by John A. Keel
So there may not be any types at all!
Our UFO catalog now contains flying cubes, triangles, hexagons, doughnuts, spheres, objects shaped like giant metal insects, and transparent flying jellyfish. We’ve got UFOs with wheels, with wings, with antennas, with pointed domes, flat domes, no domes at all. We’ve got objects of every color of the spectrum. There have been giant, multi-windowed “cigars” spitting blue fire from their tails (“Obviously a spaceship—a mother craft,” the cultists tell us). We’ve got wheel-less automobiles cruising along deserted backroads a few inches above the ground. And we have unmarked airplanes and unidentified helicopters and jets flitting about flap areas. We have just about everything except a basic assembly-line model that has appeared consistently in many years and in many places.
In other words, we have thousands upon thousands of UFO sightings that force two unacceptable answers upon us:
1. All the witnesses were mistaken or lying.
2. Some tremendous unknown civilization is exerting an all-out effort to manufacture thousands of different types of UFOs and is sending all of them to our planet.
The governments of the world have seized upon variations of the first explanation. The UFO enthusiasts accept the second.
I do not accept either one.
Instead, I propose a third alternative. I think that some “hard” objects definitely exist as Temporary Transmogrifications. They are disk-shaped and cigar-shaped. They leave indentations in the ground when they land. Witnesses have touched them and have even been inside of them. These hard objects are decoys, just as the dirigibles and ghost planes of yesteryear may have been decoys to cover the activities of the multitudinous soft objects. My real concern is with these soft objects. They hold one of the keys to the mystery.
There are countless sightings of objects that changed size and shape in front of the viewers or split into several smaller objects, each going off in a different direction. In some cases, this process was reversed, with several small lights converging together to form a single large one, which then went dashing off. Over and over again, witnesses have told me in hushed tones, “You know, I don’t think that thing I saw was mechanical at all. I got the distinct impression that it was alive.”
Researchers such as John Bessor and Ivan T. Sanderson have openly discussed the possibility that some UFOs may, indeed, be living creatures. It’s a mixed bag. You can take your choice. Every belief can be supported to some degree, but in the final analysis, when you review all of the evidence, none of them can be completely proven beyond a reasonable doubt.
8
Charting the Enigma
At approximately 8:15 P.M. on Monday, April 25, 1966, a brilliantly illuminated object flashed across the Canadian border and sailed majestically southward over the northeastern United States. It was seen by millions of people along the Atlantic seaboard. Astronomers and amateur photographers took excellent color pictures of it, some of which were later published in Life, Newsweek, and newspapers all across the country. It was so bright that it lit up the countryside like daylight as it arced gracefully overhead.
It was quickly explained as a meteor. The explanation made sense to those who saw it, and so the whole incident was forgotten.
However, I spent many months collecting reports of this object and assembling the whole story. Thousands of actual unidentified flying objects are erroneously explained away as meteors every year. Usually no one bothers to collect these meteor reports, lay them out on a map, and study them properly. Astronomers seem least interested of all.
Meteors and comets are vitally important to our study of unexplained aerial phenomena. They reveal patterns which indicate that they follow precise routes year after year and even operate on a predictable timetable. This certainly suggests an intelligent plan of some sort. This plan is part of a larger one. I must stress once again that we cannot understand the broad spectrum of UFO events until we have studied each of the smaller parts.
The newspapers had quite a bit of fun with that 1966 meteor. It came right on the heels of the enormous nationwide UFO flap of March-April. Two men in Hector, New York, said that after the object passed over, they found rocks in their fields which were warm and “felt funny” when they touched them. The rocks were turned over to the sheriff in Watkins Glen, New York, for examination. Mrs. Joseph Powlis was one of the thousands who watched the thing from New York City. She said, “I thought it was a jet—a Roman candle-like thing.” A woman in Baltimore, Maryland, described it as “orange and blue and red, and it left sparks—oh, it was lovely.” A man in Asbury Park, New Jersey, called the Press office and declared, “I could see a head peering out of a porthole.”
In Pikesville, Maryland, a state trooper told reporters that there had been reports of plane crashes in sixteen counties. “In the old days,” he chuckled, “everyone would have said, ‘Oh, what a beautiful meteor,’ but now everyone is hoping that little men from Mars are landing.”
On a highway near Towanda, Pennsylvania, Robert W. Martz and a friend saw the object scoot overhead. Simultaneously, their automobile engine stalled, and the headlights went out. Both men complained of feeling a wave of heat as they watched “a very awesome, huge flaming body which lit up a large area, visible for a few seconds. Then the second view was of a dark object. The huge flames went out like turning off an electric bulb for a few seconds. There was a dim light in four portholes, and then all darkness. It looked like it was 250 feet in front of us and 250 feet up, and it could go at terrific speed.”
Something dropped out of the sky that night onto the grounds of the Salvation Army Camp near Upland, Pennsylvania. A group of boys watched a strange blue light descend into the woods, and John Wesley Bloom was the first to reach it. It smelled like burning rubber, was about two feet long, a foot high and a foot wide when they first saw it, the boys reported. Young Bloom claimed that something got into his eyes and blinded him. His friends had to help him home. His mother later told reporters that his face “was red and his eyes were swollen” and she placed cold compresses on his eyes. The next day there was a crimson blotch on his cheek.
The Upland object burned itself out. The next day searchers found a small coal-like lump at the spot. Dozens of other youngsters substantiated the story, according to a lengthy report published in the Delaware County Times on April 27, 1966. But Dr. I. M. Levitt, director of the Franklin Institute’s Feis Planetarium, declared, “I just don’t believe it. Meteorites do not continue to burn when they reach earth.”
Dr. Thomas C. Nicholson, chairman of the Hayden Planetarium, said that the object “was probably ten thousand times brighter than the brightest star seen at night.” He estimated that it must have weighed “several hundred pounds.”
However, Dr. Fred L. Whipple, director of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, disagreed with his colleague and announced that “it must have been less than the size of a football.”
Although many of the witnesses claimed it moved slowly across the sky—slow enough so that photographers were able to snap pictures of it—one scientist estimated that it was traveling at thirty-five miles per second. It disappeared over the Atlantic after coursing across the Carolinas.
Thousands of miles away, in the far-off Soviet state of Tashkent, a Soviet scientist named Galina Lazarenko was awakened at 5:23 A.M. on April 26, 1966, by a brilliant flash of light.
“The courtyard and my room were brightly lighted up,” she said later. “It was so bright that! could clearly see all the objects in my room.”
Simultaneously, an engineer named Alexei Melnichuk was walking down a Tashkent street when he heard a loud rumble followed by a blinding flash.
“I seemed to be bathed in white light that extended as far as I could see,” he recalled. “I was forced to shield my face with my hands. After a few seconds, I took my hands away from my face, and the light was gone.”
Moments later the great Tashkent earth fault shuddered and buckled, and a tr
emendous earthquake struck, killing ten and leaving 200,000 people homeless. As the dazed and terrified residents staggered into the rubble-strewn streets, they saw strange “glowing spheres floating through the air like lighted balloons.”
There is a nine-hour time difference between our Atlantic seaboard and Tashkent. Furthermore, Tashkent is at exactly the same latitude and longitude as the northeastern United States, precisely on the opposite side of the earth. We were watching that “meteor” cruising overhead at exactly the same time that a brilliant and inexplicable flash of light was announcing the impending disaster in Tashkent. These correlations are exact. Our “meteor” and the Tashkent earthquake occurred simultaneously on opposite sides of the earth!
What kind of coincidence was this?
An hour before the Tashkent quake, a schoolteacher living near the fault said that her dog began to howl, and that when the quake began, the dog ran to the door before each shock struck. Scientists have long been puzzled by the apparent ability of animals—particularly dogs and horses—to sense impending disasters.
Is it possible that unidentified flying objects may have some tenuous relationship to natural disasters? Many baffling cases seem to point to such a relationship, particularly in Europe and South America. Dr. Martin D. Altschuler contributed an interesting paper on earthquake-related UFOs to the Colorado University Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects. He cited several Japanese cases in which spheres of light, powerful beams of light, and assorted fireballs appeared before, during, or after Japanese earthquakes. He suggested that these phenomena resulted from friction—the slippage of rocks, which is as far-out an explanation as visitors from Mars. If static electricity does build up from the slippage of rocks in fault zones, we should easily be able to detect it and thereby predict forthcoming quakes. Alas, this is not the case.
Large numbers of UFOs were reported over Algeria shortly after the tragic quakes of September 9 and 26, 1954 (1,100 dead; 2,000 injured). When a very heavy quake shook eleven counties in England on February 11, 1957, five “tadpole-like objects” were reported over the towns of Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire. The former was the epicenter of the quake. The descriptions of the witnesses hardly sound like descriptions of electrical phenomena produced by rocks rubbing together.
Flying saucer sightings have been numerous and spectacular around the great San Andreas Fault in California since 1896.
Another “meteor” was followed by earth tremors when it zipped in over the Gulf of Mexico early on the morning of Wednesday, March 27, 1968. It was first sighted by the crew of the tanker Alfa Mex II who described “two or three objects in the center of a bright ball of fire.” The crew of the Mexican warship Guanajuato also reported seeing a flaming object, and the men of both ships said the waters of the Gulf were churned into fountains of spray after the object passed. This could mean that whatever it was, it was exerting a direct gravitational pull.
At 2:10 A.M. that morning, residents in Veracruz, Mexico, about twenty-five miles from the ships’ positions, were awakened by a deafening rumbling noise.
“Before I had a chance to realize what was happening,” Senora Angelita de Villalobos Arana, forty, told investigators, “it was as bright as day—and the terrible noise kept on… I felt cool, then cold. The light got brighter.”
Within minutes, the streets of Veracruz were filled with hysterical people. They thought the end of the world had arrived as the sky filled with unearthly light and the ground trembled. The strange “meteor” loomed over the scene, seemed to dip toward the ground, then rose again and shot off.
Mr. Ernesto Dominguez, head of the Mexican Department of Meteorology of Veracruz, conducted a careful investigation and collected all of the reports.
“This probably was not a meteorite,” he stated in his official summary. “We cannot say for sure just what it was. We do know that it did not fall to earth or collide with the earth.
“Its trajectory was curved. Imagine a jet or a spaceship suddenly going out of control and plunging down directly toward earth. Then—as if control was regained suddenly—the object or objects suddenly veered away from the earth, only moments before collision point, and went out over the Gulf of Mexico. But I think it did not fall into the sea. It could have gone upward.
“A meteorite would hardly do such a thing.”
These peculiar “meteors” and green fireballs have been turning up in increasing numbers for the past fifteen years. They usually look like the astronomer’s concept of meteors and comets, with a long tail dangling behind, but their maneuvers and the many physical effects accompanying their passage rule out a simple natural explanation. They are far more numerous than the intriguing flying saucer-type reports of metallic circular objects. In fact, the reports of mysterious lights and unlikely meteors form the major body of our neglected “soft” sightings. Furthermore, they pop up year after year in the same isolated, thinly populated areas. Natural meteors could hardly be so selective. And meteors don’t change direction or angle of descent.
The object seen and photographed over the Northeast in April 1966 had a long corkscrew-like tail. This is a commonly reported feature. There are innumerable historical references to this same identical phenomenon. A member of the North Jersey Highland Historical Society recently came across an interesting meteor report published in The Journal of Thomas Hughes, the daily diary of a British officer who served with General Burgoyne during the Revolutionary War. On page 76, he stated: “November 21, 1779. A strange meteor was seen in the south, just as the sun went down. It appear’d like a ball of fire and left a long trail of light-something like the turnings of a corkscrew-visible for near an hour.”
A meteor visible for “near an hour”!
Our nonconforming “meteors” appear repeatedly in places like Nebraska, Michigan, Canada, New Mexico, and Arizona. Professor C. A. Chant of the University of Toronto made a study of a train of meteors that roared across Canada on the night of Sunday, February 9, 1913. Unlike natural meteors, the fiery red objects traveled slowly across the sky in a straight horizontal line. They glided majestically out of the northwest and soared away to the southeast.
“Other bodies were seen coming from the northwest,” the professor wrote, “emerging from precisely the same place as the first one. Onward they moved at the same deliberate pace. In twos or threes or fours, with tails streaming behind them they came…They traversed the same path and headed for the same point in the southeastern sky…”
Very odd meteors, indeed!
The year 1913 was just one of the recently rediscovered UFO flap years, with all kinds of strange objects being reported in the sky.
The late Morris K. Jessup, a professional astrophysicist, was especially interested in the fireball-comet-meteor reports and studied them extensively. In his book, The UFO Annual (1956), he described many of the meteor reports of 1955 and had this to say:
We are having an influx of fireballs, and these have had an unusual amount of attention because of their number, brilliance, and the Kelly-green color of some of them. There does, indeed, seem to be something queer about them… For the record, it might be stated that the green fireball flurry did not originate in the United States, but apparently in Sweden [1946]. This was a few years ago and essentially before the greatest intensity of interest in UFO or saucers. They were then thought to be Russian rockets or missiles; and to this day we cannot prove that they were not Russian. In the United States the green fireballs made their debut in New Mexico and were thought to be associated with atomic energy experiments. Now, however, they have spread over much of North America and, frankly, we don’t know what they are nor why, nor from where.
Odd “Meteor” Patterns
Toward sunset on the evening of Wednesday, April 18, 1962, a giant reddish object appeared over the northern part of New York State, apparently moving down from Canada in a southwesterly direction. Air Force radar locked onto the object and carefully followed it across a dozen states as it sped we
stward. Then, at 7:30 P.M., a brilliant flash followed by deep rumbles and earth tremors occurred in southwestern Nevada. Shortly afterward an unidentified circular object landed near a power station outside of Eureka, Nevada, and the lights went out for thirty minutes.
Lieutenant Colonel Herbert Rolph of the North American Air Defense Command Center at Colorado Springs, Colorado, faced a throng of excited newsmen that night. He admitted that NORAD’s radar had tracked the object all the way across the United States and added, “A meteor can’t be tracked on radar—but this thing was!”
What are these “things,” and why don’t we know more about them? The real problem lies in the scientific attitude. Because the objects do resemble meteors in appearance, astronomers have automatically dismissed them as such and apparently have never made a concerted effort to study these piles of reports filled with embarrassing contradictions. If the “thing” passes over at a high altitude, glows and hauls a tail, then it must be a meteor, according to their reasoning.
Biologist Ivan T. Sanderson went through the trouble of collecting and analyzing the many reports of another “meteor” in 1965. Late on the afternoon of December 9 (Thursday) of that year, sirens screamed and lines of police cars, jeeps, and army trucks converged on a thickly forested area about thirty miles south of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Cordons were set up as teams of men from an unidentified military unit plunged into the woods with Geiger counters and other instruments.
“We don’t know what we have here,” an Army spokesman told the gathering cluster of reporters and curiosity seekers. “But it looks as if there’s an unidentified flying object in these woods.”
That was the first, last, and only official statement issued on the luminous blob which had sailed silently over several states, executed a deft 25-degree turn over Ohio, and then plummeted or crashed into a forest outside of Pittsburgh. It first appeared over Michigan and was apparently high enough to be seen in Indiana, then it scooted across Lake Erie, passing over the tip of Ontario, Canada, and seemed to alter its course in the Ohio sector, shifting toward Pittsburgh. Sanderson estimated that it was traveling about 1,425 miles an hour and that it was less than 50 miles high. The slowest speed ever recorded for a genuine meteor was 27,000 miles an hour.