a.m.—a group of amateur astronomers saw a wingless, cylindrical object maneuvering over the darkened countryside of Newton, New Hampshire. (Two of the witnesses were trained observers and had received training in aircraft identification in the military.) As the object moved back and forth near the field in which they had set up a telescope, it responded exactly to signals flashed to it with a flashlight by one of the three witnesses.

  Some UFO reports included the sighting of occupants by the witnesses. Several months prior to the Newton, New Hampshire, sighting, a former U.S. Coast Guard pilot and owner of a small airport in eastern Massachusetts was awakened by a weird humming sound. Thinking that an aircraft might be attempting an emergency landing, he leaped out of bed, flung on robe and slippers, turned on a bright yard light, and hurried outdoors to investigate.

  The half-awake—but highly trained—man was totally unprepared for what greeted him. Hovering just 25 feet over a small pond between the house and the airport was a strange, silent aircraft. It was not a helicopter. He later told me it looked like “two shallow metallic saucers, one inverted upon the other, with a transparent canopy situated on its topside.” Elongated vent-like holes spaced evenly around the object’s rim emitted a soft orange glow. A softer, greener light bathed the interior of the canopy, revealing two humanoid creatures who stared down at him!

  Thinking that it must be an experimental aircraft in trouble, he cautiously walked toward it, yelling and waving his arms. Instantaneously, it moved smoothly and silently away from him, stopping again over some gasoline pumps and aircraft at the edge of the runway. The curious witness ran around the pond and again headed toward the hovering craft, waving his hands at it as he approached. Abruptly, a swishing and loud whirring sound came from the object, and the orange lights began spinning around its circumference. Slowly and deliberately it tilted back before shooting away at fantastic speed. Simultaneously, the bright yard light dimmed to practically nothing during the object’s initial acceleration, but quickly returned to normal as it moved away. All that was left behind was a smell reminiscent of burned matches lingering in the night air.

  Others were to have similar experiences. On November 2, 1967, two Native American youths were driving south on Highway 26 near Ririe, Idaho. At about 9:30 p.m., a blinding flash of light erupted in front of their car, then quickly dimmed to reveal an oval object with a central dome. The dome was transparent, and they saw that it contained two small humanoid creatures who stared down at them.

  About a month later, on December 8, 1967, in Idaho Falls, Idaho, a young woman stepped outside to look for a friend who was on her way to pick her up. She noticed a patch of light reflected off the snow. Glancing up to see where it was coming from, she was horrified to see a circular object hovering silently in the overcast sky. As she stood awestruck at the sight of it, the object tipped and rotated, revealing a central transparent dome. In the dome she could make out the distinct outline of two humanoid figures gazing down at her. As the object moved away, she panicked and ran into the house. At its closest, she estimated that it was only about 300 feet away and about 100 feet off the ground.

  Significantly, a great number of 1967 UFO reports involved sightings in upper central Massachusetts. A number of reports of objects hovering over freshwater ponds came from Phillipston, Royalston, Orange, and Tully, Massachusetts. Several objects were reported to have had a central dome. But the surge of UFO activity that reverberated into 1967 merely bracketed the incredible experience of the Andreasson family. What they had experienced was but a logical extension of all other aspects of the UFO phenomena—that is, a CE-IV: contact!

  At that time, all we knew was the year of the sighting: 1967. But later, during the course of the hypnosis/debriefing sessions and other interviews, attempts were made to determine the actual date of the experience from the witnesses’ statements. From Betty’s overall testimony, we were able to start narrowing down the exact day.

  Betty: It is 1967…the lights went out. My father and mother were staying with me. Husband in the hospital from a car accident. Snow, little bit…it’s cool, misty…fog rising from the ground.…

  With this information in hand, we checked hospital records, local power company records, and detailed weather records kept by a weather station in Ashburnham. Hospital records show that Betty’s husband was transferred from a local hospital to a Veterans Administration (VA) Hospital near Boston on January 23, 1967. He was not released until March 17 of that year.

  Ashburnham Municipal Light Company records show that a power failure occurred in Betty’s neighborhood on January 25, 1967. It was traced to a defective primary loop cutoff, which was replaced on the following day. (Unfortunately, the time of the failure was not recorded.)

  The U.S. Department of Commerce weather station at Ashburnham recorded that a trace of snow was present on the ground between January 23 and 27, 1967. (The ground was covered with snow from January 28 through March 17, 1967. Depths ranged from 2 to 29 inches.) Weather records also revealed that the night of January 25, 1967, was misty.

  Betty: Three days later, on a Saturday, Becky mentioned a strange dream. Mother and father went home that Monday.

  Saturday would have been three days after a Wednesday. The evidence was strong that the UFO experience had taken place on Wednesday night, January 25, 1967. Much of Becky’s later testimony under hypnosis substantiated this date.

  Becky: Father in hospital.… It got real dark. Think I’m 11. Birthday long time ago…cold outside…ground cool and damp.… Traces of snow…grass dead.… Path was muddy.… Bozo on TV.…Saturday was three days after.

  Weather records indicated that on January 25 there was a thaw with temperatures rising to 54 degrees Fahrenheit. That would explain why the path was muddy. And a check of TV records confirms Becky’s statement that Bozo the Clown was indeed on television the evening of January 25.

  During Becky’s initial recall, it was very disconcerting to us when she described herself and her friend eating apples from the orchard!

  Becky: We both climbed up and sat down in the tree talking and eating apples.

  Harold: Are the apples hard?

  Becky: Yeah, real hard.

  Apples seemed hardly in season during January, and we felt that Becky was imagining or mixing up this aspect of the account. Even though she talked like an 11-year-old while regressed by hypnosis, we sometimes treated her as the 22-year-old adult we saw at the present time—and in doing so, perhaps we expected too much of her. In this instance, however, she may have been giving us an accurate description.

  On December 24, 1977, I visited a local apple orchard during a thaw. It was a balmy day with a temperature of about 50 degrees Fahrenheit. There were dried-up apples on some of the trees, and piles of both decayed and firm apples under the trees.

  I picked one up and took a bite out of it. It tasted all right. Later, on January 28, 1978, I sent field investigator Jules Vaillancourt to the orchard behind the house formerly owned by the Andreasson family. Under the tree, Jules found apples that had frozen and thawed—and they were edible. It looks
as if we underestimated Becky.

  While under hypnosis, both Betty and Becky were asked what time the incident started. Because Betty had not noticed the time, she could only guess: “I don’t know, but seven o’clock keeps going through my mind.”

  Becky, however, could see the clock in the living room when the lights began flashing through the kitchen window: “They got there at twenty-five of seven.”

  When Betty was returned to the house and entered the living room with the entities, she had noticed the clock: “It is ten-forty.… It’s dim, but the hands look like ten-forty—in between ten forty-five and ten-forty.”

  Inquiries revealed that the Andreasson family had eaten early suppers, between 4:00 and 4:30 p.m., during this period, so that the children might be fed and prepared for bed before Betty left to make her nightly visit to her husband at the local hospital. Betty ceased these visits when her husband was transferred to the VA Hospital near Boston on January 23, 1967, but the habit of early suppers was still maintained on January 25. Using information extracted from the hypnosis sessions, the scenario following on pages 187–188 could be constructed.

  Another aspect tending to verify the account of the witnesses was that some portions of the story would be correlated with real-time events. We have just seen that their description of environmental conditions and circumstances corresponded to reality. Of course, the date and time of the incident were derived from this data. Interestingly enough, the present owner of the house in Ashburnham confirmed that because of the lay of the land, a dense, local fog tended to form behind the house. Weather conditions on January 25, 1967, were conducive to the misty conditions Betty described. Indeed, if not for the dense fog on that evening, the landed UFO could have been observed by others from neighboring houses.

  In addition, measurements of the backyard demonstrated that an object of the dimensions Betty described could have landed only where she had reported seeing it on the ground. True to her statement, at the reported landing site, it would have needed adjustable landing gear. A check of the interior of the house (granting allowances for known renovations) also corresponded to the descriptions given under hypnosis.

  Having established the estimated date and time of the Andreasson Affair, we continued on to complete a detailed analysis of the remaining data. During this study, we encountered startling similarities with other Close Encounter UFO reports, in more than a dozen important categories.

  1. The Vacuum-like stillness at the outset of the UFO experience

  The sudden stillness that enveloped the Andreasson house has been reported in connection with other UFO reports as far back as 1933 (that is, prior to the influx of modern UFO sightings in the 1940s). APRO reported a sighting from the year 1933 that took place between Lehighton and Nazareth, Pennsylvania. A male motorist stopped his car to examine a strange violet glow in a field. Approaching the eerie light source, he found it to be emanating from a round object resting on the ground. While in the vicinity of the object, he neither saw nor heard a living thing and stated that the silence was “deadly.”1

  Another report from this period comes from Canadian UFO researcher John Brent Musgrave, who documented a sighting which took place in the summer of 1933 at Nipawin, Saskatchewan. Several persons jumped into a truck and drove to an area where strange lights had been seen to descend. In a field they sighted a large oval-shaped object, supported by legs, with a central dome. About a dozen short figures could be seen moving around the craft. They reported that “all was a strange sort of quiet.”2

  We see this same peculiarity manifested in some modern sightings. On November 5, 1974, at about noon, Harry Pinhorn observed a strange gray object hover over the factory at which he worked in Lisarow, Wyoming. He stated that a strange silence that engulfed the area caused him to notice the object: “I looked up at the trees because the birds had all suddenly gone quiet and there it was.”3

  At 8:45, on a clear night, January 21, 1977, Robert Melerine was paddling his boat quietly up the Dike Canal in St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana. Abruptly a glowing object moved rapidly toward him and hovered overhead, engulfing him in warm light. He stated that there was a complete silence: “No wind. No frogs croaking or ducks calling. Silence.”4 Three boys at Salisbury North, Australia, had a similar experience shortly after. A low-flying object cast a beam of light at their bicycles on May 27, 1977. Investigator Colin Norris stated that “the stillness that the boys noticed…is consistent with many other reported sightings.”5

  At 5:00 a.m. on June 24, 1977, a married couple living in Lubbock, Texas, were awakened by the sudden movement of their dog. Puzzled by the dog’s antics, the wife got up and went to the door. She stated, “When I first woke, I could hear the sound of about a million crickets in all the trees here. But almost immediately, it was just deathly quiet—not a sound.” A glowing object hovered outside over her neighbor’s house.6 Still another case of this sort occurred on October 9, 1977, at 8:30 p.m., in Walcott, Iowa. Holly Prunchak, a security guard at the French-Hecht plant, watched a strange, lighted oval object descend over farm property across the street. The Center for UFO Studies dispatched veteran investigator Ralph DeGraw to conduct an inquiry. DeGraw learned that “all the ambient animal noises (cattle and crickets) went quiet when the object was in view.”7

  An identical effect was noticed by witnesses to a sighting that took place a decade earlier in Brookfield, Wisconsin. On August 12, 1967, at 2:30 a.m., a sleepy man and wife glanced out the window to see what their German shepherd was barking about. Shocked, they saw an oval object hovering at ground level over an adjoining pasture. A sharply defined beam of light emanated from the craft and the dog stopped barking. Everything became strangely silent. The usual night sounds of insects and animals ceased abruptly. “There was dead silence outside.”8

  Note that the reported silencing effect appears to be connected with certain lights from the UFO, just as it seems to have been in the Andreasson Affair.

  2. The concurrent electrical failure

  Earlier in this chapter, I mentioned the localized power failures sometimes associated with UFO sightings. These included the area surrounding Williamstown, Massachusetts, on January 18, 1967, and the case involving the manager of a small airport in eastern Massachusetts when his yard light dimmed concurrently with a Close Encounter UFO sighting.

  Our local team of investigators has investigated a number of these so-called electromagnetic (E-M) effect cases, some of which have been quite spectacular. Walter Webb, assistant director of Boston’s Hayden Planetarium, documented such an event that took place in Dorchester, Massachusetts, on April 24, 1966, at 5:00 a.m. An oval domed object, encircled with red lights, hit and shook an apartment complex. A simultaneous power failure was traced to a burned cable near the object’s flight path.

  3. The concurrent TV interference

  UFO interference with radio and TV has been a common occurrence over the years. Two cases will suffice to illustrate this effect:

  1. November 5, 1957, Ringwood, Illinois. UFO followed car to town. TV sets in town dimmed, finally lost picture and sound during same period of time.

  2. November 10, 1957, Hammond, Virginia. Police chased UFO. TV blackout in city.9

  4. The physical appearance of the entities

  In 1971, I managed to secure a number of pages from a thought provoking textbook employed by the United States Air Force academy for a course relating to UFOs. In a section captioned “Alien Visitors,” the following excerpt seems highly pertinent to the discussion at hand:

  The most stimulating theory for us is that the UFOs are material objects which are either manned or remote-controlled by beings who are alien to this planet…The most commonly described alien is about three and one-half feet tall, has a round head, arms reaching to or below his knees, and is wearing a silvery space suit or coveralls. They have particularly wide (wrap-around) eyes and mouths with very thin lips.10

  This description is also borne out in civilian sources. Concerning
height, an analysis of UFO occupant reports prepared for the Center for UFO Studies11 states that 27 such “dwarf” cases were reported in 1973. One such case allegedly involved another family’s CE-IV on October 16, 1973, at Lehi, Utah. Using hypnosis, Dr. James Harder, consultant for the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO), elicited from one of the witnesses the following description: The beings were slightly over four feet tall, very thin, with large slanted eyes. Their arms were long and their hands gloved and claw-like, with a diminutive thumb. They were wearing what appeared to be glowing clothing with Sam Browne belts!

  5. The entities’ ability to float

  A number of UFO reports describe floating entities associated with the observed craft. The Ririe, Idaho, case (alluded to earlier) involved two UFO occupants gazing down at the witnesses from the object’s transparent central dome. One of the humanoid creatures left the hovering craft, and “with a floating movement like a bird” descended to the door at the driver’s side of the automobile.12

  At Brands Flats, Virginia, on January 19, 1965, the witness reported seeing three small beings float down to him from a hovering object. (This case will be discussed further later, as it bears other similarities to the Andreasson report.)

  Air Force Sergeant Charles L. Moody is a member in high standing of the United States Air Force’s Human Reliability Program. Candidates for this program are carefully screened by psychiatrists for emotional disorders during the process of selection for this elite group. I mention this because Moody reported to APRO that he was abducted from his automobile outside of Alamogordo, New Mexico, during the early morning hours of August 13, 1975. He said of his dwarflike captors: It’s going to sound ridiculous and I hope nobody sends me a straitjacket, but these beings did not walk, they glided.