There is a very interesting interview with UFO investigator, author and archivist John Hanson -the man behind the Haunted Skies series and UFO Archives Centre- over at the AOP blog:
https://terryhooper.blogspot.com/2024/09/john-hanson-haunted-skies-and-british.html
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It's a fairly quiet and I am taking a break from reading fox post mortem reports so this blog sprang to mind!
I was watching a video on Preston Dennett's You Tube channel and although I do not agree with everything he says or claims he does give good case summaries. But there is one thing I notice in some of those accounts as well as ones I read in old publications and books that are so badly investigated if investigated at all. Ufologists mark a car chase as a UFO encounter and that is it.
Let me make one thing perfectly clear as I do not want it misunderstood. A Close Encounter with a UFO is NOT a sign that someone was abducted or pursued (for the sake of argument) by extraterrestrials. I have stated for decades (since 1979) that a natural phenomenon exists that I termed UNP (Uninvestigated (by Science) Natural Phenomena. I suspect that Earth has an internal electromagnetic field and there is the possibility that this helps create UNP. UNP can change shape, leave physical traces, cause animal disturbance and also affect humans and many car chases by "Small UFOs" are in fact UNP. The problem is that human imagination finds that it has to state that what was encountered was intelligently controlled -the same thing has been written about ball lightning going back to 1955 and Arthur Constance's The Inexplicable Sky.
UNP I have observed at close quarters on several occasions and I have also been exposed to a very strong EM field on one occasion that almost had me running away (I retreated slowly backwards).
Therefore not all "UFOs" are intelligently created or piloted. BUFORA, MUFON and other bodies were all sent briefings on the UNP theory (with example cases) in 1981 and 1982 but were uninterested (aliens are what sells!).
Back to the case summaries that interest and frustrate me. We saw in the Hill case as well as the Stanford (1976) incident what was later recorded in the Dandenong (Kelly Cahill) encounter. My new book, Earth: The Lost Contacts outlines some cases and these are almost unknown even in the countries they happened in.
The Jakobs are driving along a quiet road with countryside to their left and trees to their right. As they listen to the car radio on the long drive they are at least happy that in 45 minutes they will be home. The youngest daughter, Katja, glances out of the window as the boredom kicks in. She asks out loud "What's that light -is it a star?" Her two sibling brothers ignore her but her parents (Helen and Peter) turn their heads to the left and see the almost pure white light. Peter replies "Aircraft landing light...no idea where it's going to land though" but the Helen sits bolt upright and turns to Peter and asks if he can go a bit faster. Peter laughs "It's not going to crash on us!" and continues on but puts on a little extra speed for his wife.
Katja tells her mother not to worry as the plane must have turned as the light is gone. Peter laughs "Told you!" and Helen turns to look and is almost relieved but feels something is wrong.
As the family continue along the road Katja looks to the right and in the distance, above the trees she sees the light (or one similar) again and casually tells her parents. Helen tells Peter that it "doesn't feel right" and he feels something is odd and suggests stopping the car to get a good look and see what it is. Helen almost screams "No!" so he puts on a little more speed and as they reach a turning they lose sight of the object which Peter notices was keeping pace with them.
Katja and her parents look out of their windows. "Nothing. It flew off" says the Peter.
.Helen then shrieks as the light appears above the road ahead of them and flies low over their car as they seem to hit a bump in the road. Peter looks out and tells his wife "Whatever it was its gone" but as he speaks so Helen turns in her seat to look at Katja and her brothers "Everyone here?" she asks -then relaxes as the boys are asleep and Katja is dozing off to sleep.
Peter and Helen agree that they will not mention their "little UFO sighting" to anyone other than their respective parents. Getting home the couple notice the time on the wall clock and they have taken an extra 25 minutes to get home yet their car clock says it is earlier. All the excitement obviously made them get home later".
Eventually, a friend is confided in and Ufologists hear of the UFO sighting and a report form is filled in and the couple are asked about any engine trouble, radio cutting out etc. None of those just that keeping an eye on the light meant they got home later.
There you go. A LITS (Light-in-the-Sky) turned into a closer NL (Nocturnal Light) file it away. That is as much interest as these reports tended to get or the Ufologists might ask a newspaper to get any readers who saw a strange light that night to get in touch.
And, yes, this incident could easily be explained as UNP. No windows/portholes or "little grey men" were seen.
In fact the family were abducted and had an on board experience. They were "victims" of what I term "cat and mouse" tactics. People observe a bright light and the light might get bigger and then it vanishes either by going behind trees or cutting out its light somehow. The people involved feel some relief until the object appears right in front of them and they may well feel a "bump" in the road with electrics cutting though not always.
If you look at the Cahill, 1976 Stanford or even "Shamrock Cafe" cases it was just the usual drive home after dark, a quieter than usual road and BAM! There is the light as it suddenly appears at one side of the road in a field or other undergrowth, up it rises and there may even be an attempt to get away but, as soon as that object declared itself (rather like an old pirate ship suddenly revealing its true colours) there is no escape.
Some people report having seen a UFO but others want nothing to do with publicity that may come from asking "Did you see our UFO?" There is in these cases often a slight confusion or even "Let's not talk about it" agreement. In a number of cases where families are involved one or both parents immediately check on the children but cannot explain why.
If questioned regarding location of the main incident of NL there can be confusion as the person(s) involved give a location that, when checked, does not make sense. One person draws a quick map of the road, any trees and houses and where the object was, say above a graveyard, but investigators who do check find that the map makes no sense. All the details seem correct but the UFO could not have been seen over the graveyard after they passed the cement works as the cement works are further back along the road and not even on the same side. Something like this happened in the 1960s Wildman case and we even know that a police report noted "he was confused about time".
The investigators have the location and drive along it...several times. No "bump" in the road that made the car shake. They drive around other nearby roads -no bumps in any of them. This means that the "bump" is often dismissed as confusion -maybe the driver was more scared than he/she stated and hit the kerbside or went slightly off the road into a ditch? The "bump", if we believe the accounts, appears to be the point where anyone involved are "grabbed" or the vehicle they are in is somehow taken -the fact that memories are taken or blocked means that there could be other explanations such as they recall their drive and seeing the UFO and the "bump" is not a physical thing but a physiological reaction to "You will forget everything from this point on".
Some people stop their car as they realise they have no idea where they are and then find they are many miles from the last recalled location. Others find themselves many yards or even a mile further down the road 'suddenly'. Some find it odd and mention to others in the car "We already crossed this bridge!" Confusion starts for some when they realise they are heading in the opposite direction 'suddenly'.
A great deal is made of the "road was unusually quiet that evening" and it very likely means nothing. I have lived near to main roads and there were evenings when there was little traffic while others seemed to have non-stop traffic for hours. Ask anyone whose work involves motorway travel or even working next to motorways and you will be told the same thing. Remember that, if these incidents do take place, they are always at a quiet time when it comes to road traffic and we have no idea how people are targeted -IF they are targeted because in some cases men of advanced years as well as women of similar ages are "taken" and there is the usual described "physical" examination and usually questions asked regarding old scars and other mundane things.
People in their sixties are not abducted to be used in some breeding agenda.
It seems that most incidents are opportunistic and when an opportunity does arise it is taken. The cat (UFO) and mouse (percipient) game starts and the UFO appears, disappears, often keeps pace with the vehicle before moving in (pouncing) or vanishing to suddenly appear above the vehicle.
In the Cahill incident several cars were involved and so multiple percipients and while it was thought that only one person/vehicle was the target that makes no logical sense since at some point along a route one person could be taken. It seems more a case of "Here we are in a quiet spot and there are those few vehicles together -let's go for it!" How are these people chosen? Well, I doubt that they are.
All sorts of things have been looked at from being ‘psychic’ or having a “suitable mindset” (whatever that is). Firstly, being “psychic” is a claim that cannot be scientifically established or proven and the number of ‘psychics’ communicating with the dead as though it is like phoning a friend are far from convincing especially when they get historically and personally known facts wrong. Psychics, or people claiming to be psychic, have been tested under all sorts of conditions for a couple hundred years at least and no evidence proving a “genuine psychic” has been found (correct me if I am wrong).
And WHY would you need to be psychic to be “abducted”, physically examined and then have your memory wiped and then dumped back in your car or where ever? It makes no sense. If it is because “that makes telepathic communications easier” -it fails repeatedly. Also many alleged encounters have involved use of a spoken but unknown language or even the percipients own native tongue so that idea is also out of the window.
When it comes to the “Suitable mindset” it is just something put forward with no clear definition or meaning. Ufology is full of “it may be” and “it could be” or “what if-?” arguments. The fact is that we have no idea
Claims of being psychic or having a “suitable mindset” for an encounter could indicate a person prone to entering altered states of consciousness. No, not “crackpots” as altered states appear to be quite common rather than rare -Gayner Sunderland had a number of encounters and one while she was seen, eyes open lying on her bed at home. Maureen Puddy in Australia had encounters including seeing a UFO that the investigators who were present could not see. I can cite several other such cases wherein people who were perfectly conscious saw something that no one else present were obviously seeing. They were not “loons” or “mental” but normal people whose brain were open to altered state realities.
“While they were lunching one of two young men approached and seemed interested in their friend but was rejected” and “These three men at the bar were watching us and one came over and asked ----- whether we were going back to town and whether he could catch a lift” He was rejected. Ufologists seem to not be in the real world at times. Attractive women in a bar or restaurant where there are also single men attract attention and some chit-chat can take place as they try for a “hook-up”. They are not human spies for aliens selecting and somehow marking people out for abduction.
Women getting chatted up and then a quiet road seem to be “all part of the abduction scenario”. No, they are not. My younger sister was “chatted up” by a man in a night club, she was not interested and on the way home she said to the taxi driver “It’s quiet on the road tonight” and guess what? She was not abducted and she arrived home earlier than expected. Oh -no UFO was seen.
We need to stick to facts not fantasy.
In the new book I note how a certain entity type down to height, skin and eye colour) were reported in the UK in the mid 1970s in cases that were never publicised. In one case an older couple “drove by” one of these entities on a quiet road and the “elite” UFO Investigators Network moved in. In a badly handwritten one page report the ‘investigator’ repeated what the couple had already written. However, he gave no details as to actual age (its guessed at by me based on what was written) or even the actual full names of the witnesses who were just “Mr and Mrs ---” and that was it. Was every minute of the encounter accounted for? No one asked. In fact, nothing appears to have been asked. I have the ‘full report’ in the archive.
A certain clothing type as well as physiological type of entity is clearly identified and we even have the description of “green skinned Japanese”.
Although advanced technology is (if we accept the reports) in use in many cases there are no memory loss, no dragging aboard a UFO, none of Hopkins, Jacobs or Carpenter et al nose probe implants. There are incidents in which a person encounters a landed UFO and entities and they invite the person on board. In some cases they refuse and are never dragged off. In some cases they accept the invitation and may be asked to take part in a “physical” but not forced down. In both cases the encounters end in a friendly manner and the person gets on with their life.
So why the need for the Cat and Mouse tactic? We simply do not know because we have no idea of any advanced alien intelligence or their operational procedures or whatever. Had we had more astronomers and people involved in SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) or Science in general actually doing the scientific thing of looking at and study the data to come up with possibilities we might have some idea by now -even what certain physical characteristics might mean. But, no, free job and lunches for life time and writing about Quantum this and that, Dark Matter and multiverses none of which is backed up by solid fact but keep their names prominent and the money coming in. That is how new Science works.
I started looking at these reports and investigating/researching in 1974 when I was a bright young spark with a natty moustache -and nice, thick dark hair. Shockingly, that’s 50 years and in all that time I have found Ufologists dismissing CE3K reports or exploiting them (“The High Priests of Alien Abduction”) and throwing any real interest that Ufology might have over the cliff. False narrative, celebrity status and money -far more important than seeking the truth.
There is one thing I always have to wonder about. The Hills, the three ladies in the Stanford encounter and many many others we would not have known a thing about if it were not for someone betraying a confidence or promise (Ufologists) or had loose lips -a friend or family member who told the wrong person “on the quiet”. If I took all of the cases we know about because of the foregoing and dismissed them then there are only a few reported landings and encounters. If we take the reports from the United States that involved “black” percipients that were never investigated (for reasons exposed already) we have fewer reports still. So the question that keeps me awake at times is this:
How many people have had encounters or on board experiences and just told no one; kept it to themselves their whole lives and took what happened to their graves?
It all depends on time and whether there is interest but AOP Journal ended with volume 2 no. 5 and if you have read an issue you will know that it mainly deals with CE3K/AE reports but also other "anomalous" encounters.
I have the material so vol. 3 number 1 will be a trial issue to see if there is interest.
Becky Ferreira The New York Times
https://uk.yahoo.com/news/news/scientists-seeking-life-mars-heard-113503082.html
DEARBORN, Mich. — At sunset on a late summer weekend in 1924, crowds flocked to curbside telescopes to behold the advanced alien civilization they believed to be present on the surface of Mars.
“See the wonders of Mars!” an uptown sidewalk astronomer shouted in New York City on Saturday, Aug. 23. “Now is your chance to view the snowcaps and the great canals that are causing so much talk among the scientists. You’ll never have such a chance again in your lifetime.”
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That weekend, Earth and Mars were separated by just 34 million miles, closer than at any other point in a century. Although this orbital alignment, called an opposition, occurs every 26 months, this one was particularly captivating to audiences across continents and inspired some of the first large-scale efforts to detect alien life.
“In scores of observatories, watchers and photographers are centering their attention on that enigmatic red disk,” journalist Silas Bent wrote on Aug. 17, 1924. He added that it might be the moment to “solve the disputed question of whether supermen rove his crust, and whether those lines, which many observers say they have seen, really are irrigation canals.”
Scientists plotted for years to make the most of the Martian “close-up.” To aid the experiments, the U.S. Navy cleared the airwaves, imposing a nationwide period of radio silence for five minutes at the top of each hour from Aug. 21 to 24 so that messages from Martians could be heard. A military cryptographer was on hand to “translate any peculiar messages that might come by radio from Mars.”
Then, lo and behold, an astonishing radio signal arrived with the opposition.
A series of dots and dashes, captured by an airborne antenna, produced a photographic record of “a crudely drawn face,” according to news reports. The tantalizing results and subsequent media frenzy inflamed the public’s imagination. It seemed as if Mars was speaking, but what was it trying to say?
“The film shows a repetition, at intervals of about a half-hour, of what appears to be a man’s face,” one of the experiment’s leaders said days later.
“It’s a freak which we can’t explain,” he added.
—
A century has elapsed since the Mars mania of 1924, but the source of that strange signal remains a mystery. The original paper record is presumed lost, though digital copies have survived, ensuring that the crudely drawn face continues to stare out at us across time.
But the story of the 1924 Mars opposition is as much about the audacity of attempting a detection of extraterrestrial life as it was about the murky outcomes. Some things have changed, such as our technologies for studying the cosmos. But what endures is that sneaky feeling that we are not alone in the universe.
“We need some cosmic company out there, whether it’s in the form of gods or extraterrestrials,” said Steven Dick, an astronomer and former NASA chief historian who has written about humanity’s interest in aliens. “People go out and look at the night sky, and there’s all these thousands of stars, and they think, ‘Surely we can’t be the only ones.’”
“That’s a nice thought, but it’s not science,” he added.
The science, so far, includes the discovery that the basic building blocks of life are widely distributed in our galaxy. Researchers have also spotted thousands of planets orbiting other stars, including worlds roughly the size of Earth. And they know Mars was once habitable, a place with gushing rivers, freshwater lakes and substantive skies. They have even discovered possible biosignatures there, both from the past and in the present, although there is still no slam-dunk evidence of aliens there, or anywhere.
Humanity has learned so much about our world, and others beyond it, in a century. But that progress flowed in part from the attitudes that defined the 1924 Mars opposition as an important milestone in the history of our search for aliens — a moment when the physical proximity of two worlds exposed a deeper yearning for cosmic connection, and the will to actively seek that contact through scientific innovation, that is still very much with us today.
—
In the expansive collections of the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation near Detroit, there is a boxy artifact that was designed for the trenches and battlefields of World War I. In August 1924, it wound up serving as an interplanetary communications prototype.
Kristen Gallerneaux, a sonic historian and a curator of communication and information technology at the Henry Ford, is a caretaker of many technological relics. But they have a special fondness for the device, a Navy-type model SE 950 radio, and its historic role as a would-be alien-detector.
“It is exactly my kind of object,” Gallerneaux said. “It feels like a buried history to me.”
Manufactured on March 26, 1918, by the National Electrical Supply Co., the hardy portable radio was designed to support troops in combat, but this unit was never battle tested. It ended up, instead, in the Washington laboratory of Charles Francis Jenkins, an inventor who played a key role in the development of television.
It might have been used in many postwar experiments, but its golden hour arrived before the 1924 Mars opposition when astronomer David Peck Todd enlisted Jenkins to solve a problem that still animates the community involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence: If messages from intelligent aliens are wafting through space, how might we capture them?
The astronomer and the inventor cobbled together an answer. During the opposition, a dirigible was launched from the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington to an altitude of just under 2 miles. It carried an antenna, pointed at Mars, that relayed signals back from its aerial position to the SE 950 radio in Jenkins’ lab.
The data was then fed into the inventor’s “Radio Camera,” which converted radio signals into optical flashes that left imprints on a 38-foot-long roll of photographic paper. It was this process that produced the repeating pattern that many viewers interpreted as a face.
People were “looking for the pattern of themselves in an output that was never designed to be an understandable visual representation,” Gallerneaux said. “It’s static. Yet people are still seeing things in it and experiencing it as a kind of intelligent static.”
This anthropomorphization of radio feedback may seem like a case of imagination run wild. But it makes more sense in light of claims during that historical period by many reputable experts who believed they had already uncovered evidence of intelligent beings on Mars.
“I have encountered, during my experiments with wireless telegraphy, the most amazing phenomena,” Guglielmo Marconi, a wireless radio pioneer, said in 1920, referring to signals he speculated had been “sent by the inhabitants of other planets to the inhabitants of Earth.”
—
These claims helped to stoke imaginary Martians across the booming genre of science fiction. At the same time, radio emerged as a conduit for conversation with these beings.
“Our ideas about aliens ultimately stem from the way we think about our own world,” said Rebecca Charbonneau, a historian of science at the American Institute of Physics. If radios can communicate across the planet, she added, “it’s not that big of a leap to think we can use the same technology on other planets.”
People in this era were reeling from the fallout of devastating conflicts, disruptive technologies and vanishing wilderness. That provided fertile ground for visions of a civilization on the planet next door, older and wiser than our own, that might offer consolation and guidance, if only we could strike up a conversation with them.
“It is reasonable to suppose that the Martian knows much more about us than we know about him or his world, and it is interesting to speculate what he thinks of us, of our feverish struggle for a living, our vanities, our suicidal World War, our little gardens and our big deserts,” Silas Bent wrote in advance of the 1924 Mars opposition.
As some people longed for interplanetary validation, others worried about the wisdom of communicating with alien neighbors. A 1919 editorial titled “Let the Stars Alone” suggested that humans could be “unprepared” for “superior intelligences.”
Imagine if humans were to “cheerfully wireless to Mars, ‘two plus two is four,’ and Mars answers, ‘no, you’re wrong,’” the editorial posited. “What are you going to do about it?”
The opposition was an opportunity to road-test these competing ideas. From a hilltop in England, a group recorded “strange noises” that “could not be identified as coming from any earthly station.” In Vancouver, British Columbia, a signal “led radio experts here seriously to consider the theory that Mars is trying to ‘tune in.’”
Not all who peered through telescopes were impressed. “Either I’m drunk or Mars is drunk,” one sidewalk observer quipped, referring to the jostling motion of the planet through the eyepiece. “If that’s all you can show, you’re welcome to Mars as far as I’m concerned,” said another.
Ultimately, the opposition produced no lasting evidence of Martian life, a result that vindicated scientific skeptics who had spent years pointing to the red planet’s absence of water or breathable air. Such truth seekers were often mocked.
“Some great talkers conclude that Mars must be uninhabitable,” French astronomer Camille Flammarion, a firm believer in intelligent Martians, wrote in March 1924. “This is not the reasoning of philosophers, but of fish,” he continued, comparing skeptics to fish who believe life out of water is impossible.
Jenkins and Todd also embodied this duality between skeptic and believer. Todd was convinced the Jenkins Radio Camera was capable of establishing contact with alien life, and he interpreted the signals as potentially alien in origin.
“The Jenkins machine is perhaps the hypothetical Martians’ best chance of making themselves known to Earth,” Todd said in The Washington Post.
Jenkins, in contrast, was blindsided by the signal from his Radio Camera, and worried that misinterpretations of its meaning would tarnish his scientific reputation. His anxieties offer an early premonition of the shifting fault lines that the search for aliens continues to drive among academics, the media, the government and the general public, which are far more pronounced 100 years later.
“I don’t think the results have anything to do with Mars,” Jenkins said in an article published on Aug. 28, 1924. He speculated that the sounds had a banal terrestrial origin, like radio interference. Subsequent guesses have included trolley cars or natural radio emissions from Jupiter.
—
Regardless of the source, the radio signals and Mars fever of August 1924 helped set the stage for more practical and scientific efforts to search for aliens.
The current hunt for extraterrestrial life stretches far beyond Mars, but the popular expectation that we will, one day, find it has proved remarkably static and durable. Indeed, many people believe we have already found aliens, or that they have found us. And even as scientists search for aliens in real physical spaces — an ancient Martian lake bed, the geysers of an ice moon and the starlit skies of exoplanets — humanity continues to dream up a mind-bending variety of fictional aliens to populate our mental landscapes.
When Jenkins and Todd conducted their experiment, radio astronomy hadn’t been born; it would be nearly a decade before Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky stumbled upon the vast radio universe.
Today, a host of sophisticated technologies are revealing insights about the universe that nobody could have imagined 100 years ago. Rovers trundle across Mars, telescopes resolve chemicals in the clouds of faraway exoplanets and observatories scan space for messages across millions of radio frequencies.
But with regard to alien life, all of this ingenuity and investment has delivered the same basic result as that inscrutable readout of dots and dashes, mediated by a wartime radio born too late for combat, captured in 1924.
As an object, Jenkins’ radio “can exist in multiple timelines in its own way,” Gallerneaux said. “It existed and it did a certain thing back then, but we can look back on it now and see patterns of behavior.”
c.2024 The New York Times Company
B&W
350 pp
Fully illustrated containing photographs and maps
£20.00
Beyond UFO Contact i the fourth book in the groundbreaking series looking at reports of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Alien-Entity reports from around the world and reassessing these. In addition there is a look at the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligences (SETI) and its relevance to the UFO phenomenon.
contents list:
Introduction: The Path of Counter-Actuality
1. Dionisio Llanca: Truck Driver, UFO Abductee and Human Guinea Pig
2. Aliens -What Can We Expect?
3. The Moreland Incident
4. It Is All Fake: Ufology Needs To Be Reassessed
5. Warminster UFOs and Entity Reports
6. Have Things Changed Since 1977?
7. The Beausoleil Cas -Even Aliens Like Theatre
8. The Pwca
9. Contact...with the Vegetable Alien
10. The Casitas Dam UFO Photograph and Entity
11. The Crystal Lake Encounter
12. The Humanoids at South Riverand the Luczkowich Encounter
13. Harrison Bailey
14. Sonny DesVerger
15. The UFO "Borderline"-The Imjarvi Skiers
16. Some Interesting Reports to Note
17. Dead Aliens in Photographs
18. Ufology, Government Cover Ups and Disclosure
19. The Reports That You Might Not Want To Look Into
20. Conil de la Frontera -a Credible Report?
21. Eighteenth Century Aliens?
22. Clearview Ranch
23. The Pat McGuire Case
24. Piero Fortunato Franzetta
25. The Silbury Hill Encounter
26. The Bridge Abduction
27. The Bagshot Heath UFO Incident
28. Lurkers and Alien Disinterest
29. What If YOU See Aliens Land?
30. So What Would YOU Do If You Encountered A Landed UFO?
The Humanoids was an October-November 1966 special issue published by Flying Saucer Review. It was later released in book form. Why do I me...
