Mercury Rapids - Articles

Talk about crop patterns (or crop circles, as they are more commonly known) and most people will tell you that they are formed not by UFOs or Earth energies, but by swarthy people, stealing into farmers’ fields in the dead of night, armed with planks of wood and balls of string.

While the vast majority of crop patterns are the work of clever hoaxsters, there are some that seem to remain a mystery and even recognised ‘circlemakers’ have said that they have had odd experiences, even in formations of their own design, but we shall come to these ‘effects’ later. So what are we to make of these genuine works of art, often hundreds of feet across, that appear in our crops, sometimes in broad daylight in only a few minutes?

Patterns appearing in cereals are not a new phenomenon, although most have appeared in the past twenty years or so, thanks to the circlemakers. One of the earliest accounts dates from around 800AD, when the Bishop of Lyon wrote of ‘flattened circles’ in corn and connected it, naturally, with devil worship, citing ‘magical storms’ as the catalyst for their formation.

In 1678, a woodcut was made, depicting ‘The Mowing Devil’. The story goes that a farmer engaged in an argument with his mower about the cost of mowing his field. Eventually, the farmer said that the Devil should mow the field and stomped away. That night, a strange glow was seen in the field and the next morning, round circles were found in the corn.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, crop circles were reported in fields quite regularly. Were human circlemakers responsible for all of these early incidents?

In 1991, two retired gentlemen called Doug Bower and Dave Chorley claimed that they were responsible for all of the crop circles. They demonstrated their technique, using planks of wood, string and a gizmo attached to their caps that allowed them to create perfectly straight lines.

Of course, Doug and Dave cannot have created the patterns from antiquity, nor could they have made those found in other countries, but their revelation cast a shadow of doubt over the whole phenomenon. It was firmly implanted into the public consciousness that all crop patterns were the work of hoaxers and things only got worse when other circlemakers came forward, claiming responsibility for some of the most complex patterns. These modern day ‘crop artists’ use computers to design their patterns and even a huge, complicated formation can be created in pitch-darkness in only a few hours.

Despite this, people have reported actually seeing crop patterns being formed, usually accompanied by balls of light. Often, these designs have appeared in a matter of a few minutes to an hour.

Colin Andrews, a champion of crop circle research (cereology) for many years, finally admitted that he thought that the complex patterns were the work of man, while the simple formations could be due to anomalous meteorological conditions. While this seems like a reasonable standpoint, many cereologists are still convinced that not all complex designs are the work of the circlemakers. Indeed, there are some fantastic designs for which no circlemaking group has claimed responsibility. Here are just three examples:

1. In 2001, a pair of patterns appeared in a field next to the Chilbolton Radio Observatory in Hampshire. The design seemed to emulate the famous ‘Arecibo Message’ that was broadcast into space in 1974 from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico. There were some significant differences, however. Instead of a stylised human form, the Chilbolton design had a large-headed, alien figure; the depiction of our solar system was different, showing two raised ‘planets’ and a star-like object; and whereas the Arecibo message included a representation of the telescope’s dish as the transmitter, the Chilbolton design showed a copy of a crop pattern that had appeared in the same field a year earlier.

In the same field as the ‘message’, there was another pattern that depicted a humanoid face. Some have suggested it is a representation of the ‘Face on Mars’, that mysterious structure in Cydonia first photographed by the Viking orbiters in 1976.

2. A year later, in 2002, another intricate design was found in a field near Winchester, Hampshire. This one had what appeared to be the head of a ‘Grey’ alien, along with a disc with some kind of data and three, small ‘UFOs’. Believe it or not, the dots and dashes in the disc have been decoded and it forms a readable, if bizarre, message:

"Beware the bearers of FALSE gifts & their BROKEN PROMISES. Much PAIN but still time. BELIEVE. There is GOOD out there.We OPpose DECEPTION. Conduit CLOSING (BELL SOUND)".

3. In August of 2001, what became known as ‘the mother of all crop circles’ appeared overnight (during a rainstorm) at Milk Hill in Wiltshire. This remarkable formation consisted of 409 circles and was almost nine hundred feet in diameter! It remains the largest crop pattern ever recorded.

Of course, the fact that no circlemaking group has claimed responsibility for these designs does not make them the ‘genuine article’. There are legal issues to consider. The creation of the patterns would mean that the designers trespassed onto private land and caused thousands of pounds worth of damage to crops. However, this has not prevented them from claiming ownership of some other impressive patterns.

Either way, whoever created these things deserves a nod, not only for their artistic creativity, but also for their ingenuity in evading capture (the Chilbolton designs were formed in a field right next to a major radio observatory).

Earlier, I mentioned ‘odd experiences’ by people in some crop patterns. As previously noted, strange balls of light have been observed in or near patterns, but other anomalous occurrences have been reported. These range from hearing strange noises, such as buzzing, ringing or beeping, to ailments being cured to electrical devices becoming suddenly inoperative.

Researchers claim that reports of this kind indicate a ‘genuine’ pattern, but circlemakers themselves have claimed to have experienced weird happenings in their own designs. Matthew Williams, a circlemaker who has been prosecuted for his art, has admitted to experiencing paranormal events while creating a pattern. He said that he felt as though ‘something’ was watching him as he went about his stomping. Other circlemakers have admitted to seeing unexplained ‘bright lights’ moving over fields.

So how are ‘genuine’ patterns identified from those made by the hoaxers?

Researchers claim that genuine crop patterns (i.e. those not made by people with planks of wood) demonstrate features that hoaxed patterns do not:

The stems of the crop are bent and not broken, so the crop continues to grow, even though it is lying flat
The ground appears to have undergone a burst of heat, radiation or ultrasound
Nodes on the stems are ‘blown’, as though heated very quickly
The structure of the soil itself has been altered, as though by temperatures exceeding 1500C or extreme pressure
Genuine circles are not perfectly round, but slightly elliptical
The local electromagnetic (EM) field is altered

It must be noted, though, that investigations into known hoax patterns have also found all of these features. Believers maintain, though, that only in a genuine pattern will you find all of the above. It is also worth mentioning that while crop pattern incidents decreased during the Foot and Mouth outbreak of 2001, some patterns still appeared in affected areas.

It has often been pointed out that the damage caused by a large pattern can cost a farmer thousands of pounds in lost revenue, that farmers abhor these attacks upon their crops. That might be true for the most part, but farmers are a canny bunch and know when to turn a situation to their advantage.

In 1996, a pattern appeared in a field next to Stonehenge. It was five hundred feet wide and almost a thousand feet in length in the form of a mathematical fractal pattern known as a Julia Set. Although circlemakers claim to know who made the pattern, no names have been forthcoming. The design appeared overnight and believers claim that people stomping about the field for hours would have been seen by the security guards at the nearby monument.

The farmer who owned the field began charging tourists to view the pattern and within four weeks he had made himself the healthy sum of £30,000, considerably more than the worth of the crop itself!

Think about it. Farmers complain about circlemakers trampling their crops, yet, if they are savvy, can recoup their losses and more (hundreds of times more in some cases) in a short time. I think that many farmers would not only smile when a pattern appeared in one of their fields, but dance a little jig!

This has just been a brief introduction to the crop pattern phenomenon and there is a lot of material out there that goes into great depth on the subject in the form of books, DVDs, magazine articles and websites.

As of the time of writing this article, the first crop patterns of the 2006 season are appearing, so it appears that the enigma is still with us. Whether they are entirely the work of ‘crop artists’, non-terrestrial intelligences, the weather or a combination of any and all of these, it cannot be denied that they are beautiful to behold and it is one field (forgive the pun) in which Britain still leads the world.

UFOs & Ghostly Phenomena

The subject of UFOs is often lumped together with other paranormal phenomena without much thought. “Heck, it’s unknown, therefore it must be paranormal…” But there are aspects to ufology that are not solely concerned with ‘nuts & bolts’ flying saucers and the physical entities that pilot them. There are numerous cases in which UFOs and ghosts have crossed paths, blurring even more the distinctions between perception and reality in this most fascinating field of study.

Throughout history, unsuspecting victims have yielded to the midnight advances of supernatural creatures such as succubi. These demonic entities appear to their prey often in the form of hideous dwarfs or wizened crones, crouching on their chests in the dead of night. Many researchers have suggested that such stories correlate with today’s reports of alien abduction. Sceptics have argued that the similarities prove that the phenomenon is nothing more than psychological in nature.

What I shall cover here, though, are one or two ghostly apparitions associated with the UFO phenomenon. It is surprising how common such reports there are and how the worlds of spirits and extraterrestrials seem to converge regularly.

A famous, and highly entertaining, example of how these subjects intermingle was demonstrated on Halloween in 2004. The popular LivingTV (a UK cable and satellite channel) programme, Most Haunted Live, was beginning a three-night investigation in the Lancashire town of Pendle. On the first night, the show’s resident psychic and medium, the flamboyant Derek Acorah, picked up on what he said were the spirits of alien beings. He declared that several extraterrestrials had died on the spot where the building they were in now stood. It was a bizarre statement during a show that usually confines itself to seeking out ‘regular’ spirits from an earthly origin and whether or not you believe in Acorah’s abilities, it adds to the subject nevertheless.

Another ghostly experience was recounted by Scottish researcher, Malcolm Robinson. In July, 1998, Malcolm travelled to Devon with BUFORA colleague, Judith Jaafar. They arrived at the family home of the witness that Malcolm referred to as B.P. and he told his family’s story.

Beginning in November of 1991, the entire family had experiences that eventually led them to calling in a spiritualist to perform a ‘cleansing’. Initially, it seemed that what was being dealt with was not connected with UFOs and that they were living in a haunted house. Footsteps were heard in the dead of night; B.P. awoke with pressure on his chest, as though something were sitting on him; figures in old-fashioned clothes were seen; the odd aroma of tobacco could often be smelled, even though nobody in the house smoked.

Then strange creatures began to be seen in the house, ranging from a typical Grey alien, to a hairy beast described by B.P.’s son as resembling Captain Caveman. After several weeks of these kinds of encounters, the spiritualist was called in and his work appeared to do the trick and all became quiet again.

Then, a few days later, when their 26-year old son was away, B.P. and his wife heard strange moaning noises coming from his bedroom. Then obscenity-filled screaming began, terrifying the pair. They entered the room and found it empty.

Things got so bad in the house that the family began sleeping in the same bedroom. One night, B.P. woke up to see a strange glow in the room. He roused his son, who was sleeping on a mattress on the floor, who said he could see what looked like a Grey alien. B.P. could not see this. His wife was apparently still asleep and mumbling something incoherently. After a few seconds, the glow coalesced into a ball and vanished with a ‘pop’ into a funnel of light. Later, B.P.’s wife told them that she had had a dream about aliens in the room and that she had tried to wake them both up.

After the son saw what he described as a ‘laser-light show’ in the house, the spiritualist was called in again and this time his cleansing was successful. The family have seen nothing since, although they say that they can still ‘feel’ the entities around them.

B.P. underwent hypnosis and recalled seeing alien beings with cat-like eyes taking him into a saucer-shaped craft. He had the sensation of travelling in the ship. Prior to this, the family had no interest in UFOs and took their experiences to be a haunting event. ¹

Another incident that connects UFO lore with ghosts happened to a friend of mine. He experienced over three hours of missing time one evening in 1992. When he regained consciousness, his clothes were torn and he was covered with scratches. He recalled seeing a strange, green mist, something often reported by abductees. Immediately prior to him losing those three hours, though, he saw the ghost of his grandfather in his house. He has no explanation for what happened to him and a hypnosis session could shed no further light on the matter unfortunately.

In 1977, a case became so famous that it has had several books written about it and ancillary events were reported in the mainstream news media. In that year, south-west Wales, and in particular the Pembrokeshire coastline had a major UFO flap with many witnesses reporting strange craft flying around the skies and even landing. The most notorious of these recorded incidents took place at Ripperston Farm on St Bride’s Bay.

The details of what happened to the Coombs family can be found in such books as The Uninvited by Clive Harold, but the story is a strange one. What began with a light in the sky chasing the family car escalated into electrical interference and drainage, silver craft seen landing and taking off from the fields and even up-close sightings of silver-clad figures of up to seven feet in height.

What we are interested in this instance, though, are the more supernatural aspects to the case (if that is possible!). As well as these visual sightings and physical effects that plagued the Coombs, there were other incidents that bear more similarities with ghost or poltergeist lore. Items would move about the house by themselves, figures were seen passing through solid objects and even a whole herd of cattle was transported from one location to another in a matter of seconds.

The events surrounding the Coombs family may not seem overly surprising, given the fact that Pauline Coombs, the farmer’s wife at the centre of the ‘disturbances’, appears to have a history of supernatural interactions. Before moving to Ripperston Farm, the family lived in a caravan at Pembroke Dock. While here, Pauline, a devout Catholic, claimed to have witnessed not only the Virgin Mary, but Jesus himself, leading to such a stream of visitors that the owners of the caravan ended up destroying it!

So are ghosts and UFOs linked or do the occupants of extraterrestrial craft use ghosts as some kind of cloaking device? Do they, through some form of advanced technique, use recognisable images, such as deceased family members or cartoon characters, to make their targets more relaxed? If so, it doesn’t seem to work very well, as the poor victims are often petrified beyond belief, but it could be argued that the ETs know very little about our psychology and view us in their terms, much as we humans tend to anthropomorphise our view of the universe.

Whatever the truth behind these incidents, it seems that the barriers between the so-called physical world of UFOs and the spiritual world of ghosts and apparitions are not quite as water-tight as many would believe.

Credits:

1 - Devon Family: UFOs & Ghosts! (11/07/98) - Joint Investigation with BUFORA. - http://www.spiuk.net/casebook/ufos_aliens/casebook_ufos_aliens.htm

(Originally published in Issue 3 of UFOData Report)

It’s Not Just UFOs That Intrigue Us!

While we’re all craning our necks and gazing skyward, seeking out those enigmatic UFOs, it is sometimes interesting to look down now and again and look into the bizarre creatures that are reported across the globe every day. Lumped into the category of cryptozoology, these strange animals defy science by remaining hidden and often eluding the gaze of man.

Occasionally, though, stories emerge that remind us that there are still many, many mysteries right here on Earth. Here, we will cover just a few that have made the news recently.

The Porcupine-Monkey

In January, 2006, a story broke that American Navy SEALS videotaped a troupe of strange, ape-like creatures while on a secret mission in the Congo, sometime between 1997 and 2002.

The creatures were described as being about 4.5-5 feet tall, grey in colouring and having long, porcupine-like quills running down their backs. The SEAL team said that the group they videotaped (which has never been released due to the covert nature of the operation – go figure!) were in the act of killing another animal and that in this excited state, the quills stood erect.

The description of these odd, ill-tempered beasts resembles not only that of the legendary chupacabra of the Americas, but also of similar creatures known to the tribes of Madagascar, an animal they call the kalanoro.

It seems that the animals are carnivorous and, indeed, the kalanoro is often blamed for the disappearances of children.

The kalanoro

The Thylacine

Officially, the thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, a carnivorous marsupial, became extinct in 1936, when the last known specimen died in the Hobart Zoo on the island of Tasmania.

Since ‘Benjamin’s’ death sixty years ago, though, sightings in the wild of thylacines have continuously occurred and not only on Tasmania. Most recently, on January 2^nd, 2006, when a man driving in Colac, in the Australian state of Victoria, says he saw one run across the road in front of his car. He said the stripes on its rear, the distinctive, stiff tail and long, hind legs convinced him that “it was not a dog, feral cat or fox”.

If the thylacine was found to still remain alive in Australasia, it would be one of the most important rediscoveries of modern times, on a par with the discovery of the coelacanth, the primitive fish found alive off the African coast after believed to be extinct for 65 million years.

The Thylacine

“Champ” – The Monster of Lake Champlain

While Scotland has Nessie, the beast said to rear its head from the murky waters of Loch Ness, other countries have their own lake monsters. Probably the most famous after our home-grown beast is Champ, the long-necked monster said to swim in Lake Champlain, a sixty-five mile long body of water along the New York/Vermont border.

Champ is said to resemble Nessie, whom many cryptozoologists maintain is a type of plesiosaur, a marine reptile from the time of the dinosaurs, with a long neck, coils or humps and a length that varies from ten to almost two hundred feet.

The latest sighting made headline news in the States on February 22^nd, 2006, when a pair of Vermont fishermen videotaped something strange lurking in the water close to their boat. FBI forensic analysts have said the video is authentic, but of what it depicts, they cannot say.

A still from the February, 2006 video of Champ

The most famous photograph of Champ was taken in 1977 by Sandra Mansi. It appears to show a long-necked creature in the water, but some have said it could be anything from a log to a whale’s fluke.

Sandra Mansi’s famous photo of Champ

Speaking of debunking famous myths, recently a palaeontologist from Glasgow University explained away the Loch Ness Monster as being nothing more than an elephant swimming in the loch.

Neil Clarke spent two years researching Scotland’s famous cryptoid and came to his conclusion after discovering that circuses often used the new road by the loch in the 1930s (when the modern wave of sightings began). He said that the animals of the big top would be allowed to take a dip in the cool waters and an elephant swimming partly submerged could easily be mistaken for Nessie!

An elephantine Nessie?

Stegosaurs in Cambodia?

The magnificent temples of Angkor Wat are one of the wonders of the ancient world. They marked the height of the Khmer Empire between the 8^th and 14^th centuries and draw tourists from all over the world.

In February, the temple of Ta Prohm raised the eyebrows of cryptozoologists, when a photograph that appeared to show a carving of a stegosaurus appeared on the internet.

A Cambodian Stegosaurus?

The carving is genuine. It is really there. But does it depict a dinosaur, an animal supposedly extinct for at least 65 million years?

Stegosaurs were herbivorous dinosaurs that had two rows of bony plates that ran along their backs, just as shown in the carving, but what was one doing in Cambodia hundreds of years ago.

The answer may be more close to home than you might think. Some people have suggested that what is actually depicted on the temple wall is a rhinoceros, that lived in the area in historic times, and that the ‘plates’ are actually representations of a leafy background. Others have also posited that the carving is a modern hoax, put there by artistic pranksters for the enjoyment of tourists. And, of course, some say that it is a dinosaur and proves that the history of our planet is all-to-cock and that dinosaurs and man shared the globe until fairly recently.

Alien Big Cats

The British countryside is famous for its cows and sheep grazing in green fields bordered by hedgerows and dry-stone walls. Its mammalian wildlife ranges from tiny shrews up to the Red deer, while our largest carnivore is the badger. Or is it?

Since the 1960s, reports of large, cat-like animals have come from all over the country, the most famous being the Surrey Puma. In the 1980s, the so-called Beast of Bodmin ripped apart sheep in Cornwall. Things got so bad for farmers that the armed forces were called in to find the predator. Needless to say, they didn’t catch it. The reports carried on, with sightings and photographs coming from city suburbs to the wilds of Scotland. They became so numerous that a new term entered the lexicon: Alien Big Cats. By ‘alien’ we are referring to the fact that these felines are not native to the British Isles, rather than coming from another planet.

The Beast of Bodmin?

The cause of this invasion was put down to the Dangerous Animals Act of 1976, which prevented the public from owning exotic animals ranging from ostriches to big cats to crocodiles without obtaining a special license. What this doesn’t explain is the sightings pre-1976 and also why we aren’t getting reports of wild ostriches and crocodiles by British picnickers!

The release of alien creatures in the UK is not without precedent, however, as wallabies now thrive in Derbyshire, descendants of a group that escaped from a private zoo in the 1930s. The South American rodent, the coypu, also thrives in the wild in East Anglia, after being introduced in the 1920s.

Luckily, nobody has been seriously injured by the alien big cats, although there are reports of people being attacked and terrified by these predators. For the most part, though, they appear to shun human contact.

Sightings still occur and in February, 2006, casts were made of paw prints found in Scotland. Wildlife experts confirmed that the print was made by a big cat, possibly a black leopard.

(Originally published in Issue 3 of UFOData Report)

UFOs and Weird Beasts

Everybody knows that the study of the UFO phenomenon mainly concerns the investigation of sightings of lights and unexplained objects in the sky, abduction reports and the like, but there is another aspect to UFO lore that is less well-known – that of the strange beasts (aside from the Greys and other alien-type beings we are familiar with) that often accompany UFO incidents.

Many of these weird creatures are famous in and of themselves, but it is their connection with unidentified flying objects that we shall explore here.

BIGFOOT

People have been seeing ‘wildmen’ all over the world for centuries, but it is the sasquatch or Bigfoot of the American North-west that is the most notorious. Probably the most famous account of a Bigfoot sighting is that of Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin. They captured the creature on film in 1967 at Bluff Creek, California and, though the film is still controversial, this incredible piece of footage has yet to be completely debunked. We are concerning ourselves here, though, with the creatures’ relationship with UFOs.

In February, 1974, a woman was confronted on the doorstep of her Pennsylvania home by a Bigfoot (they are not solely exclusive to the NW Pacific coast states). She shot at it from a distance of about six feet, but instead of keeling over dead, there was a bright flash and the creature vanished. Her son-in-law reported seeing other Bigfoot (the word is both singular and plural) at the edge of nearby woods, with a bright, red flashing light hovering above them.

In 1973, again in Pennsylvania, a 22-year old man saw a red orb come down in a field. Taking two 10-year old boys to investigate, they saw the object hovering just above the ground. Close to the UFO, stood two Bigfoot-like creatures that possessed glowing, green eyes and long, dark hair. The man fired his rifle over their heads and when they failed to react, he fired directly at one of the creatures. It raised its hand and the UFO disappeared. The Bigfoot then walked slowly into nearby woods.

In 1991, Wisconsin farmer, Rita Massman reported that a few days after a UFO sighting, a Bigfoot came onto her land and stole several chickens. Her children reported being chased by a ‘8- or 9-foot tall, brown, 400-500 pound creature having a monkey-like face’.

CHUPACABRA

The chupacabra, or goat-sucker, entered the public eye in the mid-Nineties, but the legend goes back to 1975, when a creature known as the Moca Vampire was held responsible for slaughtering animals on the Caribbean island of Puerto Rica. Ducks, goats and even cows were found completely drained of blood. There was a spate of UFO sightings at the same time. The creature itself, though, was never seen.

Then in 1995, the island was victim to another wave of animal deaths. At first it was mainly goats that were found drained of blood through a single puncture wound, hence the name, el chupacabra – the goat-sucker. It didn’t take long for other animals to be found exsanguinated and this time, there were even sightings of the beasts responsible.

Many witnesses have reported a four or five-feet tall bipedal creature, with large, black eyes, long dorsal spines, large fangs, the ability to fly or jump to great heights and being able to dematerialise at will. They are also often reported at the same time as UFOs are witnessed.

To this day, sightings persist and they are no longer restricted to Puerto Rico. The same or similar creatures have been seen in Mexico, Texas and many other US states, Chile and Brazil.

THE MOTHMAN

In the late-Sixties, the town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, was the centre of a mystery that became a best-selling book and later, a major motion picture, The Mothman Prophecies.

People began reporting electrical interference with their home appliances and often cars would cut out for no reason. Lights would be seen hovering above the town, but particularly over an old TNT plant. People also reported seeing the Mothman.

This bizarre creature was described as possessing large, red eyes; standing between five and seven-feet tall; having dark, possibly grey or brown, skin; huge, bat-like wings with which it could ascend vertically and hover for long periods; and a terrifying, screeching call.

Although the bulk of Mothman sightings took place in 1966-67 in the West Virginia area, prior to the Silver Bridge disaster that claimed forty-six lives, witnesses are still coming forward with stories of large, bat-like creatures all over the world. Has the Mothman moved on to pastures new?

Curiously, the Mothman of Point Pleasant may have an earlier incarnation. In November, 1963, two young men and their girlfriends were walking near Sandling Park, Saltwood, Kent in the south of England. They observed a bright object that resembled a star descend into trees and begin moving through them. The UFO came to a halt close to them and disgorged a creature that resembles the Mothman reports. It shambled towards them and they described it as black, headless (some Mothman reports suggested that its red eyes were very close to the shoulders) and with wings like a bat.

THE SKINWALKER

In Navajo culture, a skinwalker is a medicine man that will don animal skins to perform magical or ritual ceremonies. Other Native American tribes claim skinwalkers to be able to shape-shift into wild animals, such as wolves. Skinwalkers have been known to ‘haunt’ an individual for years until the day the person dies.

One case links skinwalkers with UFOs like no other and that is the case of the so-called Skinwalker Ranch in Utah. For fifty years the ranch has been the site of UFO sightings, Bigfoot reports, ghost and poltergeist encounters and all many of paranormal phenomena.

The ranch was bought by the National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS) in 1995 from a family that had owned the property for only twenty months. They had reported all of the above phenomena and also cattle mutilations, giant wolves that vanished into thin air and could survive direct hits from rifle fire and the vaporisation of the family dogs after they chased blue orbs.

NIDS set up video cameras that were destroyed by unknown forces; they observed UFOs in the night sky and witnessed unknown animals appearing out of ‘tunnels of light’.

Las Vegas newsman, George Knapp and NIDS scientist, Dr. Colm Kelleher, have written a book about the ranch entitled Hunt for the Skinwalker.

These are just a small selection of the strange creatures that have been associated with UFO sightings over the years. As we continue to receive reports of Grey aliens or Nordic aliens or other beings that to all intents and purposes resemble us, save for cosmetic differences, perhaps we should consider that most intelligent beings in the universe will bear little to no resemblance to us and may have capabilities that would appear nothing short of magical.

(Originally published in Issue 2 of UFOData Report)

ALIEN CONTACT:

Has it already happened?

There are many conspiracy theories whizzing around the internet. Most fizzle out after a few turns around the block, but a few remain. Some become giants, with whole websites, books and TV programs devoted to them – 9/11, Princess Diana, JFK etc. Some persist, but are virtually unknown to most people. Whispers are heard, internet forum posts are made, the occasional article (such as this one) is written. But for the most part, they are lost in the raging sea of controversy that preoccupies many of us. While we search for answers to those questions that affect us now (Is climate change real? Am I going to be killed by Al-Qaeda?), truly wonderful stories become subdued.

In 1974, American documentary producer, Robert Emenegger, was asked by the Republican Party to produce a film about UFOs, using only official, government people and files. He was promised footage of an actual ‘flying saucer’ landing that had occurred at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico back in 1964. His film was made and given the title of UFOs: Past, Present and Future.

Unfortunately, the promised footage was never forthcoming, but Emenegger had shot the dramatised parts of the segment beforehand (air force officers answering telephones, emergency trucks driving around, that kind of thing). These would have been used as inserts into the actual landing footage. What he was forced to do instead was use paintings of the alien craft and the meeting that occurred with its occupants.

A few years later, in 1976, the documentary was re-released as UFOs: It Has Begun and again in 1979 (no doubt to cash in on the success of the Steven Spielberg smash-hit movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind), with additional material added from French ufologist Jacques Vallee and sections concerned with animal mutilations.

Did the meeting at Holloman AFB actually occur, or was it a ruse, a piece of misinformation with which to taint Emenegger’s otherwise excellent documentary? Rumours abound that Emenegger actually saw the footage for himself, yet in an interview for a History Channel program, he said that he asked about the footage at Wright-Patterson AFB, but he did not elaborate on whether he was shown it or not. It was all very hazy, murky and confusing.

Nevertheless, the stories that a meeting between top US military officials and representatives from an alien race actually did take place in 1964 persist to this day.

In 1974, Robert Emenegger published a book to accompany the release of his documentary. Large sections of it are almost word-for-word identical to the television program and it is an interesting read that expands. When it comes to the Holloman AFB landing, barely three pages are devoted to it! Here is the full text of that segment of the book:

Let us look at an incident that might happen in the future – or perhaps could have happened already.

The premise is that alien contact is made by extraterrestrial beings with representatives of the United States Air Force at Holloman AFB in the deserts of New Mexico.

Early morning is breaking over the cool gray New Mexico desert. We are in the operations tower of Holloman Air Force Base at the landing field.

We hear, over an intercom, a voice: "Check list April . . . Charlie four standing by." From within the tower, we hear a control operator giving some data to a pilot: "Wind, northeasterly—two knots. Temperature sixty-eight degrees, visibility ten miles and clearing." Behind the operator's voice, airmen are making small talk about the lousy coffee.

The day is clear. It's about 5:30 A.M. Traffic is light; one recon plane is on the field ready for takeoff when the tower phone rings and Sergeant Mann is given a report of an approaching unidentified craft.

We shift to the radar hut. On the scope several blips appear as the radar scans the sky. The radarman leans into his phone: "I'll repeat it again—unidentified approaching objects—on coordinate forty-niner—thirty-four degrees southwest following an erratic approach course..."

The controller, sipping his coffee, responds: "Probably a stray—civilian maybe? Keep me informed." He turns to his associate. "Check with Edwards." He scoots his chair up next to the radioman's. "Make contact with him, Bill."

The radio operator depresses the talk button and flicks a control switch: "This is Holloman Air Force Base Control Tower. Identify yourself. You are encroaching on military air space—warning—identify yourself— what is your tail number? You are in a restricted military air corridor." There is a pause and the airman turns to the controller: "No response."

The controller searches the airman's face for a reaction. "My god, what the hell do you make of it?" He pushes the intercom, connecting him to the base commander. He passes his binoculars to the airman, saying, "Here, look through my glasses."

Inside the commander's pale green office, a sergeant picks up the phone: "Base commander's office, Sergeant Whitmore speaking. Yes, yes—hold on. Colonel, for you."

The colonel swivels around in his chair and picks up the line: "This is Colonel Horner. Yes . . . yes, an unidentified vehicle. You warned the craft again? It's a what shape? . . . Check Edwards? . . . The civilian patrol? OK, right." The colonel sits for a moment with the phone in his lap, then makes a decision. Pushing a line on the squawk box, he leans forward: "Sound a red alert—unidentified craft approaching." He rises and calls to his aide, "Bill, make a quick check with Wright-Patterson and Intelligence—it may be an experimental craft from nearby. Alert the fire chief and security and safety." Searching for the plausible explanation, he mutters, "Sounds like a damned lunar module experiment."

Two military interceptors are dispatched to escort the unidentified craft out of the area.

By chance, cameramen, a technical sergeant and a staff sergeant, of the base photographic team, are aboard a base helicopter on a routine photographic mission at the time, and they run off several feet of film of three objects in the sky over Holloman. One of the objects breaks away and begins a descent. A second high-speed camera crew, set up to photograph a test launch, turn their camera toward the object and run off approximately six hundred feet of 16mm color film.

The cameras continued to roll as the extraordinary vehicle comes into view. It hovers, almost silently, about ten feet off the ground for nearly a minute, and yaws like a ship at anchor. Then it sets down on three extension arms.

The commander and two officers, along with two base Air Force scientists, arrive and wait apprehensively. A panel slides open on the side of the craft.

Stepping forward, there are one, then a second, and a third—what appear to be men dressed in tight-fitting jump suits. Perhaps short by our standards, with an odd blue-gray complexion, eyes set far apart. A large, pronounced nose. They wear headpieces that resemble rows of a rope-like design.

The commander and the two scientists step forward to greet the visitors. Arrangements are made by some inaudible sort of communication and the group quickly retires to an inner office in the King I area. There they are met and guided to the end of Mars Street to the west area building number 930. Left behind stand a stunned group of military personnel. Who the visitors are, where they're from, and what they want is unknown.

For an event that ‘might happen’ or ‘may have already happened’, it goes into some detail, giving names, times, amounts of footage shot etc. A big clue in my opinion that dates this to the 1964 event is the comment made by the colonel about it perhaps being a ‘lunar module experiment’. NASA was getting its moon missions into gear during the Sixties, following John F Kennedy’s famous speech of 1961 that set the goal of ‘placing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth’. It has been suggested, though, that the UFO landing actually occurred in 1971, but this would also still place it within America’s Apollo moon program.

One of the people that Emenegger and his partner, Allan Sandler, met during their negotiations for the Holloman footage was Paul Shartle, a senior officer at Norton AFB, California. In 1988, Emenegger and Shartle would appear in a television special called UFO Coverup – Live. Here it was revealed that twelve seconds of the Holloman landing footage was actually used in the UFOs: Past, Present and Future documentary. Shartle stated that the footage was real and that he had seen it in its entirety several times.

The Holloman story took another twist when in late 2005, a former military insider, who goes under the name ‘Anonymous’ began releasing material about a project called SERPO.

‘Anonymous’ claimed that the United States government had been in contact with a race of aliens that were called Ebens by the military. They were from the planet SERPO, a world that resided in the Zeta Reticuli star system, some thirty-nine light years from Earth. The contact had gone so far as to include an exchange of personnel, with a dozen military personnel travelling to SERPO and spending thirteen years there before returning in 1978 (the year that Spileberg’s Close Encounters depicted military officers returning home aboard a UFO, as well as new personnel preparing to leave). Of the twelve people that went, only eight returned – two died on the alien world and two decided to remain there. All of the eight that came home have since died.

Among ‘Anonymous’ revelations was a brief mention of a landing and meeting that took place ‘close to Holloman AFB’ on 24^th April, 1964. Two Eben ships were due to arrive, but one landed at the wrong location. The other craft found the meeting site without any problems.

Curiously, according to the SERPO releases, the craft that ‘got lost’ landed at Socorro, New Mexico. Check the date: 24^th April, 1964. The same day that police officer Lonnie Zamora saw his egg-shaped UFO outside Socorro, New Mexico!

In 1994, a strange, wooden mask appeared in the public domain. It appears to be an archaeological relic of some sort, but has National Security Agency (NSA) and United States Air Force (USAF) labels affixed to its reverse. Since when did these agencies become interested in archaeology?

It has been suggested that the mask resembles the descriptions of the headgear worn by the aliens at the Holloman AFB meeting. I will leave you to make up your own mind…

So, what is to be done with all of these rumours of human/alien interactions? If the military are really meeting with extra-terrestrials and even travelling to their homeworld on occasion, what is the purpose? No doubt, great scientific discoveries have been made and perhaps shared by the aliens. Are they sharing this knowledge with their new human chums? If these liaisons really do take place, then have we seen any practical applications from any exchanged technology here on Earth?

There have been countless technological breakthroughs in the last fifty or sixty years, but all of them can be accounted to the human geniuses involved in their development. As far as we know, there has been no technological aid given by an alien race to the US military or anybody else on Earth for that matter.

I have to ask: if they are not here to share their knowledge and advancements, then why are they here? Is there a more sinister agenda at work, one that the powers-that-be must keep secret at all costs?

Credits:

Thanks to Joshua Shapiro of www.v-j-enterprises.com for granting permission to use the image of the wooden mask.

Weird Travel:

UFOs & Alien Encounters

The Travel Channel (USA), Sunday 26^th March, 2006

Of all the places to expect to see a serious documentary about the UFO subject, the American ‘Travel Channel’, albeit part of the Discovery network, is not one of them. Yet, what was broadcast on Sunday, 26^th March, 2006 was one of the better programs on the subject in recent times.

Admittedly, it was made with the general audience in mind, therefore covered material that was well-known to UFO researchers, but it also covered phenomena that are not so widely known, such as the Mexican ‘flying humanoid’ sightings.

Straight off, sceptic, Dr Michael Shermer told us, paraphrasing the late, great Carl Sagan, by informing us that “we no longer live in the demon-haunted world of the Middle Ages”. By this he meant we were a sophisticated people living in a technological age of computers and space exploration, a world in which superstition plays no part.

To counter this, the narrator said that a recent CNN poll had discovered that one in seven Americans had “seen or knew someone who had seen a sign of alien activity”. He also remarked that eighty percent of US citizens believe that the government is hiding the true facts about UFOs.

Our first stop was, of course, Roswell, New Mexico. Stanton Friedman told us that a UFO crashed there, while Shermer reappeared and advised that Roswell was an example of nothing more than myth-making. We all know the story, but to surmise, something crashed at a ranch outside of Roswell in July of 1947. A press release from the Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF) informed the world that a ‘flying disc’ had been captured. This was hastily recanted and an experimental balloon with radar reflectors was blamed for the confusion.

Roswell investigator, Tom Carey, suggested that saying that the intelligence officer, Major Jesse Marcel, of the 509^th Bomb Group, at the time, the only atomic bomb group in the world, could not identify earthly materials from a balloon (tin foil and rubber) was not only ludicrous, but insulting.

A visit to modern Roswell showed how the UFO culture has descended on this out-of-the-way town, with almost every store having some sort of ET item to sell to the many tourists that visit each year. The Crash Site Café even boasts an alien chef! The main attraction in the town, though, is the International UFO Museum. This facility acts not only as a museum, depicting the Roswell Incident and other UFO topics, but also as a research centre, with an extensive reference library.

Despite the official version of events, which put the incident down to a Project Mogul balloon, researchers are still claiming that an extraterrestrial craft came down in 1947. Dennis Balthasar and Stanton Friedman maintain that the authorities’ actions during that time prove that it was nothing like a balloon that crashed. These actions included the threatening of witnesses.

The infamous alien autopsy was covered next (very timely, given the recently-released Ant & Dec movie) and Friedman made it clear that he thought it was a hoax, while Balthasar suggested it was an example of government misinformation.

Our next port of call was Area 51 in Nevada.

Connie West of the famous Little A’le’Inn diner explained how they have had visits from government officials and that, for some reason, the public has a need to know what goes on beyond the mountain range in the distance.

Friedman divulged that he believed that Area 51 held tests of such projects as Aurora, the hypersonic aircraft, and experiments with Uninhabited Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), some of which are designed for combat scenarios. The base, which was only recently acknowledged to exist, is exempt from federal and state laws and to this day, the government will make no comment about what goes on there.

The difficulty in accessing the base was noted, with explanations about the high fences, motion and other sensors and the many patrols that roam the desert, both on the ground and in the air. Stray into its airspace and fighters will be dispatched to escort your plane to safety…

Of course, Area 51s most famous secret is the claims that alien technology was back-engineered there. Bob Lazar is the most notorious whistle-blower and maintains that he was employed to work out how extraterrestrial craft operated.

Stanton Friedman believes that Lazar is a phoney and that his educational and work background is suspect. Lazar is adamant that he worked there and that the government went to great pains to erase his history.

In the small town of Snowflake, Arizona, an event in 1975 put it on the world map and produced one of ufology’s most famous stories.

A group of loggers were returning home one night in November when they saw a light in the forest. On investigating, they saw a UFO and, against the wishes of his friends, Travis Walton got out of the pickup tuck and headed towards the craft. He was struck by a beam and sent flying. His friends panicked and drove away, but Walton bore no malice and said he would have done the same. When they returned, Travis and the UFO were gone.

They reported what had happened to the local sheriff, but their tale was greeted with scepticism. They were even suspected of murdering their friend.

Walton described what happened when he came to. He was held down by a group of short aliens and something was placed over his face. Then he blacked out again.

He awoke, naked, by the side of a road, with the UFO hovering above him. As he watched, the craft zipped away. He was in the town of Heber, thirty miles from where he had been abducted. Finding a payphone, he called his friends and it was only then that he learned that he had been missing for five days!

Despite the efforts of sceptics to accuse Walton of drug-taking or flat-out hoaxing his experience, he maintains to this day that he was abducted, against his will, by extraterrestrials. In fact, he says that he wished that this thing had never happened to him.

Mexico is one of the world’s premier tourist destinations, both for its history and its beautiful beach resorts, but recently it has become more famous for one thing – UFO sightings. More reports come from Mexico than any other country, and more often than not, the sightings are backed-up by video evidence.

It all began during the total solar eclipse of 1991, when millions of Mexicans watched the spectacular event in the skies above them. Camcorders were trained upwards, but they not only caught the eclipse, they also caught something else – fleets of UFOs, metallic, disc-shaped objects that defied explanation.

So many sightings have occurred that even the Mexican military acknowledges that something is going on that they cannot explain.

In 2004, a young police officer from Guadalupe claimed he was attacked by a flying humanoid. He was in his patrol car, when the being dropped down out of the trees and repeatedly rammed into his windscreen. He described it as a hooded figure, like a witch, but without a broom (!). As he frantically reversed away, he said that the creature tried to grab him through the broken glass. He called for backup, but eventually lost control of the car and smashed into a wall and losing consciousness. Later medical tests proved he was fit and well and had no drugs or alcohol in his system, but that he was in a deep state of shock. It was also revealed that he has never been prone to hallucinations or any other psychological disorders.

Many video recordings of these flying humanoids have surfaced, with one showing two figures. One large figure expelled a smaller object, which flew away, then returned and was reabsorbed by the first.

Stanton Friedman is not impressed with the reports, but researcher, Ed Sherwood, believes that the appearance of the beings is a sign that something unprecedented is going to happen soon.

In 1997, something flew over Phoenix, Arizona and was seen by thousands of people and captured on videotape. The tale of the Phoenix Lights became the biggest UFO story since Roswell.

Explained away as nothing more than flares from military aircraft, the residents of Phoenix do not believe this theory and city official, Frances Barwood, was told to drop her inquiries when she brought it up at a meeting. She persisted, but says that the government has stonewalled her constantly.

Jeff Willes photographed the lights three hours before the main sighting and is certain that they were not military flares.

The most famous footage was shot by a local physician, Lynne Kitei. She remained anonymous for almost seven years, but still wanting answers to what she had seen, not only on that night, but on several occasions previously.

She first saw the lights two years previously, in 1995, close to her home. She described them as amber orbs that hovered in the air, but appeared to be intelligently-controlled. There were three of the orbs in a triangular formation. Then in January, 1997, two months before the famous event, she saw them again. She took photographs that showed strange, amber objects.

Lynne’s famous footage of the Phoenix Lights was sent to Village Labs, run by Dr Jim Dilettoso. His team scoured the footage and were able to triangulate a path for the objects. Military officials and Michael Shermer still maintain that what was seen were flares.

Dilettoso’s analysis of the footage, when compared with footage of known military flares, led him to the conclusion that what was seen over Phoenix was not what the authorities claimed it to be. He collected accounts from eyewitnesses over the three hour period that the lights were seen and said that a huge, V-shaped craft had glided over the city, reversed its course and glided back. What was seen, he said, was unknown.

As sightings and videotapes continue to flood in, people like Dilettoso believe that the best is yet to come, but, the narrator explained, UFO sightings are not a solely modern phenomenon.

Historical artworks depict what appear to be saucer-shaped craft in the skies and many, many ancient cave paintings and petroglyphs show what we today would call UFOs. Have aliens been observing us for thousands of years?

Stanton Friedman rounded things off by saying that he believes that extraterrestrials are observing us to ensure that we do not become a danger to the other, more advanced civilisations out there. As we take our first steps into space, the danger is that we will take our weapons and aggression with us. It would be prudent to keep an eye on ‘us primitives’.

This was a great show that was extremely enjoyable and no doubt brought the UFO subject to a whole, new audience. Hopefully, one day it will be broadcast over here in the UK.

The images used are the property of the copyright holders and are only used here for review purposes.

UFO FILES

Brazil’s Roswell

The History Channel, Sunday 12^th March, 2006

The History Channel’s UFO Files continues to prove itself to be one of the best UFO-based documentary series produced for many years. This week’s episode explores the events in 1977 on an Amazonian island that the producers have dubbed Brazil’s Roswell.

Over a period of months in that year, a sequence of events occurred that some have said led, twenty years later, to the apparent suicide (some call it murder) of Brazilian army captain, Uyrangê Hollanda. He was found hanging from his bed, asphyxiated by a tie wrapped around his neck by his daughter in 1997 just two months after giving an interview with Brazilian ufologists about what he experienced on the island of Colares in the Pará region of the country.

The superstitious people of Colares are simple fishermen and their families for the most part, not primitive by any means, but somewhat isolated from the bustling cities only a few hours drive away. Beginning in September of 1977, a technology beyond the ken of even the most sophisticated city-dweller visited this tranquil location.

Emidio Campos Oliveira was settling down to sleep on a warm night in October. Suddenly, a bright light penetrated the roof of his house and burned his thigh before vanishing as quickly as it had appeared.

Several days later, Orivaldo Malaquias Pinheiro was net fishing on the beach with a friend. A bright light began approaching them from the sea and, afraid, they ran. On telling others about their experience, it became clear that dozens of people had witnessed something similar, with some saying that they had been chased and attacked by the lights.

Lucia Helena Marques was a twenty-five year old dentist at the time and she recounted how she and others at the market she was visiting saw strange lights moving erratically out to sea. The lights were mostly red, but green and yellow ones were also visible. Then they simply vanished.

A journalist in the nearby city of Belém, Carlos Mendes, began receiving phone calls from the witnesses in Colares suggesting that his newspaper should visit the island and see the lights that were making the population so afraid. Mendes and his photographer set out to the island and heard the stories of the locals. The photographer took images of marks on the skin that witnesses said were caused by the lights. One woman had been paralysed by the lights and the next day found a group of puncture marks that looked like they had been made with a pin on her chest. Some even said that they thought the lights were sucking their blood!

Mendes never saw the lights for himself, but he appreciated how scared the local people were. Over the next few months, over eighty people would report being attacked by the paralysing beams of light from space. Things got so bad that many of the women and children left the town, while some of the men stood guard around bonfires. Others locked themselves in their homes, fearful of the mysterious invaders from above.

Doctor Wellaide Carvalho was the young local physician and had only been on the island for six months. During the time of the attacks, she saw a sharp increase of patients complaining of injuries caused by the lights. Initially sceptical and at first believing that the town was gripped with mass hysteria, Dr Carvalho found that each patient suffered from the same symptoms – signs of radiation burns and odd puncture marks, usually in the chest and thigh areas.

One night, a woman was brought in and her family explained that she had been attacked by the lights. She was suffering from spasms, her mouth was clenched shut and Dr Carvalho could not get her to respond to stimuli. Unable to stabilise her patient, the doctor could do nothing but have the patient bundled into a car and driven to the regional hospital in Belém.

Five days later, as she waited for a report on the progress of the woman, another patient was brought in, another victim of the lights. She had been attacked whilst standing in her garden. She was so completely rigid that the police officers that had brought her in their car had been forced to drive her there with her legs sticking out of the door. This patient was also sent to the city hospital.

Shortly afterwards, Dr Carvalho received word from Belém that both patients had died. She requested that a cause of death be ascertained, but the report came back, giving no explanation for how the women had died. The young doctor still did not believe that the women had died because of an attack by these supernatural lights, but that the panic that had gripped the town had brought on a heart attack or stroke in both patients.

Hoping to put an end to the hysteria, Carvalho and other town officials pleaded with the mayor for help. A request went out for the Regional Air Command (COMAR) to look into what was happening on Colares. Heading up the investigation was Captain Uyrangê Hollanda.

Carlos Mendes suspected that the government assigned COMAR to investigate the island was because it believed that communist guerrillas were behind the attacks. The rebels had been active in the state for some time. Despite this mundane reason behind Captain Hollanda’s investigation, it was assigned a curious name – Operation Saucer.

The team arrived on Colares and set up camp. They placed cameras on the beaches and ensured that the locals saw everything that they were doing, in the hope that seeing this would calm their fears. Their efforts were in vain, however. Hollanda met with Dr Carvalho and instructed her that she should tell everybody that all that was at work on Colares was mass hysteria and nothing more. From that point, the doctor knew that the investigation was not to find the truth, but to hide it. She refused to cooperate, saying that she would not lie to her patients.

Carvalho’s scepticism about the cause of the injuries changed when she had an encounter for herself. She was walking home one evening when she saw a woman faint. As she tended to her, her attention was drawn to a bright light in the sky. She saw a cylindrical object of a colour that she could not describe. Transfixed, she watched it move in an elliptical manner. Unknown to her, at the same time, a radar station set up on the beach by the COMAR team picked up the object. As they rushed to focus their cameras and telescopes on the object, it headed out to sea and vanished.

Over a four month period, Hollanda’s team took over five hundred photographs and fifteen hours of film footage, depicting strange lights in the sky. They drew diagrams of what they had seen and made out reports, which were sent back to COMAR headquarters in Brasilia.

At the end of December 1977, the order came to wrap up Operation Saucer. Hollanda’s team packed up and left Colares and their reports have never been made public.

Over the following months, the sightings and attacks diminished and eventually became nothing more than a local legend. Operation Saucer was forgotten about until 1997.

That year, Hollanda contacted Brazilian ufologists, AJ Gevaerd and Marco Petit. They travelled to Rio de Janeiro, where they filmed an interview with the former air force officer. Over two days, he gave an astonishing account of what his team saw during their time on Colares.

He described brightly-lit craft in the sky, some of which were over a hundred metres across and making sounds like the thrum of an air-conditioning unit and also clicking noises. He described three encounters and produced drawings of what he had seen, depicting cylindrical, saucer-shaped and triangular craft.

His final encounter included a visit from one of the occupants of the craft while he was in bed. He said there was a bright flash and suddenly, he felt the creature hugging him from behind. It was a metre and a half tall, wearing some sort of mask that hid its features and a suit that reminded him of something an astronaut or diver might wear. Then it spoke to him in Portuguese, but in a metallic, computer-like voice:

“Take it easy. We are not going to do you any harm.”

Then it vanished.

Hollanda then claimed that he had an object implanted under the skin of his left arm. As he demonstrated, something solid, yet flexible could be clearly seen beneath the surface. He claimed the alien had placed it there and an x-ray had shown nothing.

Two months later, Hollanda was dead. Despite having a history of mental illness and previous suicide attempts, some who knew him said that he could not have killed himself. His co-pilot during Operation Saucer, Pinon Friás, said that Hollanda would never have tied a rope around his neck and hanged himself. Gevaerd disagreed, saying that the captain had been depressed, but that his story proved that something went on at Corales and the Brazilian government knew all about it.

In 2004, Gevaerd and Petit fought and won a case to be allowed access to the Operation Saucer files. They found the sketches, reports and photographs taken by Hollanda’s team, however, they claimed that not all the documents were made available to them. Of the hundreds of photographs and reports that were filed, they were shown only a hundred and ten photos and two hundred documents, nor were they allowed to view the film footage shot by the team. The reports they saw, though, were astonishingly detailed and comprehensive, yet they made no attempt to explain the sightings nor did they debunk them. The photos they saw were also puzzling, showing odd lights in the sky.

Officially, Operation Saucer found nothing that can be explained scientifically and that was as far as the Brazilian government would go with regard to the events of 1977. It would be up to independent researchers to try and find their own answers.

Doctor Daniel Rebisso is a ufologist intrigued by the reports of burns and puncture marks inflicting the victims of the Colares lights. He dismissed the theory that the marks were the result of vampire bats, explaining that bats leave completely different wounds when they feed. He also found the theory that what happened was down to mass hysteria and self-mutilation to be wanting. Rebisso also looked into claims that the lights were some form of psychological warfare by the communist guerrillas, in an attempt to frighten away the locals so that weapons could be brought in for their cause. This could neither be confirmed nor denied.

He came to the conclusion that some form of radiation paralysed the victims’ nervous systems and the lights extracted something from their bodies. Marco Petit seemed to agree, suggesting that material was taken so that the aliens could produce vaccines that would protect them against earthly viruses once open contact is finally made.

Whatever happened on Colares, and the files opened by the Brazilian Air Force seem to confirm that something happened and was not only reported, but also captured on film, it is another little-known case brought to mainstream, public light by the increasingly excellent UFO Files. Whether it should be called ‘Brazil’s Roswell’ is another matter. The case bears little resemblance to those events of 1947 and the incident in Varginha in 1996 would likely fit the ‘Roswell’ label better. Perhaps UFO Files will cover this important case at some point?

The images used are the property of the copyright holders and are only used here for review purposes.

UFO FILES

Russian Roswell

The History Channel, Sunday 5^th March, 2006

The History Channel’s UFO Files continues with its theme of worldwide ‘Roswells’, after bringing us Britain’s Roswell, Mexico’s Roswell and Texas’ Roswell. This latest episode tells us all about the Russian Roswell.

Kapustin Yar was the former Soviet Union’s most sensitive air base, even exceeding America’s Area 51 for the levels of secrecy that shrouded it. UFO Files claimed that it was to present never-before-seen footage of the base, reconnaissance photos and even a virtual tour of its hidden depths.

Kapustin Yar was created as the site for the development of the Soviet Union’s space program after the end of World War II. It lies over 500 miles south of Moscow and about 60 miles east of Volgograd, the former Stalingrad. These days it lies close to the Kazakhstan border, but back in those days, the base was deep inside Soviet territory. It was here that captured V2 rockets and the German scientists that created them were set to work with not only the single task of getting into space before the Americans, but also designing and testing new aircraft, missiles and other weapons systems. The base was deemed so secret that the nearby town of Zhitkur was emptied of its population and levelled because it was too close.

In 1948, less than a year after the famed Roswell Incident, the base’s radar operators picked up an unidentified object. At the same time, a fighter pilot flying close to the base had a visual sighting of a silver, cigar-shaped object. Reporting that he was being blinded by rays from the UFO, the pilot was ordered to engage with it and, after a three minute dogfight, a missile successfully brought down the object. It seems that the UFO fired some sort of energy weapon at the MiG and both craft crashed to the ground.

William J Birnes, publisher of the American UFO Magazine, believed that the alien craft fired a particle beam weapon at the Soviet fighter, but a lucky shot with the missile disrupted the UFO’s anti-gravity field, causing it to fall from the sky. Soviet recovery teams quickly gathered up all the wreckage and transported it to the underground facility at Kapustin Yar, which was ironically named Zhitkur, after the former town not far from the base.

Birnes claimed that MiG pilots were ordered to take any measures necessary to bring down extraterrestrial craft because Moscow was desperate to gain any advantage over the United States, whom they believed had made their tremendous advances due to recovered flying saucer reverse-engineering.

Russia has a long history of UFO sightings, dating back thousands of years. Russian researcher, Paul Stonehill, co-author with Philip Mantle of UFO-USSR, described how in about 950AD, Ahmed Ibn Fadlan, an Arab chronicler, was dispatched by the Caliph of Baghdad to engage in diplomacy with the King of the Bulgars. In the Volga region of Russia, Fadlan described how he and his fellow travellers witnessed ‘aerial battles’ between ‘shapes’ that moved through the clouds. Fleets of objects, flying in formations that resembled people and animals, engaged each other, merging and separating for a long period of time. Stonehill described it as being like something from a modern movie.

On 15^th August, 1663, a great fiery disc came down from the sky and began shooting beams of light into the Robozero Lake near Belozersk, about 250 miles east of St. Petersburg. It moved from the south to the west, vanished and later reappeared for an hour and a half, terrifying the local witnesses. Fisherman were said to have been scalded by the light and glowing fish leaped from the water, as if to escape the fireball floating overhead.

In 1892, an object appeared over Moscow and shot a ‘pillar of light’ down to the ground for 20-25 minutes. It was described as fiery, much like most other Russian UFO reports through the ages.

One Russian event dwarfs any reported anywhere in the world. On June 30^th, 1908, a huge fireball raced across the Siberian taiga and exploded over the forest close to the town of Tunguska. Six hundred square miles of tundra was razed to the ground and the shockwave was felt by seismographs around the world.

At first it was thought that a meteor had impacted with the Earth and when the first expeditions arrived twenty years later, they expected to find a huge crater. No crater was found, but the devastation was evident, with trees laid out like matchsticks in a huge, circular swathe from the centre of the blast. From the pattern of the destruction, it soon became apparent that the object had exploded high above the ground, much like the atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945, but much more powerful in terms of magnitude.

Most researchers outside of Russia, including Stanton Friedman, were convinced that this was a natural event and nothing to do with aliens or UFOs, but Russian ufologists, such as Nikolai Subbotin of the Russian UFO Research Station, were not so sure. Subbotin explained how the object apparently changed course twice before exploding, something a natural object such as a meteorite or comet cannot do. Then there were unexplained radiation levels in the region and the fact that plant life appears to have been altered because of this radiation.

Stalin himself seemed convinced that the event was related to some sort of weapon, possibly from extraterrestrials, and he set Sergei Korolev, the father of Soviet rocketry, the task of finding answers. Korolev financed a team to travel to Tunguska in fleets of helicopters. They found radioactive metal fragments and an area that has become known as ‘The Devil’s Graveyard’, an area close to the blast site where no plants will grow and animals tend to die. Although Korolev is believed to have told Stalin that he thought the blast was caused by an alien spacecraft, his official report put the blame squarely on a meteorite.

As rumours began to filter back to Washington DC about UFO wreckage from Tunguska, the 1948 crash and other incidents being taken to Zhitkur, it became obvious to America’s intelligence agencies that they needed to find out what was going on. Their spies informed them that the Soviet Union was building huge rockets that could not only carry large, nuclear payloads, but could also reach space. Indeed, their progress became so rapid, that the Soviets were ahead of their own schedules in terms of advancement.

By the time American U2 spy planes photographed the complex at Kapustin Yar, there were at least four ballistic launch sites, fourteen launch pads, a highly-sophisticated radar tracking facility, three long runways and numerous unidentified areas. There were strange, geometric patterns on the ground. Many UFO researchers believe that these designs are to attract UFOs and are patterned after ancient monuments and cereal glyphs.

What the reconnaissance aircraft could not reveal was the underground Zhitkur facility. UFO Files now took us on a virtual guided tour of the base, recreated from descriptions given from Russian ufologist Anton Anfalov. A quarter of a mile beneath the surface, we were led down dark, dank corridors and tunnels, with numerous chambers containing various types of extraterrestrial craft in various stages of disassembly. There were areas where autopsies of aliens would take place and other sections where perhaps engines wer