Pennsylvania: UFO Portal by Headline Books / Zoom Into Books

Pennsylvania UFO Portal FRED SALUGA AND DR. RAYMOND KELLER

Fred Saluga has been investigating Bigfoot, UFOs, and other paranormal phenomena for over 50 years. He is a licensed private investigator in the States of West Virginia, Florida, and Pennsylvania and a retired law enforcement officer and Chief of Police in Fayette County, PA. He currently serves as the State Director for the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) in WV and the Assistant State Director of MUFON in PA. Fred has investigated over 500 UFO cases and established MUFON’s Humanoid Research Group, which oversees the investigation of humanoid beings reported as UFO occupants. He is also concurrently serving as the Director of the West Virginia Center for Unexplained Events, an organization dedicated to investigating sightings of Bigfoot, cryptids, ghosts, and other anomalous entities. He is the Director of the Fayette County, PA Bigfoot Research Project, headquartered in Uniontown, PA.

Pennsylvania

UFO Portal FRED SALUGA DR. RAYMOND KELLER

Pennsylvania: UFO Portal Fred Saluga &

Dr. Raymond Keller

Headline Books Terra Alta, WV

Pennsylvania: UFO Portal by Fred Saluga and Dr. Raymond Keller copyright ©2024 Fred Saluga and Dr. Raymond Keller All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any other form or for any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage system, without written permission from Headline Books. To order additional copies of this book or for book publishing information, or to contact the author: Headline Books P.O. Box 52 Terra Alta, WV 26764 www.HeadlineBooks.com Email: mybook@headlinebooks.com ISBN 13: 9781958914366 Library of Congress Control Number: 2024933256

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

This book is dedicated to all ufologists of Pennsylvania, past and present, facilitating the ultimate disclosure of the “Truth that is Out There.”

CONTENTS Introduction..................................................................................................................5 Philadelphia Buzzed by Flying Saucers (1949).........................................................7 Landed “Jets” with Pilots Disembarked: Possible Case of Time Travel (1952).......................................................................9 Life Forms from Outer Space Drop Down to Pennsylvania (1958)................... 11 Abducted by the “Men in Black” (1959)................................................................. 14 “Mothership” and UFO Formation Passes Over the “City of Brotherly Love” (1962)........................................................... 19 Truth of the Kecksburg, Pennsylvania “Meteor” (1965)...................................... 21 “It’s the End of the World,” at Least as She Knew It (1966).................................. 27 When UFOs Were First Deemed “Essentially Real” (1968)................................ 29 Back Seat Bingo and the “Horst Orchard Ghost Lights” (1972)......................... 43 The Great Flying Saucer Invasion of Pennsylvania (1973)................................... 46 Trooper Dale and the Case of the Frightened Driver (1977).............................. 52 “Thumb-to-Eye” Estimation Made of Fifty-Foot-Wide UFO (1981)................. 55 Southwest Pennsylvania Residents Baffled by “Strange Ball” and Lights in the Sky (1981)..................................... 57 “Fuzzies” Dropped from Flying Saucers (1981).................................................... 62 “Keystone Cops and Saucer” (1982)....................................................................... 64 Central New Jersey-Pennsylvania UFO Study Group (1985).............................. 66 Pennsylvania Boy Experiences “Missing Time” Following UFO Encounter (1992)....................................................................... 78 Flying Saucer Flap Over Franklin County, Pennsylvania (1996)........................ 80 Southwest Pennsylvania Counties Receive “Rash of UFO Sightings” (2009).......................................................................... 83 The Day the Venusians Came to Town (2017)...................................................... 87 Appendix A: Looking Back at the “Philadelphia Experiment” (1943)............... 92 Appendix B: Pioneering Application of Computer Technology to UFO Research (1989)............................................... 96 Appendix C: Personal vs. Public Disclosure (2023)............................................ 102 Books by the Authors.............................................................................................. 104 4

Introduction In 1972, the chief astronomy professor of Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois, Dr. J. Allen Hynek, proposed a classification system for UFO reports, consisting initially of three categories. Hynek’s purpose in creating this system was to get researchers in both the scientific and ufology communities to start thinking about the UFO phenomenon in similar, reasonable terms. He wanted those involved in UFO investigations to move beyond superstitious, preconceived ideas about UFOs, sometimes steeped in a panic mode, and begin to examine the enigma in a more rational and objective manner. In his new classification system, Hynek looked at UFO reports in terms of close encounters, these being of the first, second, and third kinds.1 Since he first came up with these three categories; however, four more have been added in order to establish a more comprehensive list.2 In the future, perhaps more categories will be added as necessity requires, but in this book, we have chosen to utilize this more updated categorization of seven categories and provide you, the reader, with a brief summary of each below: Close Encounters of the First Kind (CE-1) are sightings in which one or more UFOs have been reported. These are the most common UFO reports on Hynek’s scale. Close Encounters of the Second Kind (CE-2) consist of UFO reports in conjunction with other phenomenon, such as trace evidence of an object’s presence, i.e., a crop circle, environmental damage, animal reactions, electrical or mechanical interference, memory gaps (lost time), bodily paralysis of the UFO experiencer, excessive heat or radiation emission, etc. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (CE-3) are those in which UFOs have been spotted but go further to include a visual confirmation of an associated, animated entity. Reports in this category, as well as the remaining four, remain controversial, as they are hard to validate. 1 2

J. Allen Hynek, Ph.D., UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry (Chicago, Illinois: Henry Regnery Company, 1972), 29. Act for Libraries, 2017: http://www.actforlibraries.org/the-7-classes-of-extraterrestrial-close-encounters/ (Accessed 18 May 2023). 5

Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind (CE-4) involve the abduction of a human being by an entity associated with a UFO. Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind (CE-5) are those where bilateral contact with an extraterrestrial or ultra-dimensional entity occurs. This type of information exchange can take place through some audible form of communication or by some form of mental telepathy. The contact can be initiated by either the human or extraterrestrial/ultra-dimensional entity. Close Encounters of the Sixth Kind (CE-6) entail a UFO or its occupants directly causing injury or death. Close Encounters of the Seventh Kind (CE-7) are decidedly the most controversial. In this type of encounter, a human and extraterrestrial or ultradimensional mate to produce a hybrid being. According to an article published by Act for Libraries on their website, “Over the years, many kinds of (UFO) encounters have been slightly changed, not all sources agree on what are the actual kinds of close encounters beyond those of the fourth kind. While science itself seems to only endorse the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence, at this time, encounters beyond the second kind have not received any accepted empirical investigation that has been made public.” Act For Libraries is an internet community of science, medical, health, and wellness professionals, experts, and ordinary consumers dedicated to developing and enhancing an open dialogue about health and wellness. They included the description of the last four close encounters classifications in the context of being “committed to bringing you the latest in medical health facts and research.” Especially in light of the CE-6 category, we, the author and contributing editor, heartily thank and agree with the Act for Libraries’ decision to do this. Keep watching the skies! 18 May 2023 Fred Saluga

State Director for West Virginia, Mutual UFO Network Assistant State Director for Pennsylvania, Mutual UFO Network Telephone (304) 439-3590 e-mail: paranormal1949@aol.com Chester, West Virginia

Raymond Keller, Ph.D.

Venus Rising book series author Telephone: (304) 594-0454 e-mail: rkeller1@mix.wvu.edu Morgantown, West Virginia

CHAPTER I

PHILADELPHIA BUZZED BY FLYING SAUCERS Classification: CE-1 Date: Saturday, 9 July 1949 Location: Philadelphia, Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania

Flying Saucers over typical American metropolitan area in Ed Wood’s Plan Nine from Outer Space (Reynolds Pictures, Inc., Los Angeles, California, 1959).

On the evening of Saturday, 9 July 1949, between 9:30 p.m. and 11 p.m., Philadelphia’s skies were peppered by the intermittent appearance of flying saucers, described by the observers as “dully lighted plates or discs.” These Philadelphians noted that the saucers, upon first sighting them, looked like “searchlights against the clouds, but no beams were visible.” One couple from the northeast suburb of Tacony, about eight miles from downtown Philadelphia, George G. Wunsch and his wife of 7017 Tulip Street, reported seeing as many as nine flying saucers. Both testified that the saucers “appeared at intervals” and “traveled considerably faster than an airplane.” To

this couple, the objects were only in view for a few minutes, starting around 10:30 p.m., but “clearly visible to the naked eye.”3 Barry Mc Guiren, a theatrical photographer, and his wife, of 4101 Spruce Street in West Philadelphia, also reported sighting a flying saucer that evening. They, too, thought at first it must be a searchlight, but were puzzled by seeing no beam reaching upward from the ground connecting with it. Both claimed that “A platter circled about our West Philadelphia neighborhood for some time. At intervals, it seemed to stop for about eight seconds.” The flying saucers that buzzed Philadelphia that night seemed to be moving in every direction, passing over the central city as well as outlying suburbs. Some informants reported that the small, illuminated plates or discs were moving in a circular direction toward Trenton, New Jersey, across the river from Philadelphia. Others claimed the flying saucers were headed toward the west end of Philadelphia. Excited residents called both the Inquirer newspaper offices and the Electrical Bureau at City Hall to report the presence of the strange objects and to find someone in authority at either of these offices who might be able to tell them what the discs might possibly be. All of those reporting the flying saucers were in agreement on one aspect of this event. That being the objects “disappeared as mysteriously as they came by just vanishing into the clouds” around 11 p.m., no matter where they were overhead in the Philadelphia sky. Historical Context The unknown journalist who covered this story for the Inquirer did, however, include this historical note: “The reports recalled the excitement of the summer of 1947 when similar objects were viewed by thousands of persons in virtually all sections of the Western Hemisphere. As suddenly as the reports started, they ceased. “The 1947 episode never was really solved. Some guessed that the discs were new military weapons from a foreign power, possibly Russia. Others offered the suggestion that they were from another planet. Still others said that the reports were caused by a “concoction of one-third make-believe, one-third mass hysteria, and the remainder just plain tomfoolery.” Whatever the objects over Philadelphia were that night, it had the whole population of eastern Pennsylvania and western New Jersey talking about it.

3 8

No stated author, “Flying Saucers Seen Over Philadelphia,” Philadelphia Inquirer, 10 July 1949 (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania).

CHAPTER II

LANDED “JETS” WITH PILOTS DISEMBARKED: POSSIBLE CASE OF TIME TRAVEL Classification: CE-3 Date: Tuesday, 15 July 1952 Location: Litchfield, Bradford County, Pennsylvania

Did two Harrier jump jets crash the time barrier, plummeting back to 1952 and landing on a Litchfield, Pennsylvania, farm? Photo source: Aviation Today.

On 7 March 2021, a call came into the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC) in Davenport, Washington, from a 73-year-old gentleman from rural Litchfield, Pennsylvania, the town of his birth, recounting a UFO and occupants encounter that he and his younger brother had there on their family farm’s property back in the summer of 1952. It was about 1:00 p.m. on Tuesday, 15 July 1952, that the caller to NUFORC, wishing to remain anonymous, was then but eight years old when he and his younger brother had ascended a hill to a rock-strewn mesa more than an acre in length along the southern perimeter of their land, whereupon they caught sight of “two hovering craft which resembled jets that came in for a landing.” The caller also explained, “We could also see the 9

pilots that had gotten out of their respective crafts for a few minutes to check out their jets, and they had on what appeared to be oxygen masks. As soon as they reboarded their jets, they took off vertically and then turned about, heading in a westerly direction. When we returned to the farm, where our father was out bailing hay, and told him what we saw, he did not believe us.” The caller to NUFORC asserted, “I believe that back then (in 1952), it was impossible for jets to land on a short field. Perhaps it was some kind of camouflaged UFOs.” Comments: The only type of aircraft with such capabilities as described by this UFO is the Harrier, informally referred to as the “Harrier jump jet.” It is of a family of jet-powered attack aircraft capable of vertical/short takeoff and landing operations (V/STOL) and named after a bird of prey. It was originally developed by British manufacturer Hawker Siddeley in the 1960s. The Harrier emerged as the only truly successful V/STOL design of the many attempted during that era. It was conceived to operate from improvised bases, such as car parks or forest clearings, without requiring large and vulnerable air bases. Later, the design was adapted for use from aircraft carriers. That such aircraft did not exist in 1952 leads one to believe that this was a genuine report of UFOs on the part of the two boys. Based on the type of “jets” described in this encounter and the masks worn by the pilots, one could speculate that somehow, two Harrier jump jets crashed through the time barrier, plummeting their pilots ten or more years into the past.

In September 1960, American International Pictures (Los Angeles, California) premiered the epic science fiction movie Beyond the Time Barrier, where a United States Air Force pilot lands his jet 100 years in an apocalyptic future.

CHAPTER III

LIFE FORMS FROM OUTER SPACE DROP DOWN TO PENNSYLVANIA Classification: Possible CE-3 Date: 8 September 1958 Location: Blue Mountains, mostly the southwestern end of Franklin County in south-central Pennsylvania

Photo from files of Saucerian Press (Clarksburg, West Virginia) staff photographer August C. Roberts depicts Howard and Connie Menger of Highbridge, New Jersey, well-known contactees of the late 1950s and early 1960s and frequent guests on Long John Nebel’s WORNew York City, 710 on the A.M. dial, nightly radio program, Party Line. Howard made a film of UFOs as living entities in the Blue Mountains of south-central Pennsylvania and Connie published them in the October 1959 issue of Fantastic Universe (New York City, New York: Great American Publications) science and science fiction magazine.

(Editor’s Note: The following letter was submitted to the world authority on contactees, Frank Chille, a program director for Jeff Rense’s popular paranormal podcast on the Rense website (scan QR), to which it was posted on 31 January 2018.) 28 January 2018 Dear Frank: On the afternoon of 8 September 1958, then well-known contactee with the Venusians and Saturnians, Howard Menger, drove about 70 miles from his home in Highbridge, New Jersey, to a remote, but predesignated location in Pennsylvania’s Blue Mountains. He was previously instructed by a Venusian contact in New Jersey to bring his 8 mm movie camera in addition to his Polaroid land camera. He did not return home until 5 a.m. on 9 September. Howard had taken a photograph of a spaceship, but he admitted that it was “something more,” and he wasn’t going to go public with it because “people might misunderstand and become frightened.” His wife, Connie, also claiming to be a contactee and a reincarnated Venusian, however, immediately recognized that the ship itself was a living entity and in the very process of transmogrification that she had seen extraterrestrial beings of every kind undergo while transitioning into the Earth’s biosphere. Connie insisted that Howard calm himself and that nothing bad would occur if the photos were published with a rational explanation. Howard was still hesitant, but Connie went ahead and submitted the film to Hans Stefan Santesson, the editor of the Fantastic Universe Science Fact and Fiction magazine. They were published under her pen name Marla Baxter, in the October 1959 issue, vol. 11, no. 6. There is much to discuss here, certainly lending vindication to UFO theorists like Ivan T. Sanderson and John A. Keel. Your cosmic friend, Dr. Raymond Keller

From Keller Venus Files: Photos below of UFOs as living entities on a roll of film taken by contactee Howard Menger on the afternoon of 8 September 1958 in the Blue Mountains somewhere in Franklin County, Pennsylvania.

CHAPTER IV

ABDUCTED BY THE MEN IN BLACK (MIB) Classification: CE-4 Date: Summer 1959 Location: Unspecified urban area, Pennsylvania

Are these the real Men in Black (MIB)? This image, albeit blurry, was taken from a security camera in a Pennsylvania hotel lobby. Photo source: ufoinsight.com

A Pennsylvania gentleman, wishing to remain anonymous, experienced an abduction by the notorious Men in Black (MIB), whence he was taken aboard a flying saucer for a brief period. After surviving the MIB/UFO encounter, the experiencer did not know who he should report the incident to. After all, it was the summer of 1959, and anyone in authority in the government (local, state, or national) might very well see that he was locked up in an insane asylum for filing such a seemingly tall tale. Government agents might assume one of two scenarios: First, the gentleman knew too much about flying saucers and 14

their occupants, enough to convince the general public of a wide conspiracy to prevent the disclosure of classified UFO information; or secondly, the required investigation to follow up on the incident would be a waste of time for any government operatives, who maybe are as much in the dark about the real nature of the flying saucer phenomenon as the average man or woman on the street, and wouldn’t even know where really begin in investigating this matter. As such, the gentleman kept his mouth shut until he was lying on his deathbed, whence he finally made the report to Brad Steiger (1936-2018), a paranormal investigator who authored over 175 books on such subjects as Atlantis, Bigfoot, cryptids, extraterrestrial encounters/UFOs, ghosts, etc. The experiencer had read many books about UFOs and possible extraterrestrial and ultra-dimensional connections to the phenomenon since his encounter with the MIB and the UFO almost 20 years ago, and he recognized Steiger as one of the world’s greatest authorities on the subject, a man who would not laugh at him and might be able to provide him with some sensible answers and explanations for the incident. It was 1977, and the paranormal author, who lived in Nashville, Tennessee, made it a point to go and visit the experiencer at his home in a major metropolitan area of Pennsylvania to receive his report and provide an account of this gentleman’s experience in his then forthcoming book, Alien Meetings (New York City: Ace Books, 1978). An Unfortunate Meeting with Two of the MIB The experiencer was at home, sitting in his favorite lounge chair, trying to push back sleepiness while trying to catch up on some reading. Then, all of a sudden, he felt tense and couldn’t figure out why. He was getting restless. Some strange thoughts were merging at the back of his mind. Feeling compelled to look at the living room door, he had a sneaking suspicion that someone, or perhaps something, was lurking on the other side of it. Placing his book on the table stand next to his lounge chair, he got up and went to the door, just opening it a wee crack to peer out and see who, or what, might be there. Sure enough, there was not one, but two men dressed in black, looking like identical twins. They were dark complexioned with Orientalappearing eyes. The quirky thing about this, however, is that he instinctively knew that the two men weren’t of Asian origin. The experiencer took note that neither of these two men dressed in black spoke a single word in any language. Nevertheless, he could clearly pick up their thoughts in English. They both projected the question, “Are you ready?” to the

experiencer’s mind. For some unknown reason, he answered them with the thought, “I am ready to go.” It was stifling hot that night, so our Pennsylvania friend was in the buff. A large standing fan was whirling from the other side of the living room, facing directly toward the lounge chair. Keeping the living room door slightly ajar, he reached for his walking shorts, wishing to put them on and maintain a decorum of modesty when he fully opened the door and stood face-to-face with the strange visitors. He quickly forgot the shorts, however, as he heard the telepathic voice in his head once again, with the MIBs simply declaring, “That will not be necessary.” Once the experiencer stepped out into the hall, he and the MIBs were instantaneously transported to the top of a flat hill in the back of the apartment complex. Naturally, the experiencer was surprised that their location had changed so quickly. While standing outside, he was again startled as the headlights of a car were speedily approaching him and the visitors coming down the street. He ducked, therefore, behind the two MIBs. He then heard laughter echoing through his mind. As he snarled at the visitors, they calmly projected the thought, “Well, we told you no one would see you. You’re invisible. Test it for yourself!” In Steiger’s aforementioned book, the paranormal investigator writes of the experiencer, “He then boldly stepped around in front of them, spread his feet apart, propped his hands on his hips, daring anyone to see him. But a car, with a man and a woman in it, passed a few feet from them, not even looking in their direction. “He turned to say something to his companions, and they were looking up. He followed their gaze and realized that something was hanging there, suspended above them. As he did so, an opening appeared in its center and blue-white light came tumbling out of it. He felt an uneasy sensation in the pit of his stomach, like when you are in an elevator or an airplane that is dropping too fast. He could see apartment houses and the ground receding below them.” Abduction Aboard the Flying Saucer They were floating up toward a mysterious craft, some type of flying saucer. The experiencer temporarily blacked out as they approached an opening in the bottom of the ship. When he came to, he found himself lying on his side, but facing a wall. He then rolled over on his back and sat up. It was an oddly-shaped room that he woke up in, resembling a “wedge of pie with the point of it bitten off.” 16

The entire room was bare except for some kind of protrusion from the wall upon which he had been sleeping but was now sitting. Everything appeared to be made of the same substance, an unidentified blue-gray material. The walls were of a very hard surface, while the protrusion seemed to be softer, but apparently made of the same material, being visually, at least, indistinguishable from the material composing the walls. The room was bathed in a soft glow, with no shadows anywhere. There was also no apparent source of the light. Then, for the very first time, he heard an audible voice, but a female, saying, “He’s awake now.” He looked around to find the speaker, but saw no one in the room. Then, on the shorter, seamless wall, an open door just materialized. Looking into it, he could see a long, dark hallway, but towards the end of it he noticed a blue-white illumination, whence he was able to detect two shadows that flitted forward across the doorway. They were ghostly in appearance, not taking on any singularly identifiable shape. Their movement was too rapid, too distorted. Nevertheless, our experiencer did receive a mental impression of two people approaching him, a man in front and a woman in back. The woman was carrying a tray full of some kind of surgical instruments and hypodermic syringes. Needless to say, at this point, our abducted friend was scared shitless and blacked out. But have no fear, dear student of the paranormal, for when this Pennsylvania man awoke, he was back in his apartment, in his lounge chair, and reading his book. Comments: Most likely, a good many of these abduction cases can easily be explained in the context of hypnagogic hallucinations. As in the case of the Pennsylvania experiencer, who was in the process of pushing back sleep, hypnagogic hallucinations are brief hallucinations that take place as you’re falling asleep. They’re common and usually nothing to worry about. They’re usually visual in nature, such as images of patterns, shapes, or flashing lights.

What are hypnagogic hallucinations? Recently, the Cleveland Clinic’s website published an article explaining the nature of hypnagogic hallucinations.4 An excerpt from this article follows: Hypnogogic hallucinations are hallucinations that happen as you’re falling asleep. They’re common and usually not a cause for concern. Up to 70% of people experience them at least 70% of the population experiences hypnagogic once. hallucinations. Perhaps this explains the “alien A hallucination is a false perception abductions” alleged by some of the many millions worldwide. Illustration source: University Health of objects or events involving your News / dreamtime.com. senses: sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste. Hallucinations seem real, but they’re not. Hypnogogic hallucinations are usually brief and fleeting, but are occasionally prolonged. They can take different forms, including: Visual (seeing something that’s not there): About 86% of hypnogogic hallucinations are visual and usually consist of changing geometric patterns, shapes and light flashes. It may seem like you’re looking into a kaleidoscope. They may also involve images of animals, people or faces. Somatic (feeling or sensing something that’s not real): About 25% to 44% of hypnogogic hallucinations are somatic experiences. They may involve feeling bodily distortions; feelings of weightlessness, flying or falling; and sensing the presence of another person in the room. Auditory (hearing something that’s not there): About 8% to 34% of hypnogogic hallucinations are auditory — either hearing sounds or voices. They may involve words or names, people talking, and environmental or animal sounds. While hypnagogic hallucinations are a common symptom of narcolepsy, they also occur in people who don’t have narcolepsy. Clearly, we understand much more about this psychological phenomenon of hypnagogic hallucination today than we did in 1959, when our Maxatawny, Pennsylvania, gentleman underwent his traumatic experience.

4 18

No stated author, Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland, Ohio (2023), https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/ articles/23234-hypnagogic-hallucinations (Accessed 23 July 2023).

CHAPTER V

“MOTHERSHIP” AND UFO FORMATION PASS OVER THE “CITY OF BROTHERLY LOVE” Classification: CE-1 Date: Sunday, 26 August 1962 Location: Philadelphia, Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania It was 12:30 a.m. when Walter T. Jones, Jr., of Philadelphia, a member of the Pennsylvania State Section of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO), then the second largest civilian UFO research group, and headquartered in Tucson, Arizona, and his mother, were out in their backyard when they observed a light in the west traveling along a Mothership with deployed flying saucer north to south direction. At first glance, Jones scout ships. Photo source: National thought that the light was the Echo satellite, but Public Radio (NPR) then noticed that it dipped in its course at regular intervals, where a satellite would maintain a steady path across the sky. The following is Walter T. Jones, Jr.’s official report to APRO headquarters, as it appeared in the July 1963 issue of the A.P.R.O. Bulletin (Tucson, Arizona): “It increased in size as it came directly ahead of us, until it was several times the size of the planet Venus (as it normally appears in the night sky). As it became larger, it was increasingly brighter, and when it remained motionless in the sky, I knew Echo had nothing to do with it. Fortunately, I had my binoculars with me. It hovered at such a distance I could not give you a more detailed description than already mentioned, except several smaller, bright, round objects appeared beside the large one. This was noticed by my mother, Mrs. Jones, without the use of binoculars. “The large object disappeared, and from the same area came a row of six of the smaller orbs, with one bright green light following in what I would call an

imaginary triangle. This group came directly our way and passed over our house as low as perhaps several hundred feet. I had the impression they were no higher than a plane would fly when we consider it to be flying very low. The formation headed east and I saw all of the objects clearly, the six in front, followed by one bright, glowing green light, and nothing in between, or connecting them. It was a completely silent operation, and the entire incident took no more than three or four minutes.” The term “mothership” was coined by the alleged contactee with beings from Venus and other planets in the solar system, George Adamski (1891-1965) of Mt. Palomar, California, referring to a larger spacecraft that serves or carries smaller vessels that we commonly refer to as “flying saucers” or “scout ships,” but that can be deployed and operate independently from it.5

5 20

George Adamski and Desmond Leslie, Flying Saucers Have Landed (New York City, New York: British Book Centre, 1953).

CHAPTER VI

TRUTH OF THE KECKSBURG, PENNSYLVANIA “METEOR” Classification: Identified In the coronavirus-plagued times of 2020-2022, with even small gatherings being limited to no more than ten persons or completely curtailed, the usual forums available for Fred and Ray to answer pertinent questions that readers of our books have about paranormal events or the UFO phenomenon, have been closed off. Many thanks are extended to Cathy Teets, the publisher of Headline Books, for the opportunity to allow us to tackle some of these controversial issues in this book. Kecksburg “Meteor” and Project WHITE STORK

Military personnel allegedly hauled off the bee-hive-shaped UFO to Wright-Patterson AFB in Dayton, Ohio. The UFO crash is frequently referred to as “Pennsylvania’s Roswell.” See www.youtube.com/ user/TheTop5ss.

At approximately 4:45 p.m. on 9 December 1965, a so-called “meteor” was observed streaking across the northeastern skies of the United States and the southeastern skies of Canada, descending at a steep angle, whence it crashed on 21

the outskirts of the small town of Kecksburg, Pennsylvania. The incident, and the town, which have come to be known collectively as “Pennsylvania’s Roswell,” has been the subject of ongoing speculation in the UFO community, even becoming a meme of pop culture. A movie about the incident, appropriately and simply titled Kecksburg, premiered at the State Theatre Center for the Arts on Main Street in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, on 12 September of last year. For additional information about the movie, directed by Pennsylvania native Cody Knotts, please see https://www.kecksburgufomovie.com/. On 27 July 2019, Cosmic Ray, the co-author of this book, enjoyed the privilege of attending the annual Kecksburg UFO Festival, being one of the many vendors of UFO-related products at the event, i.e., Venus Rising books and bumper stickers. World Kecksburg UFO authority, Stan Gordon, provided an outstanding power point presentation on what happened on the fateful day of the UFO crash at that location nearly 54 years ago. Other presenters discussed various aspects of ufology in general. A fellow ufologist, S. W. from Michigan, and Ray were examining many of the original drawings, photographs, and testimonies in UFO reports and Pennsylvania newspaper articles about the incident that Stan Gordon had spread across his table. S. W. wanted to know what Ray’s take on the event was. He explained that there was a definite Venus connection to the Kecksburg UFO that needed further investigation. A few hours after the crash, Air Force personnel were dispatched to the debris site to cordon off the area and collect all they could of what remained of the UFO, then transporting it to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, for analysis by National Reconnaissance Office and Project BLUEBOOK personnel. Apart from the Air Force brass and President Lyndon Baines Johnson, nobody had any knowledge of what this object was or where it came from. Speculation was running wild. Astronomers speculated that it might be some kind of “bolide,” a meteor as bright as a full moon that impacts the Earth, causing a big explosion. Ufologists said it was a crashed alien spacecraft, and there were even rumors of several four to five-foot extraterrestrial occupants being reported as disembarking from the object and disappearing in the dense woods. What fascinated Ray about this case was the possible connection with one of the many Soviet Venus space probes. In December 2005, just before the 40th anniversary of the Kecksburg incident, a spokesperson for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) released a statement reporting 22

that experts had examined metallic fragments from the area and determined they were from a Soviet spy satellite that re-entered the atmosphere and broke up, but records of their findings were supposedly lost in the 1990s. For Leslie Kean, an investigative reporter for the Sci-Fi Channel, this was totally unsatisfactory. Therefore, he sued NASA under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain the so-called “lost” NASA records. On 26 October 2007, NASA, being ordered by the court, agreed to search for those records. Not surprisingly, it wasn’t too long before Steve McConnell, NASA’s public liaison officer, testified that two boxes of papers from the time of the Kecksburg incident were missing. As with the original tapes of the Apollo 11 Moon mission, the Kecksburg files just “disappeared” from NASA’s prevue with no chain of custody for tracing their disposition. The Venus connection with the strange object that crashed in that rural area outside of the village of Kecksburg in Westmoreland County starts with an eyewitness’ account of the event. In the Wednesday, 9 September 1998 issue of the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Post-Gazette, staff writer David Templeton reports that almost immediately after the UFO came down, “Local residents headed toward the landing site.” He added that, “James Romansky and others trailed the object into the woods by observing the arc-wielding flames and bluish sparklers evident through the trees after the landing. “The object was 12 feet long and six to seven feet in diameter and shaped like an acorn. It had a ring around the base, just like an acorn, that bore what Romansky described as backward letters…. The craft had no doors or windows. The metal was seamless, with a dent, but bearing no rivets or welds. “The local men soon were chased away by United States military officials who announced that the landing site was off-limits to all civilians.” In 1993, James Oberg, a 22-year veteran NASA engineer and specialist in orbital mechanics, as well as an American space journalist and historian, regarded as the foremost expert on both the Chinese and Russian space programs, weighed in on the Kecksburg controversy and declared that it was his opinion that the object was part of the Soviet Venus probe known as Kosmos 96. While the United States Space Command reported that the Kosmos 96 crashed landed in Canada shortly after 3 a.m. on 9 December 1965, more than 12 hours before the Kecksburg crash, Oberg believes that the spacecraft broke up into two sections in orbit before falling down to Earth. As the author of Final Countdown: Rockets to Venus (Terra Alta, West Virginia: Headline Books, 2017), Ray explores the vast array of space probes sent to Venus by the United States, Russia/former Soviet Union, Japan, and 23

the European Union. To my mind, Oberg is correct in his assessment because Kosmos 96 matches the Kecksburg object in many aspects. It was shaped like an acorn and possessed the ability to maneuver and land on Venus. As a Venus probe, it was also equipped with state-of-the-art heat shield technology so designed to survive a plummet through the electrically charged ionosphere of the second planet, estimated to be around 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. That could have allowed the craft to survive the long passage through Earth’s atmosphere before landing in Kecksburg. The writing on the spacecraft would have been the Russian Cyrillic alphabet, and all Venera probes from the former Soviet Union were fitted with plaques proclaiming the glories of their country and staking a territorial claim on Venus. After analyzing all the data, Oberg concluded that the fragments that came down in Canada were most likely the “jettisoned rocket stage of a large piece of space junk, while the probe itself could have headed off toward Kecksburg.” That explains why the United States military would lie, or at least not divulge everything it really knew about the Kecksburg crash. Back in the 1960s, the United States military intelligence agencies were interested in collecting as much of the Soviet military space debris as possible, dispatching operatives of the National Reconnaissance Office to all parts of the free and non-aligned countries to recover these downed objects, or what was left of them. Stanton Friedman, the famed nuclear physicist from the University of Chicago and prominent UFO investigator, was even dispatched on orders from the Central Intelligence Agency, to West Africa in 1962 to recover a downed Soviet satellite. While international law required that such debris be returned to the country of origin, we all know that this wasn’t going to happen until every bit of knowledge concerning the design and application of each recovered item had been determined. Therefore, in the midst of the Cold War, it was clear that hardware from the Kosmos 96, with all of its missile-warhead shielding, would have been much too valuable to return to the Soviet Union.

Kosmos 96 Soviet Venus probe When it comes down to what crashed in Kecksburg, as far as the former Soviet authorities, and now Russian Space Agency spokespersons are concerned, they would only speculate that anything that crashlanded in American turf was probably American spy technology that the United States was too embarrassed to acknowledge. In May 1998, Stan Gordon interviewed Russian Cosmonaut Viktor P. Savinykh, who then served as rector of Moscow State University of Geodesy and Cartography. Gordon said, “I took the opportunity through an interpreter to ask him whether he could help solve the Kecksburg mystery. He, too, suggested rather emphatically, and with some laughter, that whatever plunged into Kecksburg surely was some faulty American technology.” But none of this takes into account one of the United States Air Force’s most TOP SECRET programs during the 1960s, Project WHITE STORK (United States Air Force Foreign Technology Division, Soviet Effort to Contact Extraterrestrial Life, Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, USAF Historical Archives, 1967) whose very purpose was to monitor and report on the Soviet Union’s progress in searching for and establishing communications with extraterrestrial life. The majority of the space probes dispatched to other bodies in space by the former Soviet Union were targeted for Venus. In Ray’s second book in the Venus Rising series, Final Countdown: Rockets to Venus, a fuller extent of the WHITE STORK Venus revelations is presented. The Kosmos 96, officially designated 3MV-4 No. 6, was a space probe launched as part of the Soviet Venera program, supposedly intended to make a flyby of Venus. Allegedly, however, there was a launch failure that forced the spacecraft into a low Earth orbit. TASS, the Soviet News Agency, reported that the Kosmos 96 was launched on 22 November 1965 on a Molniya 8K78 rocket. In light of the WHITE STORK revelations, however, I wonder if the Kosmos 96 may have actually been sent up during a much earlier launch window, as part of the Soviet Union’s clandestine space program, whence it skimmed samples from the Venusian atmosphere pushed off as a long tail from the planet’s North Pole by the strong solar wind, to be followed by a return voyage to Earth. The actual samples could then be analyzed by experts from the Soviet Academy of Sciences to prove the existence of a suitable atmosphere for the later human exploration 25

of Venus, and possibly the presence of primitive life forms, like microorganisms, on our sister planet. We must always keep in mind that as far as space exploration and the search for extraterrestrial life, primitive or advanced, the official policy of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union has always reflected the Marxist-Leninist materialist philosophy that, “Life is a normal and inevitable consequence of the development of matter, and intelligence is a normal consequence of the existence of life.” Until next time, keep in mind the words of the Venusian Commander Aura Rhanes of the Moon Base Clarion, “Work, study, meditate.”

CHAPTER VII “IT’S THE END OF THE WORLD,” AS FAR AS SHE KNOWS Classification: CE-1 Date: Tuesday, 26 April 1966 Location: Philadelphia, Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania Mrs. L. C. of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, informed the editors of Fate magazine,6 “I never quite believed the stories about UFOs, but I believe them now!” On the balmy evening of Tuesday, 26 April 1966, Mrs. L. C. went outside on her front steps to talk with her neighbors. One of the women from an adjacent house who had come over to chat with her excitedly “Oh, it’s the end of the world!” screamed an edgy Philadelphia woman pointed upward and called out loudly, “Look! upon sighting a UFO and thinking it might be the harbinger of a mass Look!” invasion. Photo credit: www.youtube. “We all looked skyward to see a green, cone- com/watch?v=IZIt9Gs8oTE shaped flying object with fire coming from its tail,” reported Mrs. L.C., adding, “The object left a path of smoke like a jet trail, or skywriting. We watched it until it was out of sight, but the trail of smoke remained for quite a long time.” Another neighboring woman, however, was extremely excitable and screamed, “Oh, it’s the end of the world!” Fortunately, Mrs. L.C. and the other women present were able to calm her down, and the first woman who spotted the UFO suggested that a call be made to the local newspaper. Mrs. L.C. immediately went into her house and made exactly such a telephone call, and the switchboard operator asked her, “Does this call have anything to do with something in the sky?” Apparently, the newspaper had been flooded with calls about this particular UFO passing over Philadelphia. 6

“Report from the Readers,” Fate magazine (Highland Park, Illinois: Clark Publishing Company, Vol. 19, No. 8, Issue No. 197, August 1966), 126, 128. 27

All media in the Philadelphia area- newspapers, radio, and television, were calling the mysterious object a “meteor,” but Mrs. L.C. doubted this explanation. On the following day, she called the Fels Planetarium at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, which is the second oldest planetarium in the nation, hoping to speak to an astronomer there and get a more professional and scientific opinion. The gentleman who answered the telephone affirmed that he was an astronomer and also declared, “I, too, am of the opinion that the object was a meteor.” Mrs. L.C., in turn, asked the astronomer, “Are there any green meteors?” “No,” he responded. “Do meteors leave trails of smoke?” she inquired. Again, he answered, “No.” “If this is the case,” Mrs. L.C. further queried, “then how can you still say the object was a meteor?” The astronomer finally leveled with her, “Lady, we don’t know what it was.” The moral of this story is that persistence pays off. How often to we meekly accept the lame explanations given by those in authority to dismiss legitimate UFO reports? Kudos to Mrs. L.C.!

CHAPTER VIII WHEN UFOs WERE FIRST DEEMED “ESSENTIALLY REAL” Abstract: The following article provides a synopsis of Dr. Berthold Eric Schwarz’s groundbreaking article on the reality of UFOs that appeared in a prominent Pennsylvania academic medical journal back in 1968, thereby rallying many in the global scientific community to seriously consider the phenomenon and the implications inherent in UFOs as physical and possibly extraterrestrial spacecraft. Scientific Credibility In October 1968, just one year before the infamous federal government-sponsored University of Colorado at Boulder’s so-called Dr. Berthold Eric Schwarz (19242010), a prominent New Jersey Scientific Study of UFOs was officially released, psychiatrist who, starting in 1968, directed by that institution’s physics chair, Dr. wrote articles in academic medical journals attesting to the credibility Eduard U. Condon, and totally debunking of UFO experiencers and the the entire UFO phenomenon, a handful of phenomena encountered by them. Scan QR for Photo scientists from throughout the United States source. had decided to join the conversation as to the reality of these mysterious objects and the as yet undetermined intelligence behind their evermore frequent appearances in our skies and their occupants, the so-called “ufonauts” alleged interactions with American citizens from all walks of life. Among these were Dr. J. Allen Hynek, an astronomer from Chicago’s Northwestern University and Air Force Project Bluebook consultant on UFOs, Dr. Jacques Valle, a French computer expert and long-time investigator of the phenomenon and author of several books on UFOs, as well as Dr. Ronald Leo Sprinkle, a prominent psychologist from the University of Wyoming at Laramie 29

who also served as the first scientific consultant to the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO), the second largest civilian UFO investigating group in the world, then located in Tucson, Arizona. Dr. Sprinkle, it should be noted, wrote the introduction to my first book in the Venus Rising series. In October 1968, I was a member of APRO, which unfortunately ceased operations in 1988. Much of the group’s UFO-investigating activities were assumed by the rival Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), then headquartered in Seguin, Texas. The block of ice encasing the UFO phenomenon began to break even more in October 1968 when Dr. Berthold Eric Schwarz, an assistant attending psychiatrist at Montclair Community Hospital in Montclair, New Jersey, joined the fray in publicly coming out in a prominent academic journal attesting to his conclusion that UFOs were “essentially real,” and not delusions or figments of anyone’s overactive imagination. In that month’s issue of the prestigious medical journal, Medical Times (Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania: Romaine Pierson Publications, Vol. 96, No. 10), Dr. Schwarz’s article, “UFOs: Delusion or Dilemma,” October 1968, focused on four close-range UFO encounters which he personally investigated.7 Speaking to the UFO witnesses in person, the psychiatrist became convinced that there were no psychopathological reasons for these people to have had these experiences. He concluded that the UFOs involved in each of the four cases were “essentially real;” and hence the UFO phenomenon, in general, was a worthy subject for scientific inquiry. Competition with Santa’s Sleigh On Christmas Eve of 1966, a factory worker from Passaic County, New Jersey, Claude Coutant, photographed this UFO hovering over the Wanaque Reservoir, the site of intensive UFO activity for several months. The mayor, city councilmen, police officers, security guards and many other credible witnesses reported a UFO emitting a blinding beam of nearly opaque light that would, when the reservoir was frozen over, melt circles in the ice. The UFO flap provoked a military presence in the area, where attempts were made to confiscate all photos of the Wanaque 7

The UFO cases were not presented in chronological order in the medical journal by Dr. Schwarz. The order of their presentation is maintained here, with the first two in New Jersey and the second two in Pennsylvania. The New Jersey cases were presented here due to their close proximity to the east central border of Pennsylvania during the period of an extensive UFO flap taking place there.

object and to pressure the UFO witnesses into silence. Fortunately, this photo escaped confiscation and many of the UFO experiencers spoke up about their encounters, believing strongly, like police sergeant Benjamin Thompson, whose account appears below, that the truth needed to be known. Case Number One: Wanaque, New Jersey, 11 October 1966 Classification: CE-2 “Blinded by the Light” Dr. Schwarz read numerous newspaper accounts about a flurry of UFO sightings taking place in the vicinity of Wanaque Reservoir in northwest New Jersey in late September 1966 through January 1967 and then decided to drive out to the area where he first spoke with Sergeant Benjamin Thompson of the Borough of Ringwood Police Department in Passaic County, New Jersey, where the reservoir is located. The police sergeant, respecting Dr. Schwarz’s medical and scientific background, was not as reluctant to discuss his UFO encounter as he was with reporters from sundry media, who tended to be more sensationalist in their approach to both him and the subject of UFOs. In his own words, as spoken into Dr. Schwarz’s portable tape recorder, Sergeant Thompson describes his UFO encounter that took place on 11 October 1966, starting at about 9:15 p.m.: “It was diagonally 250 feet from me, out over the reservoir, as big as an automobile, or bigger. It was about 250 feet up in the air. When I got out of the police car, this thing was so bright that it blinded me so bad I couldn’t find the car. It was all white, like looking into a bulb and trying to see the socket, which you can’t do. I signed out of service (to the Borough of Ringwood Police) for twenty minutes because I couldn’t see, neither the fingers of my hand nor the lights of my jeep. I stood by the fence until my vision came back gradually. “It made no sounds, but left a heavy mist-like sort of fog. It really shook me up. When I got back into the car, switched on the red dome light and flasher, and then got out of the car and started walking toward it, it took off. It never made a sound. I would say that I observed it for about three minutes. I was totally blinded, after the light. It took away my voice and I was hoarse for two weeks after that.” Nine months later, Dr. Schwarz interviewed Sergeant Thompson again, and his story did not vary even one iota in the details. The psychiatrist was convinced that Sergeant Thompson’s UFO experience was real because several other officers in the Ringwood Police Department confirmed his account and

testified to Thompson’s outstanding reputation as to never telling a lie or making up tall tales. Case Number Two: Newfoundland, New Jersey, 15 October 1966 Classification: CE-2 “Flu-like illness induced by UFO encounter” Here is another UFO encounter that took place in the vicinity of a reservoir in New Jersey. In this case, our UFO experiencer, Jerry H. Simmons, was a 22-yearold gentleman from Montclair, New Jersey, a bedroom community of New York City, who was employed as a forester in Newfoundland, New Jersey, a small, unincorporated community in Passaic County, extending more to the eastern end of the county limits and situated in the north-central section of the Garden State. Simmons maintained that on Saturday, 15 October 1966, while driving to a campsite that he frequented in the nearby Split Rock Reservoir, between the hours of 4:30 a.m. and 5:00 a.m., his car was buzzed by an anomalous object. Simmons informed Dr. Schwarz about the incident: “I was traveling north on the road into the campsite and noticed a very outstanding glow in the rearview mirror. I thought at first that my brake light was stuck because it (the UFO) was a very dull glow at the time I noticed it. I tried putting my foot under the brake pedal and pulling it up. It was at this point that I became aware of the orange-red glow becoming brighter.” The forester then parked his car along the side of the road and lowered the window on the driver’s side so he could get a better look at the back end of his car. Then, from out of nowhere, came a “huge, glowing light” that seemed to be emerging from some type of “solid body or object” apparently approaching him. At this point of the encounter, Simmons noted that he began to “doubt my sanity,” adding, “I could not accept what my eyes were seeing, but it only took a few seconds for all doubt to leave my mind and for me to understand that what I was seeing was very real.” Deciding to get back into his car and drive south back to the main road, Simmons was hoping that he could flag down assistance or even garner others who might come with him back to the campsite who could serve as witnesses to the UFO(s). He thought that perhaps the light might be a probe of some kind dispatched from the larger, but darker object. Unfortunately for him, the intelligence behind the UFO had other plans. As the object continued to slowly approach him, his car motor died out, thus leaving him stranded on a lonely country backroad.

“Without any warning,” asserted the forester, “all the electrical equipment quit working. My headlights, dash lights, and engine quit. I don’t believe I have ever been so frustrated in all my life.” Once the UFO was directly over his car, it passed over to the passenger side of the vehicle, thus allowing Simmons to turn the ignition and move the vehicle slightly forward down the road. This cat-and-mouse game between the UFO and Simmons occurred two more times until the UFO intelligence seemingly tired of it and flew out over the reservoir once Simmons had gotten closer to it. On 17 January 1967, Simmons was admitted to the Montclair Community Hospital for an illness that one of the doctors on staff diagnosed as the “flu.” The forester reported that symptoms of “fatigue, anorexia, generalized soreness and weakness of the muscles, drowsiness, chills, and a weight loss of 35 pounds” had all plagued him since his initial encounter with the UFO. Doctors and medical staff were concerned about the persistence and severity of these symptoms contributing to the “bizarre nature of the illness.” Therefore, arrangements were made for Simmons’ admission to the National Institute of Health (NIH) for a special analysis and study, free of charge. The forester, however, did not like the track where this was heading and declined to participate any further or go to the NIH headquarters in Bethesda, Maryland, across from Johns Hopkins Hospital. Pentagon doctors warn that not all Fortunately for the UFO experiencer, all of UFO encounters are happy ones. these aforementioned symptoms disappeared Artwork source: The Sun, U.S., subsidiary of The Sun, London, U.K. on their own after a few months. Mental Health Survey Checks Out In the Medical Times article, Dr. Schwarz reported: “A study of the forester’s past life, gleaned in several interviews lasting many hours, led me to believe that he never had any previous experiences like this. He had never had any emotional illness. He was an experienced outdoorsman who had camped in many of the states of the United States for some years. He was a high school graduate and had had two additional years of industrial arts.”

Perhaps Robert Martz’ encounter with UFOs on a rural Pennsylvania road in 1966 inspired this scene with Richard Dreyfuss in Steven Spielberg’s epic Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Columbia Pictures, Hollywood, California, 1977).

Case Number Three: Outskirts of Monroeton, Bradford County, Pennsylvania, 25 April 1966 Classification: CE-2 “Stalled pickup truck engine and faded headlights” While in the process of driving home with a friend, shortly after 8 p.m. on 25 April 1966, Robert W. Martz, a 73-year-old retired electrical contractor, sighted a “fireball-type UFO” in the vicinity of Monroeton, Pennsylvania. According to Martz’s testimony, as given to Dr. Schwarz, he and his friend’s attention “was drawn to the sky by a very awesome, huge, flaming body, which lit up a large area and was visible for several seconds. It had a lengthy green and yellow tail.” Soon after the appearance of the first UFO, a second object, cigar-shaped, came into view. Of this UFO, Martz noted that “A dim light could actually be seen coming from four ports on the craft. It looked like it was 250 feet in front of us and 250 feet up, and it could go at a terrific speed. It was about 25 feet in length and had a tail 35 feet long.” The retired contractor added, “My pickup truck’s engine stalled and the headlights faded out. I was amazed and flabbergasted.” Solid Psychological Profile Dr. Schwarz believed Martz because of his solid psychiatric profile. The psychiatrist duly remarked: “Martz has never had any emotional illness. He 34

and his friends do not use liquor or unprescribed drugs. There was nothing in the contractor’s history or behavior since the UFO event to suggest sociopathic behavior, brain syndrome, and the like.” Case Number Four: Presque Isle Beach on the outskirts of Erie, Erie County, Pennsylvania, 31 July 1966 Classification: CE-3 “Possible contact and monster sighting” This CE-3 case involved multiple experiencers whose car was stuck in the sand on the Presque Isle beach, immediately to the northwest of Erie, in the northwest corner of Pennsylvania, on the last day of July in 1966. It was around 10 p.m. when Erie Police Patrolman Robert Loeb, Jr., and fellow Patrolman Ralph E. Clark were making their nightly beach patrol in the Presque Isle Peninsula Park when they noticed an automobile bogged down in the sand and stopped to check it out.8 The occupants of the car were Douglas Tibbets, 18, Betty Jean Klem, 16, Anita Haifley, 22, and Gerald La Belle, 26, the owner of the car, whom the others informed the police had walked into town to try and get some help in removing the automobile from the sand, but who had not yet returned. Upon hearing about La Belle’s going for assistance, Senior Patrolman Loeb told the others in the car, “We’ll be back in another 30 or 40 minutes and we will check again if you are still here.” Right after the policemen left, the two young women in the car rolled down the windows to look at the starry night sky when they spotted a bright pinpoint of light that continually seemed to increase in size and luminosity as it was swooping down and nearing their vehicle. Much to their dismay, the illumined, strange object from the heavens landed directly in front of their car, right behind a line of brushy trees. Betty Jean Klem later remarked to representatives of local media concerning the UFO, “It was the size of a house. It was mushroom-shaped. I could even see lights on the back of it. The thing settled down on the beach about 100 yards from us. When it struck the ground, it then glowed bright red.” And Douglas Tibbets, in speaking to the same Erie reporter, added, “We felt the car shake and then there was a loud noise such as a telephone receiver makes.” A few seconds after the landing of the UFO, all of the car’s occupants agreed that the glowing red light gave way to flashing rays of white light that seemed to be probing the beach and woods. Tibbets, in his police report of the incident, noted that “There were about a dozen lights and they seemed to be searching for something.” At the same time as the UFO began to probe the area, all of those 8

Gabriel Green, Let’s Face the Facts About Flying Saucers (New York City, New York: Popular Library, 1967), 119-121. 35

inside the car heard scratching noises on the roof of their vehicle. Around 10:30 p.m., the patrolmen returned to the scene of the bogged-down vehicle with their red lights flashing so that those in the car would know it was them on the return patrol. After the patrolmen were back on the scene, Tibbets felt it was safe to get out of the vehicle, whence he found several scratches and a dent in the roof of the car. A conversation then ensued. Tibbets to the patrolmen: “There are some mighty weird things happening up the beach.” The patrolmen then walked with Tibbets to the area in front of the car. Betty Jean Klem, occupying the front passenger seat, leaned over and pressed the automobile’s horn, thereby emitting a shattering blare into the dark night. Patrolman Loeb noted that “Miss Klem was hysterical, shaking and crying. She sobbed that a giant figure had approached the car.” This prompted Tibbets and the patrolmen to hurry back to the car. Klem: “There’s something out there in the dark!” This is what she screamed upon seeing a dark creature approaching the front of the car. She further remarked, “It did not appear human and it wasn’t like any animal I’ve ever seen. It was over six feet tall and I could not see any arms or legs.9 When I blew the horn, it slowly moved away and disappeared into the bushes.” Betty Jean Klem was of the opinion that the darkness of the night kept her from viewing other features of the creature. Klem leaped from the vehicle once Tibbets and the patrolmen arrived back at the vehicle. Patrolman Clark reported that this is when “She started to run away and I caught her,” thus preventing Klem from hurting herself, possibly tripping over a rotting log or some other artifact on the beach. Anita Haifley, being in the back seat of the vehicle and huddling over her two small children, did not see anything, but could hear the scratching on the roof. For the sake of her children, she did manage to maintain her composure throughout the incident.

Marcus Lowth (ufologist and paranormal investigator), “The Shadow People- Aliens? Ghosts? Or Entities from Another Dimension?” UFO Insight, 11 March 2019, https://www.ufoinsight.com/ cryptozoology/bizarre-entities/shadow-people (Accessed 6 September 2019): “While they (the Shadow People) have been seen for centuries, at least according to legends and folklore, it would appear that sightings and general awareness of Shadow People are increasing as we surge forward into the twenty-first century. And while these mysterious, black silhouette-type entities are seemingly at home in the paranormal world of ghosts and apparitions, reports of such beings crop up regularly in case of alien abduction.” With so many others in the car and at the scene, as well as the seeming presence of just one entity, it may have prudent in this instance, on the part of the creature, to not follow through with an abduction attempt.

Park Police Chief Opines Dan Dascanio, Park Police Chief, weighed in on this most unusual incident. “I know what people are going to say,” Dascanio remarked, adding, “but this girl (Klem) definitely saw something that frightened her badly. This is no joke, as far as we (of the Presque Isle Park) are concerned. The girl was a credible person. Of the two individuals involved, she was the most specific about what she saw. She made no attempt to fill in her story when she wasn’t sure. She was one scared girl when I first saw her. Her hands were shaking. Her face was trembling. Her speech was more inarticulate, and she had difficulty maintaining her composure. Her eyes were red and she kept shaking her head from side to side.” At Dascanio’s recommendation, on the following morning at 7:00 a.m. (1 August 1966) after the alleged UFO/alien encounter, two park patrolmen, Paul Wilson, and J. Robert Canfield, were dispatched to the site of the incident, which was taped off the night before by Erie patrolmen Loeb and Clark. Later that day, the site was also visited by Erie Patrolman Abert Gagnon, who also checked out the area for anything that Wilson and Canfield may have Spirit entities, like the alleged “Shadow overlooked. Wilson and Canfield, immediately People,” are sometimes associated upon their arrival, noticed distinct impressions with UFO phenomena. Betty Jean Klem’s facsimile of the “dark, shadowy, in the sand filled with a sticky, but colorless featureless creature” that scared liquid. Samples were taken of this liquid, mixed her out of her wits during the UFO encounter. Sketch obtained from the with sand, and later delivered to the Erie Police files of the late premier ufologist, Department lab for analysis. Nothing further Timothy Green Beckley (1947-2021), a.k.a. “Mr. UFO,” as published in his has been revealed concerning the lab’s findings column, “On the Trail of the Flying about the liquid other than that it was mixed Saucers,” Flying Saucers magazine, Amherst, Wisconsin, Issue No. 67. with silicon from the sand. December 1969. Later Findings in the Presque Isle Case Douglas Tibbets was taken to Hamot Hospital in Erie on the day after the incident, where he was diagnosed with a slightly elevated temperature and an “inflammation of the throat.” Anita Haifley, the young woman who remained in the back seat of the car with her two children and who initially reported that she did not see the monster sighted by her friend Betty Jean Klem in the front seat, nevertheless reported 37

that for three weeks after the incident, she was plagued with nightmares about being attacked by a very tall, dark creature. When Dr. Schwarz tried to question her about the incident and the subsequent nightmares, Haifley unfortunately refused to discuss the matters with him. Erie Patrolman Gagnon, after his visit to the site, became ill upon returning home later that evening, also suffering with similar maladies as diagnosed for Tibbets in the Erie hospital. Gagnon explained that he had previously suffered no such illness as the one he experienced following his visit to the UFO landing site. Psychiatric Analysis by Dr. B. E. Schwarz According to the prominent psychiatrist Dr. Berthold Eric Schwarz: “On 5 and 6 January 1968, Miss Klem and Mr. La Belle,10 the fourth witness, were examined psychiatrically. Their accounts of the events and specific chronology were entirely similar to the many published accounts and other records in Chief Dascanio’s files. Miss Klem and Mr. La Belle, before the Presque Isle episode, had been nonbelievers in UFOs, and neither of them had read more in the popular press than perhaps the average person. Interrogation of three of Miss Klem’s friends of several years standing, as well as her husband,11 supported her reputation for truthfulness. Miss Klem seemed to be above average intelligence. She answered questions in a straightforward, open way. She appeared to be healthy, her only defect being myopia, which was completely corrected with glasses. There was no evidence of any past or present sociopathic behavior or neurotic character traits. In the presence of her husband, Unidentified Submarine Objects (USOs) are frequently sighted she was induced into a hypnotic trance, and the both descending into and salient details of the alleged UFO experience emerging from Lake Erie. were fully confirmed. There were never any Scan QR for artwork source. variations in her account.”12 10 11 12 38

Dr. Schwarz includes Gerald La Belle as the fourth witness to this event, insofar as he reported seeing the UFO flash across the sky while he was walking to Erie to obtain help in moving his stuck automobile out of the sand dune. She was married in 1967, one year after the incident. Dr. Berthold Eric Schwarz, “UFOs: Delusion or Dilemma,” Medical Times (Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania: Romaine Pierson Publications, Vol. 86, No. 10, October 1968), 967-982.

Ancillary Reports Point to “Saucer Nest” In or Near Erie, Pennsylvania, or Unidentified Submarine Object (USO) Base Underneath Lake Erie On Wednesday, 3 August 1966, the Erie Daily News published an article concerning reports of UFO activity to the south of Erie, Pennsylvania, that had been investigated by some of their reporters. One rural couple denied the Daily News permission to reveal their names in any forthcoming stories insofar as “they are already suffering because of their having told neighbors about the sighting.” According to the newspaper report, the couple stated that they had observed a cigar-shaped object “shortly after the Fourth of July.” The Daily News article declared that their news desk received numerous reports during the prior two weeks of a similar type of UFO in the vicinity of Erie and also out over the lake, thus lending credibility to the anonymous couple’s account. Apparently, the plethora of UFO sightings in the area caught the attention of United States Air Force personnel. One gentleman from Erie claimed that an Air Force investigator visited his neighborhood after several calls were made from him and his neighbors concerning the sighting of the cigar-shaped UFO. After checking out the UFO report, the military investigator “warned people to stay away from the object if it should reappear.” Gabriel Green (1924-2001), the president of a civilian UFO research group in Los Angeles, California, the Amalgamated Flying Saucer Clubs of America (AFSCA), asked some of his organization’s members in the Erie, Pennsylvania, area to check out the sightings and provide him with a report for later publication in the pages of their group’s official monthly organ, UFO International. What Green learned from the AFSCA investigators was that “Erie residents have been seeing strange things in their skies for several years. On 15 May 1964, Mrs. Richard Gross said that her two boys noticed a strange object in the sky as they were preparing for bed. Another young boy sighted a ‘chrome thing that went put-put’ near his home in Kearsarge, a township in Erie County. An anonymous individual called the Daily News office to report a tripod-shaped craft landing at a picnic area near Erie.” From all of this data, Green concluded that “There may be a flying saucer ‘nest’ somewhere near Erie.” Marcus Lowth, one of ufology’s leading lights when it comes to the investigation of unidentified submarine objects (USOs) or unidentified underwater objects (UUOs), as well as numerous other types of paranormal phenomena, has cataloged hundreds of sightings of strange lights and craft emerging from, or descending into the seas, oceans, and lakes around the world. 39

Some USO researchers and investigators, like Lowth, even claim that there are underwater alien bases present in the vicinity of the locales where these aquatic sightings have occurred.13 Lowth notes a unique case from Erie documented in the 2011 book Eerie Erie: Tales of the Unexplained from Northwest Pennsylvania by Robin Swope (Charleston, South Carolina: History Press), which examines and investigates numerous Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) reports. Many of these reports speak of USOs seen “crashing” into the water of Lake Erie. The incident in the book that caught Lowth’s attention took place in 1988 and alleged that a strange craft landed on the lake when it was iced over. The landing was witnessed by Sheila and Henry Baker of Erie, Pennsylvania, who filed a report with the local Coast Guard. As the mysterious craft landed, there were strange creaking and cracking sounds heard coming from the ice as well as a series of blue and red lights being emitted from the craft itself. There also appeared to be several strange triangular objects that were deployed from the USO as it was descending. These triangles moved purposely around in all directions along the iced-over surface of the lake. Suddenly, the sounds on the ice stopped, and the craft and the mysterious triangles vanished. Both Lowth and Swope suggested that the main USO and its ejected probes had indeed found their way below the ice and under the water. Our friend, William Dale Harder, the director of the North Coast Aerial Phenomena Project (NCAPP) in Cleveland, Ohio, is also of the opinion that there is a saucer base under Lake Erie due to the significant amount of USO reports coming in and out of Lake Erie waters in the Greater Cleveland area his organization consistently receives and investigates. Other UFO Reports from Erie and Northwest Pennsylvania APRO Pennsylvania State Section investigators also collected other UFO reports from Erie and the northwest Pennsylvania area taking place around the same date as Betty Jean Klem’s encounter with the UFO and shadow creature. These reports were published in the September-October 1966 issue of the A.P.R.O. Bulletin (Tucson, Arizona). A brief summary of the UFO flap follows: On the evening of Friday, 29 July 1966, at approximately 8:30 p.m., a witness who wished to remain anonymous told an APRO investigator that he had seen a six to eight-foot-long silver object passing over Erie, Pennsylvania, at an estimated speed of 300 miles per hour. 13

Marcus Lowth, “Alleged Underwater Alien UFO Bases,” Stillness in the Storm, 2 February 2020, https://stillnessinthestorm.com/2020/02/10-alleged-underwater-alien-ufo-bases/ (Accessed 4 September 2023).

On the same evening, another anonymous witness claimed to have discovered a series of “three-toed footprints” outside of his Belle Vernon, Pennsylvania, residence, which is about 120 miles south of Erie. The unusual prints measured six inches long by six inches wide. And on the following day, 30 July, a staff photographer for the New Castle News of New Castle, Pennsylvania, about 75 miles south of Erie, photographed an “angular flying object” quite similar to the description of the UFO provided by Tibbets on the evening of the 31 July. Even on the very night of the Tibbets-Klem encounter, at around 10:30 p.m., an Erie doctor living about one mile south of Presque Isle, near the coast of Lake Erie, reported seeing a “circular path of orange light about the size of a baseball (as if held at arm’s length) traveling at a high rate of speed at an estimated altitude of 500 to 1,000 feet.” At 1:00 a.m. on 1 August, an anonymous witness also observed a bright light over Lake Erie for a duration of some 90 minutes. Return of the Same Creature? To top everything off, at around 5:30 a.m. on Wednesday, 3 August 1966, an “unusual creature” was reportedly seen on the streets of Erie, Pennsylvania, by a female witness who wished to remain anonymous, but who nevertheless agreed to be interviewed by the world-renowned paranormal investigator, John A. Keel,14 the author of many books on cryptids, ghosts, monsters, and UFOs. Keel’s report to APRO states that the woman experiencer was awakened that morning by the barking of neighborhood dogs. Upon looking out her bedroom window to see what all the commotion was about, she saw what she described as a “human-shaped being about five feet, six inches tall.” She further noted that “It was clothed in yellow jacket and yellow trousers, with no discernable pockets, belts or other features. The head was huge and moon-shaped and when seen from the side, the back of its head appeared to be flat. This head was covered with straggly brown hair of a muddy color. The creature had very big shoulders and a slender build. It moved with a still, jerky, mechanical motion, holding its arms close to its sides. They (the arms) did not move at all. Its legs did not bend at the knees. He moved like a mechanical, wind-up toy.” While the local dogs were barking and nipping at the creature’s heels, it did not seem to be bothered by them. Our witness then, being quite frightened, decided to wake up her husband, calling him to the bedroom window. When 14

For a detailed description of the life and work of John A. Keel (1930-2009), see Raymond A. Keller, “Chapter 6: Evolution of an Enlightened Ufologist” in Flying Saucers: From Venus They Come (Terra Alta, West Virginia: Headline Books, 2022), 104-107. 41

he looked outside, however, all he could see was some movement in the bushes along their property line. The creature was also spotted again that night across from the United Oil storage tanks on West Third Street in Erie, also walking stiffly and out of sight behind some of the larger tanks. The Flap Continues At 11:45 p.m., on Wednesday, 3 August 1966, Clebert Steff, an advertising department employee of the Erie Times-News, witnessed a bright flying object in the skies over Erie through binoculars displaying red and white lights. The object traveled from west to east at an estimated angle of 30 degrees. The UFO’s flight path was highly erratic and no clearly defined shape could be seen. Steff did note that the UFO did not seem to move like a conventional aircraft. Around the same time that night, an Erie electrical engineer from a large plant was getting off from his shift when he sighted some “unusual sky objects” in a seeming V-formation, which he managed to get an even better view of after getting a pair of binoculars that he kept on the back seat of his car for weekend hunting trips. Upon focusing on the UFOs with the binoculars, however, he soon discovered that it was actually one object “with a V-shaped bottom, all lit up,” which flew from south to north for a period of 42 seconds before “just blinking out of sight.” From the electrical engineer’s perspective of looking at the UFO through the binoculars, it emitted an orange glow and left no trail.

CHAPTER IX BACK-SEAT BINGO AND THE “HORST ORCHARD GHOST LIGHTS” Classification: CE-1 Date: 8 June 1972 Location: Horst Orchard, four miles north of Lebanon, Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, along State Route 72 Horst Orchard, north of the city of Lebanon in the southeastern part of Pennsylvania, in the spring and early summer usually finds itself surrounded by low-hanging mists, somewhat reminiscent of the British countryside. Colorful patterns of flowers grow along the roads, always presenting a pleasant sight to passing motorists. And beyond the floral hedges lie the rich fields and, further on, the deep, wood-covered acreage, wherein many Pennsylvanians and out-ofstate visitors to the area have encountered a phenomenon that has simply come to be known as the “Horst Orchard Ghost Lights.”15 Donna and Tim Boltz, a local newlywed couple, had just left the local movie theater and decided to drive out to the Horst Orchard on their way home for a little bit of “backseat bingo.” Pulling off State Route 72, Tim drove his recently purchased Shelby Mustang onto the narrow lane leading into the apple orchard. He parked the car under a cluster of trees situated before a string of man-made beehives. It was about 10:00 p.m. and he turned off the headlights and engine. Being intimately involved, the couple were oblivious to the passing of time; but after 30 minutes, the couple’s attention was drawn to an amazing sight. Outside the car, hovering like “inquisitive balloons,” were floating orbs of a “mild white light, approximately eight to ten inches in diameter.” These orbs seemed to be darting about in every direction. Donna later told a reporter from the Lebanon Daily News that “The orbs were moving from the tops of the tallest trees, about 25 feet high, to the level of Tim’s car’s hood. It was as though they (the intelligences behind the UFOs) were curious about us.” 15

Curtis K. Sutherly, “The Horst Orchard Ghost Light,” Caveat Emptor magazine January-February 1974, No. 11, Metuchen, New Jersey. 43

Donna and Tim continued to watch these small UFOs flutter around the car for about an hour, feeling a little bit frightened by the whole scenario, mixed with curiosity. Both felt there was something unnatural about this entire event, at which time stronger emotions emerged. Donna rolled down the car windows on the front passenger side and took a good, long, hard look into the night air. Now, the lights that were previously bobbing about, hovering and “off-and-on blinking here and there,” had now congregated together, moving closer to the car. Donna screamed when she realized that one of these orchard lights was approaching quickly toward her open window on the passenger side. She quickly rolled the window pane back up. Tim yelled, “It looks like it’s time to go!” and, fortunately, the engine turned over. The rear tires of the Mustang spun rapidly, with the engine’s 289-cubic inch V-8 transmitting its power to the vehicle’s rear axle. Tim later explained to the Lebanon Daily News reporter, “We spared no haste in leaving. As we drove out of the lane, I asked Donna to watch and see if anything followed. But nothing did.” Once free of the water-soaked apple orchard lane, Tim drove to the nearby house of Donna’s brother, Curtis K. Sutherly. When they got to Curtis’ home, he was out of town, but his and Donna’s father answered. Dad’s a Party Pooper After they explained to the elder Sutherly what happened in the orchard, he was somewhat skeptical. On a previous occasion, Curtis and his dad were sitting out on their back porch one night when three mysterious objects appeared high above their property, “flashing every color in the spectrum.” Curtis, an Air Force airman back home on leave, felt that this was a real sighting of UFOs insofar as he could not classify the objects in any category of “orthodox aircraft, fixed-wing or rotor-craft,” explaining this to his father, who failed to be convinced by his son’s insistence that they were UFOs being observed, dismissing them thusly, “They must be helicopters.” Following the elder Sutherly’s rejection of the UFO account, Tim and Donna drove to Tim’s family house, where his father, Lloyd Boltz, was more receptive to the story. Lloyd said that while he could not go back to the orchard with them right away, he would make the trip after taking care of some business requiring his immediate attention. They arrived in the orchard together in Lloyd’s car around daybreak on the following day, 9 June 1972, but the globe-shaped UFOs were nowhere to be seen.

Intelligently Controlled Globes On 10 June 1972, Curtis Sutherly, out of curiosity, drove out to the Boltz’ home to interview Tim and Donna about their UFO encounter, before he had to report back on duty with the Air Force. “Did the globes seem to display anything similar to intelligence or intelligent control?” inquired Curtis. Donna replied, “The lights seemed friendly. I was fascinated by them.” Tim declared, “I believe they were watching us.” Later that night, at around 10:30 p.m., Curtis drove out to the site of the UFO incident, hoping to catch a glimpse of the “dancing lights.” Unfortunately, all he could see under the twinkling stars were fireflies, accompanied by the chirping of crickets.

Intelligent sphere beings were monitoring human colonist activities on Mars in Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles (New York, New York: Doubleday, 1950). Scan QR for artwork source.

CHAPTER X MARCH 1973 AND THE GREAT FLYING SAUCER INVASION OF PENNSYLVANIA Classification: CE-1 Date: 1 March 1973 Location: Saylors Lake, Saylorsburg, Monroe County, Pennsylvania “Saucer Fleet” Sighted Numerous UFO reports came in on the night of Thursday, 1 March 1973, from the small town of Saylorsburg in the central part of eastern Pennsylvania, close to the border of New Jersey. An officer of the Pennsylvania State Police detachment in Stroudsburg stated that Shirley Pfeiffer of Saylorsburg reported sighting at least 34 UFOs flying over her home near Saylors Lake between the hours of 7:30 p.m. and 10:00 p.m.16 The witness attests that the UFOs, looking like “flying saucers,” were flashing “red, white and blue lights” and flew over the lake “one-by-one” at a “fairly low altitude and making no noise.” The patriotic flying saucers flashed red, white and blue The elucidating officer also noted that other lights. Item by Green’s Dream. residents in the vicinity of Saylors Lake, nestled in this famous Pocono resort area, witnessed UFOs but were hesitant to give their names. The Stroudsburg detachment also sent a trooper, Jeffrey Huntz, up to Saylorsburg to check out Pfeiffer’s report. He also spotted four of the saucers, which were “flying low and noiseless.” According to Huntz, “It was like a Christmas tree flying in the air, with all the ornaments. There was no noise, and 16

Other accounts report that Pfeiffer reported up to 39 UFOs between the hours of 7:25 p.m. and 10:45 p.m. that night; but we are sticking with the first and most localized report.

I believe the objects were flying at an altitude of about 1,500 feet above ground level. Most had white lights, but some had blue lights.”17 A reporter from the Hazleton, Pennsylvania Standard-Speaker newspaper, writing about these sightings in the 2 March 1973 edition, checked with the control tower at the Allentown-Bethlehem-Easton (ABE) airport, but nothing unusual was noticed taking place in the central east Pennsylvania airspace on the night of the alleged saucer sightings. John Doster, the chief of the Federal Aviation Authority District Office at this same airport, said that he had not been informed of any UFO incident, but speculated that the objects sighted up in Saylorsburg may have been “military airplanes” without getting into any specifics.18 However, a spokesman at the Pentagon declared that “No military aircraft were scheduled to fly over that area,” but declined further comment. Air traffic control in New York City was also unable to identify the objects on their scopes insofar “as they were flying too low.” Classification: CE-1 Date: 8 March 1973 Location: Bushkill Township, Northampton County, Pennsylvania Amateur Astronomer Chimes in on Spate of UFO Activity in Area Rodger W. Gordon of rural Bushkill Township, located just ten miles south along Pennsylvania State Route 33 from Saylorsburg as part of the greater Lehigh Valley area abutting the Poconos, was an amateur astronomer and ardent skywatcher for about twenty years prior to the spate of UFO sightings in his area. As such, Gordon had become familiar with most of the nighttime appearances of many conventional aircraft. Fascinated by the plethora of UFO sightings in his neck of the woods, Gordon was outside almost every night in the early days of March 1973, hoping to catch a glance at one or more of the elusive UFOs being reported in the newspapers. Conventional Aircraft As Gordon wrote in a letter appearing in the 19 March 1973 edition of the Shamokin, Pennsylvania, News-Item newspaper, “On one of these nights, I counted 30 jet aircraft in the space of about three hours, and several propellerdriven aircraft. Some of these would definitely have given a person unaccustomed to seeing sky objects at night the impression that he or she was seeing a UFO. With many of these jets, no sound was heard until long after the jet had passed.” 17 18

“UFO Spotted by Residents of Pocono Area,” Eagle newspaper, 2 March 1973, Reading, Pennsylvania. Ibid. 47

The amateur astronomer added, “On another occasion, several small aircraft were seen with their landing lights on, which gave the impression of very bright lights in the sky. When the planes turned, the lights disappeared.” One Object Stands Out There was one object that stood out from the others, in Gordon’s opinion. In his own words, he explains that “On one night, (Thursday) 8 March 1973, I saw an unusual, slow-moving object, which my wife and I observed with binoculars. We could not, with any certainty, identify it, as it was too far away to make anything out once we got the binoculars and focused in on it.” Gordon mused that it might have been a conventional aircraft seen at an unusual angle. He noted, “In some twenty years of observing, I have perhaps seen three or four objects which I would class as very unusual. One or two of these were in powerful telescopes and identification could not be made. For this reason, Gordon is not so quick to dismiss the notion of UFOs existing and maybe even some turning out to be extraterrestrial spaceships. While he is aware that the scientific community remains divided on the subject of UFOs for various reasons, the foremost being the making of UFO reports by “untrained observers,” the amateur astronomer is, nevertheless, keeping an open, but skeptical mind, on these matters. Overriding Skepticism Gordon said that he was unaware of any other UFO reports being made on the night of 8 March. He explained that he had spent several of the past few years investigating UFO reports and could relate many classic cases that turned out to be astronomical phenomena, aircraft seen under unusual circumstances, and in one particular incident, the UFO was explained away as being the Goodyear blimp. “So far,” the amateur astronomer said, “the ‘pattern’ for the present sightings is going true to form. An initial sighting is made, then a few more, and finally, many people who otherwise never look at the sky except to see if it is raining, are suddenly seeing UFOs. “I believe people are reporting aircraft as UFOs in this area. My observations would indicate this; and I have a much better location Have a good pair of binoculars handy if you want in rural Bushkill Township for viewing sky to watch UFOs, opines an objects than those who observe hampered by amateur astronomer from rural Pennsylvania. Artwork source. 48

city or town lights. But I will continue to monitor the night skies on just the chance that perhaps a genuine UFO will appear.” He recommended that potential UFO observers use a good pair of binoculars, preferably with a power of 7X. “These will readily identify aircraft of any type, even at night,” he pointed out. Classification: CE-1 Date: 12 March 1973 Location: Windsor Township, York County, Pennsylvania Glowing UFO at Close Range Joyce Zettlemoyer, along with some of her neighbors in Windsor Township, a small and mostly rural community outside of York, Pennsylvania, witnessed a glowing, round-shaped UFO at close range, beginning on Monday, 12 March 1973. Zettlemoyer informed a reporter from the Reading, Pennsylvania, Times newspaper that she first spotted the UFO hovering over her neighbor Sharyn Semmel’s house early on the morning of 12 March.19 Zettlemoyer informed her neighbor about the UFO sighting, and later that night, Sharyn Semmel herself witnessed a similar glowing, spherical UFO hovering over her home. Perhaps it was the same object. Semmel sighted the UFO at least five other times in the next nine days. “The second time I saw it, it was hovering above the woods behind our home. It was about 50 feet away. There was a form to it. It was rounded in the front, where there were some red lights. There were white lights in the back, but not as bright. I would say it was the same size as a small airplane. “But when I stuck my head out our back door, I couldn’t hear a thing. But I could see it hovering above the woods. The lights, both red and white, throbbed on and off together. When it moved away from our house, I called Joyce Zettlemoyer so she could verify if it was the same UFO she observed.” But after Semmel made the call to her neighbor, and Zettlemoyer looked out her window, the UFO had disappeared. Dr. Ahmad Kiasat, a professor of astronomy from nearby Kutztown State College, suggested on Wednesday, 16 May 1973,20 that the rash of UFO sightings in southeast Pennsylvania might possibly be explained away by the appearance of the so-called “Ray Aurora,” which is caused by solar flares and magnetic particles exploded from the Sun. After Kiasat advanced this theory, Semmel vehemently objected to it. “I think all of the publicity has chased the UFO away,” rued Semmel, noting that, 19 20

22 March 1973 edition. Ibid. Kutztown State College became the Kutztown University of Pennsylvania on 1 July 1983. 49

“There are more planes flying around here than ever. An expert in UFOs has contacted me and told me it would not show up if air traffic is heavy. I just hope someone spots it so we can clear this up.” During the evening of Tuesday, 20 According to experts from the Mutual March 1973, two policemen of the Sunbury, UFO Network (MUFON), spherical Pennsylvania, Police Department were UFOs are more frequently sighted than the traditional “flying saucers.” dispatched to the Chestnut Towers Apartments, Artwork source: Daily Express, 18 July a housing project for the elderly, after one of 2020, London, United Kingdom the residents reported a UFO hovering over the 21 building. The witness excitedly reported the UFO to the dispatch officer and provided only a vague description of it. When the two officers arrived on the scene in their police cruiser, however, they called back to the dispatcher and confirmed the sighting of a rotating, white, red, and green flashing object, which was, indeed, hovering over the building. After the policemen observed the UFO for several seconds, they reported that “It just took off straight up in the air and disappeared.” That evening, after hearing the police radio dispatch, a reporter for the News-Item newspaper of Shamokin, Pennsylvania, went out to the Chestnut Towers, where other neighbors in the apartments confirmed the UFO sighting, Some elderly residents of a Florida retirement community prepare to noting that they, too, had seen it hovering over board a flying saucer bound for their residences.22 This newspaper account extended lifetimes in the Antares star sector in the 1985 blockbuster Cocoon stated that “The sighting at Sunbury is the latest (20th Century Fox, Los Angeles, in a series of reports on UFOs received from a California). Has such a scenario played itself out, from time to time, in wide area of central Pennsylvania.” real life? Harrisburg Helicopter? Sunbury police were checking into the possibility that the UFO hovering overhead the Chestnut Towers apartments may have been a helicopter flying in from nearby Harrisburg, which is the largest metropolitan area closest to Sunbury, situated about 55 miles to the south, and also the state capital. A police spokesman from the Sunbury City Hall told the News-Item reporter, “We received one report that the UFO was possibly a large helicopter out of 21 22 50

“UFO seen by Sunbury policemen,” Morning Press, Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania, 21 March 1973. “UFO Sighted Over Sunbury,” News-Item, Shamokin, Pennsylvania, 21 March 1973.

Harrisburg. We checked this out, also, but learned there were no helicopters sent out from Harrisburg that evening.” Classification: CE-1 Date: Tuesday, 27 March 1973 Location: Brookside neighborhood, Wilkes-Barre, Luzerne County, northeastern Pennsylvania “Colorful UFO” A strange object was viewed by multiple witnesses as it hovered over the Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, neighborhood of Brookside on the evening of Tuesday, 27 March 1973. Local resident Theresa Kusirka of 80 Brookside Street noted that the UFO first appeared in the sky slightly to the northeast of Brookside around 6:40 p.m. “It was flashing green, yellow, blue and red lights and making a soft, whirring sound,” she affirmed. Immediately upon sighting the UFO, Kusirka ran into her house and brought out two other family members to see it as well. Then she ran over to the neighbors’ homes on both sides of her house, so that they, too, might serve as observers of this phenomenon. One neighbor from each of the two homes came outside. Therefore, including Kusirka, there were four other witnesses to the UFO, so far as she knows. All five stood outside until 8:15 p.m., watching the UFO just hover in place, at which time it began to move gradually to the east. By 8:55 p.m., it just disappeared over the eastern horizon. A reporter for the Times-Leader newspaper of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, checked with the desk of the National Weather Service at the Wilkes-Barre/ Scranton airport in Avoca, Pennsylvania, and was told that none of the airport officials had reported anything unusual in the sky on Tuesday evening, going into the night; and that at the time where the object was allegedly visible over Brookside, the sky was cloudless and visibility was reportedly “good.”23 This author’s internet check24 for the night in question revealed that Venus was on the other side of the Sun and, therefore, not observable. As such, it most likely was a UFO being observed.

23 24

“Brookside Residents Spy Colorful UFO” Times-Leader, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, 28 March 1973. https://in-the-sky.org/ephemeris.php?ird=1&irs=1&ima=1&iob=1&objtype=1&objpl=Venus&obj txt=Venus&tz=0&startday=27&startmonth=3&startyear=1973&interval=4&rows=25 (Accessed 3 October 2023). 51

CHAPTER XI TROOPER DALE AND THE CASE OF THE FRIGHTENED DRIVER Classification: CE-1 Date: 19 March 1977 Location: Big Run area in Jefferson County, Pennsylvania, along State Route 410, about seven miles northeast of Punxsutawney, in central west Pennsylvania It was a cool Saturday night, 19 March 1977, at 8:05 p.m., when Pennsylvania State Trooper Phillip Dale was cresting a ridge in the Big Run area on Route 410, about seven miles northeast of Punxsutawney, in his cruiser, when he looked out of his driver’s side, rolled-down window and sighted what appeared to be a volleyball-sized light (gauged as if held at arm’s length) pacing his vehicle. Dale later told a Pennsylvania state UFO investigator from the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), based in Washington, D.C., that the object looked “like a glow” and “seemed unusually low as if it were actually below the horizon.” The state trooper also noted, “It seemed unusually close to the ground. It appeared closer and brighter than any of the other stars, and all the stars were bright on that clear night. For the next six miles of driving toward Punxsutawney, Dale kept his eyes fixed on the ball of light. The more he watched the UFO, the more it seemed to change color. At first glance, the object was a light cream or amber color, but after ten minutes of watching it closely (the time was now 8:15 p.m.), the UFO changed its color to a deep red, simultaneously increasing its intensity. Just outside of Punxsutawney, the sphere of light turned toward the northwest. The April 1977 edition of NICAP’s official publication, the UFO Investigator, notes that, “When Dale first noticed the light, he was on the top of a hill. He was immediately interested in what he was observing, especially after he saw the light change color. He decided that after driving down the hill and across the valley, he would proceed to the next ridge, which would be at a higher elevation than 52

the first one, and get out of his car to observe the light. But in the approximately ten minutes it took him to reach the next ridge, the light disappeared.” Originally, Dale was dispatched from the Punxsutawney station to check out a report coming in earlier that evening concerning a “brightly-lit object” that was hovering over a woman’s car, terrifying not only her, but her son and a female friend. That incident allegedly took place around 7:00 p.m. According to Trooper Dale’s report on this occurrence, “The frightened woman, her son and her friend left her mother’s house, which is in the Big Run area. She was driving toward Route 410 and paralleling Red Dog Township Road. A bright light on a nearby bill caught their attention; but they thought it was a new drilling rig, something frequently seen in the area. “However, the tan-colored light started moving toward the right rear of the car. Now Mrs. Bowser, the reporting witness, and her friend were alarmed. She continued to drive, though, and as she did, the light moved over the top of the car until it was ahead of them. The object maintained the same speed as the car’s for about 30-45 minutes, hovering just over the front of the car the entire time. Once it assumed its position in front, it shot two bright, off-white beams of light, just like two headlights, directly onto the car.” Trooper Dale continued with his report of Mrs. Bowser’s encounter: “When these lights came on, the women could not help but watch the object, even though they were terrified. They described it as being a flat disk encircled by windows. From these windows, blue-green lights emanated. The object finally drifted away from the car when the women reached the junction with Route 410.” The NICAP investigator asked if any electromagnetic effects were noted during the incident by Mrs. Bowser or any of the other UFOs frequently buzz automobiles on two in the car, and Trooper Dale stated that he lonely country roads at night, scaring was not aware of any being reported by the two unsuspecting drivers. Photo source: Weird World News ladies or the boy. Other UFO Activity that Night Trooper Dale, of course, was cognizant of the details surrounding Mrs. Bowser’s encounter at the time that he first sighted, from the crest of a hill, the bright light resting on the horizon. Immediately upon seeing the UFO, Trooper Dale radioed back to the police barracks in Punxsutawney providing his position and a description of the phenomenon he was observing. The radio 53

police dispatcher, who received Trooper Dale’s report, informed him that there were two other policemen, about twenty miles north of his position, who were also watching a glowing ball of light low on the horizon. However, the dispatcher told Trooper Dale that the UFO that fit the description that he and the other two officers had provided could not be seen from the police headquarters and barracks in Punxsutawney. Nevertheless, those at headquarters were watching a “different, but just as unusual light, from another direction in the sky.” After the first light sighted by Trooper Dale had disappeared, he turned his attention to the southeastern skies, whence he spotted a second unidentifiable light. This one was much higher in altitude and appeared to rotate counterclockwise. This UFO pulsed red and blue-green lights for about thirty minutes, emitting no smoke, leaving no trail and making no sound. Trooper Dale kept the object in his sight until it finally flew out of his range of vision around 8:45 p.m. Expert Opinions Sought Trooper Dale later consulted with an astronomer from the Indiana University of Pennsylvania in the city of Indiana, in Indiana County, immediately to the south of Punxsutawney and Jefferson County, Pennsylvania, to get an expert’s opinion on what he viewed on the night of 19 March 1977. The astronomer felt that the first object was probably Aldebaran, the brightest star to be seen in the constellation of Taurus, viewed under unusual atmospheric conditions, possibly an atmospheric inversion. As for the second object reported by Trooper Dale, the astronomer felt certain that it was a UFO. There was no major airport near any of the sightings’ locations and, therefore, no way to verify if any “bogeys” turned up on radar screens. In any event, Trooper Dale concurred with the astronomer’s assessment and as to his second reported object, subsequently informed the NICAP investigator that, “I’ve never witnessed anything like this before.”

CHAPTER XII “THUMB-TO-EYE” ESTIMATION MADE OF FIFTY-FOOT-WIDE UFO Classification: CE-1 Date: 10 April 1981 Location: Rural District One, Freeland, Luzerne County, Pennsylvania

Technical extrapolations made comparing UFO photographs taken by contactees from the 1950s are highlighted in engineering-style drawings as corroborative evidence for the existence of UFOs. The contactees who snapped these photographs identified their respective crafts as a type of “electromagnetically-driven scout ship,” approximately 50 feet in diameter. Source: Flying Saucer Review, Vol. 11, No. 4 (July-August 1965), London, United Kingdom. Some ufologists believe that a Freeland, Pennsylvania, couple witnessed the takeoff of such a scout ship from the other side of Highland Mountain in the Sandy Valley back in 1981. 55

Freeland is a small, rural Pennsylvania borough some eighteen miles south of Wilkes-Barre and ten miles northeast of Hazleton in Luzerne County, situated in the east-central portion of the Keystone State. At the beginning of the 1980s, much like today, most of its approximately 4,000 residents were intricately connected economically to the coal mining industry. Perhaps in the annals of this community, there has been nothing so exciting than the appearance of a UFO that took place on the night of Friday, 10 April 1981, at a little past 9 p.m. A Freeland Rural District One couple, requesting anonymity, was the first to report the UFO with a call to the news desk of the Hazleton, Pennsylvania, Standard-Speaker newspaper about five minutes after first sighting it.25 The husband never believed in UFOs as spaceships from another planet, “but now I don’t know,” he told the reporter recording his story. He and his wife first spotted the object while looking out their kitchen window. There was an unusually bright light that caught their attention, holding to a space in the sky where they had never noticed anything like it before. It was hovering over the treetops of Highland Mountain “way off in the distance.” It remained stationary for several minutes and then seemed to gain a little altitude before heading off in an easterly direction towards Sandy Valley. The husband declared, “It moved very slowly and eventually went out of sight.” Both the husband and wife were in agreement that the UFO was “creamcolored on one side, red on the other, and separated by a black spot.” By the husband’s so-called “thumb-to-eye estimation” of measurement, the unusual object was some type of craft approximately 50 feet wide. No sound was heard.

25 56

“Sight a UFO-type light,” Standard-Speaker newspaper, Hazleton, Pennsylvania, 11 April 1981

CHAPTER XIII SOUTHWEST PENNSYLVANIA RESIDENTS BAFFLED BY “STRANGE BALL” AND LIGHTS IN THE SKIES Classification: CE-1 Date: Thursday, 16 April 1981 Location: Fairchance, a borough in Fayette County, southwest Pennsylvania Linda Baker drove her car to a Main Street residence across from the Veterans of Foreign Wars Hall in the borough of Fairchance, Pennsylvania, for the purpose of picking her son up from a Cub Scout meeting that concluded at 9:30 p.m. on the evening of Thursday, 16 April 1981. No sooner had she gotten her son seated in the car, situated herself behind the wheel, and turned the key in the ignition to start up the vehicle and begin the return drive to her home on High Street in the same borough that her eyes were drawn to the top of the windshield, where overhead outside appeared a strange aerial dance of flashing, multicolored lights. Linda Baker’s Testimony In an interview with Theresa Brady, a staff writer for the Herald-Standard newspaper of nearby Uniontown, Pennsylvania, about seven miles north of Fairchance, Linda Baker remarked, “That night, I did not look up at the sky as I usually do. I didn’t really notice anything. I was in a hurry to get myself and my son in the car and back home. “Out of nowhere came this white light in the sky. It came on and then shut off. It came on and shut off yet again. I had a sneaking suspicion that this light, which appeared slightly larger than a star, was trying to attract my attention. I kept thinking, ‘Gee, this thing wanted me to see it.’ “For the third time that the light came on, however, it came on with these colored lights of blue, red, and green all around it.

“I realized then that it wasn’t just a star. I didn’t get scared. I sped home because I wanted someone else to see it. I didn’t want anyone to think that I was loony.” When Linda Baker and her son got home, she excitedly called for her friends and neighbors to come and look at the mysterious lights, which fortunately were still visible. Fourteen people came over to the Baker home on High Street, joining Linda, her husband, and son in the sky watch. One of her neighbors in attendance was Anna Marie Garlett, who noted that “The red, blue and green ones would flash like a neon light and stop. Then, a minute or two later, it started again, but the white one was constant.” To add to her neighbor Anna Marie Garlett’s comment, Linda Baker said, “They (the lights) would move a while and stop. It wasn’t like a plane that constantly moves.” As to the constancy of the white light, Baker was in agreement with Garlett, noting that “The white light in the center seemed brighter and larger. It seemed as if it was the leader and the other ones were behind.” Fairchance Police Officers Also View UFO Display Jack Flowers, a Fairchance police officer, was also on the scene at Baker’s High Street home to view the UFO display. Officer Flowers remarked, “The lights would travel in a southwest direction and then stay in position for a while. After hovering in one place for ten to fifteen minutes, they would continue the journey.” Linda Baker also concurred with the police officer’s assessment. Garlett made additional remarks concerning the lights: “One pair of lights seemed to be closer to Fairchance than the other set. When I first came outside, there were two lights. They resembled stars, but they were much lower. These things were as low or lower than planes. The one on the left-hand side was much lower than the light on the right. It seemed like something suspended from it that resembled the lower part of a cone. The left one moved up higher. Just like a neon light, it flashed red, blue and green. Then it turned completely red and headed toward Morgantown.” Stan Gordon, the director of the Pennsylvania Center for UFO Research in Greensburg, noted that his organization received two other UFO reports on the same Stan Gordon, director of the night. The first came in from a fellow Fairchance Pennsylvania Center for UFO Research, at his home and research police officer with Flowers, Mike Volek, who room in Greensburg, observed the object from a different location Pennsylvania. Scan QR for photo source.

than Flowers in Fairchance, and the second from a resident of Morgantown, West Virginia, which is the same location that Garlett reported that the object was moving towards. In Volek’s testimony provided to Gordon, he declared, “The only thing that I saw was one red light, sort of over the New Geneva area. After observing it for about fifteen minutes, it went out of sight. It was a red, blinking light.” Baker, for her part, added that this blinking red light made no noises whatsoever. It just seemed to be “circling” overhead. Later that night, the same phenomenon was viewed by about twenty people. According to police in Masontown, Pennsylvania, most of these reports were coming in from the New Geneva area, about five miles to the south of Masontown. Family Encounter with a Large UFO A housewife out on Fairchance Road, Mrs. James Popovich, along with other members of her family, also sighted some UFOs that night after Linda Baker’s son Jamie, a good friend of Richard Popovich, told him about the local sightings then taking place. Richard, in turn, got the word out to other Popovich family members. Mrs. James Popovich explained to Theresa Brady of the HeraldStandard newspaper, “There was this red one that shot straight up. And then I noticed a huge, bright light in the direction of the Takoch farm around 6:50 p.m.” Mrs. Popovich was joined outside by her two teenage sons, Richard and Darren, and her daughter, Mary Ann, age twelve. She casually noted, “It was a clear night. The Moon was almost full. That’s when you see these things.” Mrs. Popovich provided more details of the sighting, which she had the opportunity to view through a pair of high-powered binoculars. Given this visual aid, she described the UFO as follows: “The perfectly round object resembled a moon or a dish, with no marks. In size, it is bigger than a star and larger than a moon.” Mrs. Popovich recounted some unusual circumstances regarding the UFO encounter she experienced with her two sons: “There wasn’t a star out. It was sort of like daylight yet. It was in the middle of Takoch field. My son Darren likes to fool around. He said, ‘I’m going to run up under there.’ “I said, ‘Don’t you dare!’ “He started jumping up and down, saying, ‘They got me! They got me!’ “But when he started doing that, that thing started coming toward us. It must have turned over or flipped over or something because you couldn’t see it 59

for a minute. Then, it appears again. It was really something. It headed toward us. “I told the children to get inside.” From the safety of their home, Mrs. Popovich and her sons continued to watch the larger UFO. It slowly moved down the space of two homes on the opposite side of their block and then stopped, maintaining a hovering mode above a neighbor’s house. Then it started up again, passing by the WMBS radio tower and then ascending upward to assume a position underneath the first UFO spotted, the smaller red sphere, whence both objects zipped out of sight. Yet Another Witness There was another witness to a similar phenomenon, a man in Fairchance wishing to remain anonymous, who was driving along Route 857 on the way to his work site in Uniontown at about 6:45 p.m., just a few days before the Popovich family’s sighting. The gentleman explained his UFO encounter to Theresa Brady: “At first, I thought it was a planet, but then I realized it was moving. It wasn’t moving at a steady pace, you know, like an airplane moving.” Thinking that it might be a weather balloon, he immediately discounted the idea once he noted that the object’s movements were not coinciding with the wind currents. Through his observations, the anonymous gentleman remarked, “Although the ‘thing’ was a white ball, at one point it seemed orange. But I don’t know; it could have been a reflection of the Sun setting.” Insofar as he was driving his car, he tried to keep his eyes on the road while still keeping track of where the object was in the sky. Interestingly, he pointed out that, “From the Takoch farm, this thing was going west. As I started out on Route 857, it started moving in a northerly direction. The last I saw this thing was when I got to the Red Head station on Route 119.” Concluding Commentary on the UFO Linda Baker: “I know one thing: When I travel to work at night and then travel home, I am looking at the sky.” Anna Marie Garlett: “I don’t care if I ever see a sky show again. There’s got to be some logical explanation.” Mrs. Popovich (no first name given): “I’m considering buying a telescope for me and my children.” According to Stan Gordon, his organization continues collecting UFO reports throughout the month of April 1981, coming in from the entire area of 60

southwestern Pennsylvania. From these reports, data has been garnered from Pennsylvanians of all walks of life attesting to the reality of mysterious spheres apparently conducting a reconnaissance of Fayette County for some yet-to-bedetermined reason.26

Theresa Brady, “UFO report: What’s that over New Geneva?” Herald-Standard, Uniontown, Pennsylvania, 3 May 1981. 61

CHAPTER XIV “FUZZIES” DROPPED FROM FLYING SAUCERS Classification: CE-2 Date: Monday, 4 May 1981 Location: Danville, Second Ward, Montour County, Pennsylvania One resident of Danville, Pennsylvania’s Second Ward described the unknown particles dropped from flying saucers seemingly passing in front of the Sun as “hundreds of fuzzies.” Yet another witness from the same ward noted that they looked like “falling cobwebs.” From the period of 2:30 to 4:30 p.m. on Monday, 4 May 1981, residents in this section of the central-east Pennsylvania community of Danville stood amazed outside the doors of their homes as they watched a fleet of flying saucers dumping “shiny, little white, silk-like particles,” as they were aptly described by William F. Hummer of 222 Honeymoon Street. He told a reporter for the Sunbury, Pennsylvania, Daily Item newspaper that six of his neighbors watched the flying saucers pass in front of the Sun, go into a hovering mode, and discharge the On 17 October 1952, a fleet of UFOs passed over strange substance over their small town.27 Two Oloron, France, depositing of Hummer’s neighbors were willing to come a strange, silky substance on the ground that has come to be known forward and verify his account provided to the as “angel’s hair” among ufologists the world over. Photo source: Publications Daily Item reporter, although they requested to International, Ltd. be anonymous. According to Hummer, “The saucer-type crafts seemed to have domes on top. It looked like the saucers were exploding or ‘hatching’ in front of the Sun and releasing the smaller particles. The particles seemed to disintegrate as they fell to the ground.”

27 62

“Were ‘fuzzies’ really from UFOs?” Daily Item newspaper, Sunbury, Pennsylvania, 5 May 1981.

“Angel’s Hair” Associated with UFO Phenomena This case was classified as a close encounter of the second kind (CE2) primarily because it was associated with another type of phenomenon, specifically referred to by paranormal investigators as “angel’s hair.” This is considered to be a fine, filmy substance observed falling from the sky, sometimes in great plentitude. Strands of angel’s hair may vary in length from a few inches to over a hundred feet. They often dissolve in contact with the ground. Since the decade of the 1950s, angel’s hair has become associated with UFOs. The first documented case of angel’s hair associated with UFOs in the modern era of ufology occurred in France in 1952, during which a local high school principal reported seeing a cigar-shaped UFO, or typical mothership, along with a smaller saucer running alongside it. The flying objects left a film behind them, which floated to the ground, covering trees, telephone wires, and the roofs of houses. When the unusual material was picked up and rolled into a ball, it turned gelatinous and vanished. Additional accounts of this substance have appeared in UFO literature over the years, though angel’s hair does not seem to be a common element of UFO reports. Analysis of angel’s hair has proved elusive. Insofar as the material seems to dissolve very quickly, an analysis of angel’s hair has proved elusive and inconclusive at best. “Cobwebs from airborne spiders” has been offered as one possible explanation from the skeptic’s corner.28

28 Jerome Clark, Emergence of a Phenomenon: UFOs from the Beginning through 1959 (Detroit, Michigan: Omnigraphics, 1992) 63

CHAPTER XV “KEYSTONE COPS AND SAUCER” Classification: CE-1 Date: Tuesday, 23 March 1982 Location: Shenango Township, Lawrence County, Pennsylvania (west-central part of the state on the border with Ohio It was a clear case of “Keystone Cops and Saucer” if there ever was one. A disc-shaped UFO emitting a white, glowing light followed two Lawrence County police officers, Anthony Nativio of Neshannock Township and Ronald Bongivengo of Shenango Township, in their respective cruisers Police officers from Pennsylvania, a.k.a. the at dawn on Tuesday, 23 March 1982, “Keystone Cops,” in hot pursuit of a flying saucer. before climbing vertically out of sight. Nativio was the first to report the UFO at approximately 5:00 a.m., about a quarter of a mile east of Ellwood Road, across from Cascade Park, while he was driving to his Rose Stop Road home. When he initially spotted the object, he estimated that it was about a quarter of a mile up. Thinking it was just a star, he quickly changed his mind as it began to move along with his police car at the same speed. Even as he passed by the Lawrence Village Plaza, the UFO seemed to have kept abreast of his vehicle, and when he pulled into his drive on Rose Stop Road, the UFO, which now appeared more like a traditional flying saucer, began hovering about 800 feet over his house, occasionally scooting over the road and then back over the residence. As to the size of the object, Nativio could not ascertain it with any certainty but did tell a reporter for the New Castle, Pennsylvania News later that day that, “It looked pretty big to me. It was shaped like a dinner plate and gave off a white glow light.”29 29 64

“Two policemen spot UFO in Shenango Township,” News, New Castle, Pennsylvania, 23 March 1982.

Police Officer Bongivengo to the Rescue After viewing the UFO for about fifteen minutes, Nativio called his friend and associate, Shenango Township Police Officer Ronald Bongivengo. When Bongivengo arrived at the scene, Nativio pointed out the UFO to him, which was then about 600 yards distant from their location. According to Bongivengo, “It (the UFO) looked like a searchlight on the bottom of a helicopter, but larger. It was very bright and the area around the object was illuminated.” Nativio felt that the object would follow them if they drove away. Both officers drove off in Nativio’s cruiser, and sure enough, the saucer followed after them. They drove on Rose Stop Road to Ellwood Road and turned north, continuing on for about a quarter of a mile. Then, with the arrival of dawn, Bongivengo estimated that the UFO was about 1,000 feet above the police car. Not having a camera, the two officers made a call to Neshannock Police Officer Robert Shaffer, who arrived at their location a few minutes later and took some photographs of the glowing object. Unfortunately, by the time Shaffer arrived at the scene to take those pictures, the UFO had already begun to rise, thus appearing to diminish in size until it faded out of sight. When Shaffer started to snap a photograph of the UFO, it had already reduced itself to a pinpoint of light on the image. “At least Shaffer was able to see something and get a picture of it,” noted Nativio, who also was pleased that he was also able to get his mother outside to look at the shrinking UFO before it totally blinked out. As for Officer Bongivengo, while he previously did not believe in the existence of UFOs, now accepts their reality and affirms for the New Castle, Pennsylvania, News reporter, “Now I know that UFOs are real. I know what I saw.”30 Nativio was also perplexed by the UFO sighting, noting, “It bugged me a little bit as I never saw anything exactly like it before, although I did notice something strange a couple of weeks ago in the same area.” The officer did not want to go into it any further, other than to say it (the prior anomaly), too, was on the caliber of a “mysterious phenomenon.” Prior Sightings in Area The Shenango County Police Chief David Rishel informed the News reporter that there had been other UFO reports coming out of his jurisdiction years back, particularly in the Ellwood Road area.31

30 31

Ibid. Ibid. 65

CHAPTER XVI CENTRAL NEW JERSEY-PENNSYLVANIA UFO STUDY GROUP DECRIES NATIONAL GOVERNMENT UFO POLICY AND MAJOR RELIGIONS’ SKEPTICISM OF ALIENS/UFOs Controversy in the Summer of 1985 Richard Caril, a 40-year-old landscaper and automobile mechanic from Yardley, a borough of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, told Peter Howell, a reporter for the Montgomery County Record newspaper of Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, that twenty-three years ago, when he was a senior in high school and pulling into a gas station in Newton, Pennsylvania, in the Wilkes-Barre metropolitan area, that he had become “transfixed by a swirling object overhead that suddenly changed colors and then drifted away.”32 Caril was one of about a dozen members of the newly organized Central New Jersey-Pennsylvania UFO Study Group with a recruiting table set up on the second floor in Jenkintown’s Oxford Valley Mall on Thursday, 18 July 1985. Jenkintown is a borough in the eastern part of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, located about ten miles to the north of Philadelphia, very close to the New Jersey state line. Caril’s experience in the Newton gas station is what hooked him into becoming an avid investigator of UFO phenomena and a member of the newly formed study group. “I knew I saw it. I wasn’t drinking. I’m a believer. That thing, and some movies I have seen, did it. One would have to be crazy not to believe in them,” asserted Caril in the interview. Members of the group, like Caril, come from varied backgrounds and all walks of life. One in the group told reporter Howell that he believed “UFOs were as real as God and maybe scientifically easier to explain.” 32 66

Peter Howell, “UFO group wants to turn you into a believer,” Montgomery County Record, Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, 24 July 1985.

“Spiritual Experience” in Sighting UFOs Another ufologist at the recruiting table that day was Tom Benson, a balding, soft-spoken urban planner from New Jersey. Benson identified himself as one of the co-founders of the UFO group. As to his start in ufology, Benson noted, “I saw the light in my youth. Several reported sightings near Washington, D.C., convinced me there was something more than just gases in the sky. They must have picked up hundreds of objects, and still, the Air Force said it was a weather inversion. “Then, when I was 15,” he continued, “I saw two UFOs outside my home in New Jersey. It was like a spiritual experience.” Benson proceeded to draw the two UFOs for reporter Howell, depicting them as two elliptical orbs that flew over his house. He estimated them to be about 1,000 feet apart from each other. Ufologist Benson, at the time of the interview with Howell, being 47 years old, felt the UFOs possessed some kind of spiritual quality since “They can materialize and dematerialize. They can ‘transmitize’ and ‘non-transmitize.’ It’s really beyond quantum mechanics.” To sum up a really detailed analysis of his speculations concerning UFO propulsion, Benson felt that the intelligences behind the flying saucers were so advanced that they knew how to convert matter into energy or vice-versa. Origins of the Saucer Intelligences (SIs) To the Montogomery County Record reporter, Benson spoke with the articulate ring of credibility. For this reason, and due to Benson being one of the UFO study group’s co-founders, reporter Howell quoted extensively from him in his article. As to the origins of the flying saucer occupants, Benson asserted, “They are little understood. They may be extraterrestrial, other-dimensional, shortlived natural phenomena, psychic or energyprecipitating projections. “UFOs are really a philosophical subject, just so much as the study of cosmology or God.” Very few of the local shoppers, however, Some ufologists, like Tom Benson, that Our Lady of Fatima, as were approaching the recruiting table. The suggest an extraterrestrial, came down in a reporter, watching this shyness on the part flying saucer. Art source: Joaquim of the masses, concluded that the message Fernandes, Fina D’Armada, Celestial Secrets: The Hidden History of the of the group’s members was just going over Fatima Incident (Charlottesville, Virginia: Anomalist Books, 2007)

their heads, or perhaps they were turned off by some of the group members expressing discouraging words about the federal government and the supposed UFO cover-up, or even some of the more stridently anti-religious remarks being made at the table. Politics and Religion In the United States, it is customary for public figures not associated with politics or religion, to avoid making any comments on these subjects, respectively. After all, why alienate any possible audience by unnecessarily taking sides on controversial issues falling into these categories? Even back in 1985, ufologists were waging a seemingly never-ending battle against politicians and the forces of the federal government, in addition to the clergy of numerous faiths, that were loath to admit the existence of some UFOs as being extraterrestrial spaceships. Government UFO Cover-Up When some interested ones would approach the UFO study group’s information booth, Benson would overwhelm them with reams of government documents pertaining to UFOs that he obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) detailing sightings of the objects, investigations of the same, and official denials. Said Benson, “There is even a story about two Iranian pilots who were reportedly chased by a UFO in 1976. One of the pilots even fired a missile at the UFO before both pilots lost all communication with ground control. “The UFO phenomenon used to be two levels above the atomic bomb in the 1950s, as far as security was concerned. It’s only now, however, that they (those in government) are gradually releasing information.” Ecclesiastical UFO Cover-Up Benson, who self-identified as a liberal Unitarian, locked horns with the leaders of more traditional religions, such as sects of Judaism and Christian denominations that took a dim view, dogmatically, of the whole UFO phenomenon. Benson believes, for example, that the Bible prophet Ezekiel’s vision of a “giant wheel within a wheel” flying across the heavens was, in fact, an extraterrestrial spaceship. While this contention was enough to put most Jews and fundamental Christians at odds with him and his group, his comments about the Blessed Virgin Mary (BVM) and her appearance at Fatima set all of the devout Roman 68

Catholics’ teeth on edge. As Benson put it: “In Fatima, Portugal, in 1917, several people saw that the church interpreted as the Virgin Mary hovering over a tree. UFO experts have determined that the vision was actually a UFO. There have been BVM sightings all over the world. These religious apparitions are instances of a scientific phenomenon: a UFO and its occupant(s).” Circumstantial Evidence Piling Up Benson felt that the amount of circumstantial evidence for the existence of UFOs has been piling up over the centuries, since Ezekiel and Biblical times. “There’s a preponderance of circumstantial evidence that would hold up in a court of law for anything else, so why not UFOs?” queried Benson incredulously. He suggested that, “People refuse to accept UFOs because they fear the consequences. It might mean that a more advanced society exists or that some principles or religions may have to be seriously revised, if not tossed out altogether.” “Dr. UFO” Saves the Day! Keep in mind that in 1985, the popular television program Ancient Aliens was not airing anywhere. The Ancient Aliens series is produced by Prometheus Entertainment of Los Angeles, California, and the concept of ancient astronauts is presented in a noncritical, documentary format. Episodes also explore topics such as Atlantis and other lost civilizations, extraterrestrial contacts, ufology, Pat Marcattilio of Hamilton, New and sundry conspiracy theories. The series has Jersey, a.k.a. “Dr. UFO,” saved the Central New Jersey-Pennsylvania aired on the History Channel since 2010 and UFO Study Group from being swept is considered to be its flagship program. The into the dustbin of ufology’s history. continued popularity of the Ancient Aliens program has certainly contributed to a change of attitude favoring the existence of UFOs, both ancient and modern, by the general public. But in 1985, the subject of ufology, and particularly ancient astronaut theory, was not so well received by the public at large. After all, with the recommendations of the federally-funded Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects33carried out at the University of Colorado at Boulder that concluded in 1968 that there was nothing worthy of further scientific investigation into UFO sightings and that 33

Dr. Edward U. Condon (physicist), Director, Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects (New York, New York: Bantam Books, 1969). 69

the government should get out of the UFO business, the Air Force’s official UFO investigation, Project Bluebook, closed up shop in the following year. Although we now know through the ongoing Congressional Committee on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) disclosure revelations that have continued since the summer of 2021 that, as a national security concern, the federal government has never stopped monitoring UFO activity, so far as the vast majority of the American people were concerned from that period of 1969-2021, UFOs were just, as the late Swiss psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology stated, “a modern myth of things seen in the sky.”34 Benson’s above-cited remarks that appeared in the Montgomery County Record were, at best, pure speculation. How could any ancient account or myth of an alleged UFO be scientifically investigated and verified? The other co-founder of the group, Pat Marcattilio of Hamilton, New Jersey, felt that the propagation of such extremist thinking regarding UFOs, for the time being, should be abandoned in favor of the more objective approach of collecting and scientifically analyzing, as thoroughly as possible, contemporary UFO reports coming in from New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Modern-day reports of UFOs would provide real and substantial clues to the phenomenon versus old reports garnered from the Bible or mythology. With the contemporary reports, other living witnesses could be sought out and trace evidence accumulated. But this was never the case with the so-called instances of “ancient astronauts” arriving on the Earth in “flying shields” or “chariots of the gods.” For the sake of improving the image of the group, its membership unanimously elected Pat Marcattilio as its sole director. All things considered, with Marcattilio’s rational and scientific approach to the UFO phenomenon, together with a gift in public speaking and effective communication, this was the most logical step in fostering the survival of the organization.35 Endurance of the New Jersey-Pennsylvania UFO Group Over the Decades Pat Marcattilio goes by the nickname of “Dr. UFO,” although before getting into ufology circles, his coworkers referred to him as the “Spaceman” due to his interest in outer space and everything even remotely associated with it. For 34

35 70

Dr. Carl Gustav Jung, Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky (New York, New York: New American Library, 1959). Even if no extra-terrestrials were to exist, statistical information notes that the belief in them gives credence to psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s idea that images of unearthly visitors in machines are consistent with the human creation of images of descending deities and angels, archetypal figures that appear in the imagination during times of anxiety or stress (such as the Cold War era). Erin Duffy, “’Dr. UFO’ runs conspiracy, paranormal group in Hamilton,” Times, Trenton, New Jersey, 29 December 2012.

more than half a century, Marcattilio has kept his eyes on the sky. “It’s just been a favorite topic all my life for some reason,” Marcattilio said, adding, “I guess I’d just like to meet some people from other planets.” Marcattilio has been closely following the UFO phenomenon since he was in the seventh grade, back in 1955, when he read some of the writings of the retired Marine Corps aviator, Major Donald E. Keyhoe, a leader in the emerging world of UFO conspiracy theories, i.e., that the higher echelons of the United States government, and particularly the military, were aware the some of the UFOs represented the vanguard of an extraterrestrial reconnaissance force conducting a survey of our planet, possibly for the ultimate purpose of preparing an invasion. Marcattilio credits a neighborhood friend for introducing him to flying saucers. Dr. UFO explained, “A buddy got me interested in 1955. He was a ham radio operator. He was in eighth grade and later became an electrical engineer, studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and worked at Cape Kennedy. He told me every time we shot a rocket up that UFOs would follow it during the first orbit around the Earth. Then it would shoot off. Every time they shot up a rocket, the UFOs were news headlines.” It was that same friend who loaned Marcattilio the first book that he would read on the subject of UFOs, Retired United States Marine Corps Major and aviator Donald E. Keyhoe’s Flying Saucers from Outer Space (New York City, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1953). The book was a follow-up to Kehoe’s True magazine (New York City, New York) series of articles, “Flying Saucers are Real,” originally published in 1950. A writer for the Saturday Evening Post and Weird Tales, Kehoe also wrote about aviation, psychic phenomena, and pulp fiction stories. Marcattilio’s ham operator friend also became the “ears” for passing on unusual stories with seeming outer space connections. “He would get people to talk from around the world,” remarked Marcattilio, “people from all across the country and California seeing strange things. It was really interesting to us, so we joined the National Investigation Committee on Aerial Phenomenon (NICAP) and the Aerial Phenomenon Research Organization (APRO). We got reports from them on strange things from around the world,” he says. 1984 was the turning point, however, when Marcattilio, Benson, and other friends interested in UFOs parlayed their passion for the unusual and unexplained into organizing the Central New Jersey/Pennsylvania UFO Study Group. Since then, the group has continually grown and has consistently been meeting in a conference room at the Hamilton Township Free Public Library on 71

the first Wednesday of every month. Marcattilio first envisioned the meetings as a gathering for like-minded people interested in the possibility of life on other planets. To accommodate the continued and exponential growth of the group under Marcattilio’s leadership, the members now additionally hold twice-yearly conferences of the Great UFO/ET Congress. “They come from all over — Maine, New Hampshire, Florida,” said Marcattilio, further noting that, “We’ve had people from California, from South America, from Canada. We’ve had people from South Africa, Germany, France, London. Mostly, they’re all interested in UFOs, but now this year, we’re just starting to get into paranormal and metaphysical consciousness, other things like that.” Some conferences included appearances by major figures in the field of ufology. For example, in 2013, the conference speakers included James Penniston, who had a close encounter of the third kind that took place in the Rendlesham Forest in the United Kingdom when the United States Air Force was using the facilities there in the early 1980s. Retired United States Air Force Major George Flier was also on hand and discussed the 1978 shooting of an alien at Fort Dix, New Jersey; additionally present were researchers from Virginia who shared their recent investigation of UFO reports from that state. Incorporation of Paranormal Phenomena Attendance at the monthly UFO and paranormal study groups has continually been growing. Average monthly attendance runs at about 40 members and ten visitors. Said Marcattilio, “Researchers often attend or present findings on electromagnetic field scans from a supposedly haunted house or films of UFO sightings.” Bolstered by a growing interest in cryptozoology (the search for mystery animals), alien conspiracies and paranormal experiences and the rash of television shows devoted to documenting all that goes bump in the night, such as the “Finding Bigfoot” episodes on Animal Planet and, of course, all the programming featured on Ancient Aliens with the History Channel, Marcattilio said the hobbies that once earned him more than a few strange looks are becoming more mainstream. “People are really starting to dig in and get excited about these subjects,” he said. Marcattilio has thousands of books and other periodicals devoted to astronomy, UFOs and what he calls “Earth mysteries,” but he’s done more than just read about flying saucers or alien abductions. Establishing contact with others interested in UFOs and other paranormal phenomena and organizing 72

them into active research in these areas is now his highest priority. “I wanted to find other people who have had experiences as I have. I thought that we could get together in a location that would be good to share our experiences,” says cofounder and coordinator Pat Marcattilio.36 In returning to the group’s first meeting in September 1984, Marcattilio points out that it was focused on unidentified flying objects (UFOs), but today, the group embraces other less conventional yet popular topics. “We now include people who have investigated ghosts and haunted houses and parapsychology and metaphysical subjects,” the organizer explains. For example, at a recent meeting, after Marcattilio invited people to talk about their recent paranormal or unexplained experiences, one man told of a ghost encounter in a haunted gas station, and the self-professed, certified cognitive skills practitioner Laurie Cart presented a talk on electromagnetic fields and their relationship to health. Her support included the research of Albert Roy Davis, a scientist who studied the effects of magnets on health. Marcattilio justifies the incorporation of the investigations into psychic phenomena by the members of his group due to the fact that the incidents of such psychic events substantially increase in those areas of New Jersey and Pennsylvania where UFO activity is being reported. But UFOs are still the major interest for Marcattilio, who recalls an experience that has stayed with him: “I saw some UFOs in the sky, so I decided to find other people who wanted to share their experiences, too. My first one was in 1963. I saw this bright star that I thought was a satellite going across the sky. It took five minutes. I called my wife outside and for five minutes, we watched it moving. Then it made a right-hand turn and suddenly took off in seconds.” That sighting occurred in the backyard of Marcattilio’s apartment on South Clinton and Beatty streets in Trenton, New Jersey, where he lived with his then-newlywed wife, Patricia. Marcattilio is a Trenton native whose early years were spent in the Chambersburg section of the city, down the street from his grandparents’ Italian delicatessen. His milkman father later moved the family to Atlantic Avenue next to the Woodlawn Pool Swim Club, where uncles would jump the fence for midnight swims. Marcattilio attended Holy Angels Elementary School, Trenton Catholic Boys High School, and Trenton Junior College. After marrying in 1963, he moved from Trenton to Hamilton and started a family. Following an 11-year stint as a drafting engineer, he worked for Prudential Insurance and then as a mail organizer for the United States Post Office in Hamilton. He is now retired. 36

Dan Aubrey, “Paging Dr. UFO: Is That an Alien I Saw?” 29 January 2013, updated 11 January 2022, U.S. 1 (business and entertainment newspaper), Princeton, New Jersey. 73

His interest in potential space visitors is linked with another fascination, the natural world. Marcattilio, a member of the Princeton, New Jersey, Amateur Astronomers for over two decades, explained, “When I was in eighth grade, I was always excited about astronomy and would lie on the picnic table to watch the stars. Later, I would take my children out and we would stargaze. I love talking about the planets and learning about how far away they are.” He also likes to imagine what life might be like on other planets, speculating that some of the inhabitants of these worlds may be more insectoid, possibly resembling larger versions UFO/Paranormal group director Pat Marcattilio feels that some alien races of the bees, butterflies or praying mantises that may be insectoids, such as the praying we find on Earth. mantises found here on Earth. Photo source: Elizabeth Bane, Living As to exobiology, or the study of potential life Nightmare YouTube video. beyond Earth, Marcattilio further commented: “I look up and know that stars have planets and one of the planets probably has life on it. We have eight planets. We definitely know that one has life. We know that Mars had life. We have photos of glass tubes that go in the ground. NASA has photos of the glass tubes. There are the moons — Ganymede on Jupiter and Titan on Saturn — that may have life on them. One of them probably has life. That’s a lot of life flying around us. “Sometimes,” according to Marcattilio, “that life stops flying around, lands on Earth, and leaves behind bewildered humans. At our meeting, we started getting people who had been abducted, and they started telling their stories. They would have dreams of aliens waking them up, taking them out of the house through the roof, and examining them on a table. I know a lot of people have been abducted, but they’re afraid to talk about it.” The director of the UFO/Paranormal group believes most of the abductee claims. He declared, “They don’t have any proof except that they were violently traumatized and that they were scared out of their skin. When they tell you about it, you can see the terror in their eyes. That’s how I know that they’re telling us the truth.” Conspiracies Highlighted Marcattilio believes that there are alien bases on the Moon and maintains that the government knows all about them, but is keeping hush on it. Said the UFO group leader, “The government doesn’t put anything on TV about UFOs.

They don’t want people to know that there’s life out there. They don’t want us to know that there’s life on the Moon watching us.” In the past, it seems to Marcattilio, at least, that more people were aware of the possible existence of an alien presence on the Moon. He explained, “When we were going to the Moon, people were excited, and people were looking up at the sky. In the 1980s, it got exciting.” Government officials became alarmed about this growing awareness in the 1990s, and that is when officials began to squelch such information. Marcattilio replies, “They don’t want to talk about it because they’re afraid. They don’t want you to know that there are people up there. They can’t control the sky. The Air Force can’t control everything. They’re not ready to announce that yet. So, they keep it hidden. They don’t allow anyone to write about it. They don’t put it on TV anymore. I think they’re afraid.” Distrust of the government is an attitude readily shared by members of the New Jersey and Pennsylvania UFO groups. As Marcattilio and members of the group watched YouTube videos of flying saucers at a recent meeting, individuals wondered aloud how the government could ignore such evidence. Coincidentally, a 2011 Gallup Poll said 81 percent of the American public distrusted the government, so the ufologists can take some comfort in not being alone in their estimate of the situation. Naturally, any discussion of a massive UFO coverup on the part of the government will lead to discussions of Roswell, New Mexico, and Area 51 in Nevada. Of the Roswell incident and any possible connection with the mysterious Area 51, Marcattilio opines, “I think there was a crash with aliens at Roswell, and that was what woke up the government. They took the craft back to Area 51 and are trying to figure out how it worked.” Extraterrestrial Origins According to Marcattilio, the extraterrestrial visitors are close neighbors. With some knowledge of astronomy, he authoritatively declared, “There’s a group of people in Mali who say that their ancestors came from the Sirius B star. They’ve been saying this for thousands of years. But only 20 years ago, astronomers discovered Sirius B. They’re coming from our neighboring stars.” Space travelers also take trips with motivations similar to those of our own. Marcattilio mused, “You know how you get bored with TV? So, they get bored in their world. Earth’s an exciting place. We’re always fighting and killing. There are floods and earthquakes. It’s very exciting on Earth. It’s an exciting place to be.”

Marcattilio and embers of the group lacked empirical proof regarding their beliefs in UFOs and the paranormal. However, their general sense seemed consistent with common thought. In 2005, the Princeton-based Gallup Poll found that “about three in four Americans profess at least one paranormal belief ” and that 57 percent believe in more than one. That poll listed extrasensory perception and ghosts as the most popular choices. Also, in 2011, NBC News reported that “Opinion polls now indicate more than 50 percent of the American people believe there is an extraterrestrial presence and more than 80 percent believe the government is not telling the truth about this phenomenon.” It came as no surprise to Marcattilio or other group members that distrust exists despite statements of belief in UFOs or extraterrestrials by prominent national figures such as United States Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, astronaut Buzz Aldrin, and comedian Jackie Gleason, who claimed that President Richard Nixon took him to see the bodies of dead aliens. The prevalence of people who harbor conspiracy theories may reflect a genuine human response. The late paranormal radio talk show personality Art Bell, the original host of the Coast-to-Coast A.M. nightly program, used to say, “If you are not paranoid by now, then you are not paying attention to the news.” Up to the present time, only a handful of studies have looked at the personality of conspiracy theory believers. This research has found that believers tend to be lacking in trust and higher in levels of anomie — the feeling that things are generally getting worse — when compared to people with low levels of conspiracy beliefs. Following the era of the covid virus, where we find ourselves dealing with high inflation, crime and other dire matters, who can blame the American people for seriously considering sundry conspiracy theories with regard to UFOs or any other contemporary issue? Sincerity of UFO Experiencers Marcattilio believes that those checking out his group’s monthly meeting are sincere, and he is willing to listen to what they have to say. “I can’t think of any case of anyone coming in as a hoax. When people take time to come to our meeting, they are always trying to be truthful about what they experience and what they see. Some of them have been hurt, some of them traumatized, and some of them are excited because of something they saw in the sky.” Marcattilio has had to deal with people who were allegedly abducted by aliens that implanted devices in their minds to control and direct their thoughts at such times when they wanted or may still want to meet up with them. He 76

took several of these alien abduction victims to New York City, where they met up with Whitley Strieber, author of the bestselling book on UFO abductions, Communion: A True Story (New York City, New York: Avon, 1987). While in New York City, they also received MRIs that showed implants used by the aliens for thought control of their human subjects. Afterward, the members of Marcattilio’s group dubbed him with the nickname “Dr. UFO.” Marcattilio liked the appellation so much that he put it on his license plate. Because of this, at one time, he was pulled over by a New Jersey State Police officer who, upon seeing the plate, stopped his car so he could report his own encounter with a UFO. Sometimes, at the monthly meetings or conferences, Marcattilio has an exhibition from the group’s archives. “It’s a big pictorial, a big art exhibition with photographs and reports. Quite a few people have drawn ETs, so I have a lot of their drawings. Sometimes, from them, we find the star system where the aliens came from,” the director explained. For both the monthly meetings and the conferences, the coordinator hopes that people will attend. “We would like to invite all the public who would like to be educated about UFOs and the paranormal and who want to spend some time with us to learn about it,” Marcattilio declared, adding, “We’re inviting everyone who is interested in the subject. We also speak about conspiracy. People can just come, or they can call me at 609-631-8955.” The New Jersey-Pennsylvania UFO Study Group meets at the Hamilton Township Free Public Library, 1 Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr. Way, Hamilton, New Jersey, each month. For dates and times of the meeting, contact Pat Marcattilio by calling the number given in the previous paragraph. No registration is required, and there is no charge to attend. As for the scoffer, Marcattilio says, “I tell them to open up their minds. Don’t be closed-minded. If you want to see a UFO, look up to the sky and send them positive thoughts, or perhaps a sign, such as with a flashlight. Sometimes, a sighting or even a contact happens. They show themselves to people who are open-minded.”

CHAPTER XVII PENNSYLVANIA BOY EXPERIENCES “MISSING TIME” FOLLOWING UFO ENCOUNTER Classification: CE-2 Date: Tuesday, 12 May 1992 Location: Downington, a borough in Chester County, Pennsylvania, approximately 33 miles west of Philadelphia (Note: The following reports were garnered from the files of UFO Roundup, Number 13, Saturday, 12 May 1996, Joseph Trainor, editor. UFO Roundup was one of the original online UFOzines.) Sometime in May 1996, a young man eleven years of age, only identifying himself as Christopher N. of Downington, Pennsylvania, over the telephone to a representative of UFO Roundup, a computerized UFO reporting service that published a monthly newsletter, reported that four years prior, on Tuesday, 12 May 1992, when he was only seven years old, he experienced a UFO sighting followed by a case of “missing time.” At the time of the incident, around 11:00 p.m., Christopher was coming downstairs in his home on Brookhollow Drive in Downington to get a drink of water from the kitchen when he heard a strange, humming noise. Upon looking through the closest window along the staircase, the young man saw “two bright lights” in the west-northwest of the night sky. Of the lights, he noted “They came down from the sky very fast and started to turn and twist around each other.” Christopher only remembers watching these odd lights for “maybe two seconds” as they seemed to have “leveled out and flew away to the west.” The now excited young man called for his mother, but there was no immediate response. Since his mother was apparently not in the kitchen or adjacent parlor on the ground floor, Christopher continued to make his way down the stairs. However, upon reaching the bottom of the staircase, he glanced at the parlor

clock and was quite startled to discover that it was now 2 a.m., three hours later than when he left his room and started down the stairs. Elliot Budd Hopkins (1931-2011), a prominent international awards-winning painter and UFO investigator who has interviewed hundreds of individuals claiming to have been abducted by alien beings, asserts that the experience of having “missing time” is the element most common in these abduction cases.37

Elliot Budd Hopkins, Missing Time: A Documented Study of UFO Abductions (New York City, New York: Richard Marek Publications, 1981). 79

CHAPTER XVIII FLYING SAUCER FLAP OVER FRANKLIN COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA (Note: The following reports were garnered from the files of UFO Roundup, Number 9, 14 April 1996, with Joseph Trainor, editor. UFO Roundup was one of the original online UFOzines.)

An intensely bright flying saucer like this one was sighted over several communities in Franklin County, located in south-central Pennsylvania. Artwork source: Express and Star newspaper, United Kingdom

Classification: CE-1 Date: Monday, 11 March 1996 Location: Fannettsburg, an unincorporated town in Metal Township, Franklin County, Pennsylvania A flying saucer was spotted by several people hovering over the Lakeview Motel and Restaurant in Fannettsburg, Pennsylvania, on the evening of Monday, 11 March 1966. The witnesses to the object were guests checked in at the motel who described it as a “disk with flashing blue, pink and white lights.” Fannettsburg is a small town in the Path Valley, situated along State Highway 75, about three miles to the south of the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Classification: CE-1 Date: Tuesday, 12 March 1996 Location: Dry Run, Spring Run and Willow Hill, unincorporated communities in Franklin County, Pennsylvania, all situated at intersections with State Highway 75. A disc-shaped object fitting the description of the flying saucer viewed over the Lakeview Motel on the previous evening was reported by many witnesses in these several communities located to the north of the Pennsylvania Turnpike in Amberson Valley. Classification: CE-1 Date: Wednesday, 13 March 1996 Location: Willow Hill, Franklin County, Pennsylvania Once again at Willow Hill in the Amberson Valley, a flying saucer fitting the same description as the one reported on the previous two nights was seen hovering over T.J.’s Restaurant along State Highway 75 by several witnesses at around 9 p.m. “It’s got everybody in an uproar here,” noted Patti McNemar, the cook at T.J.’s, adding that, “The customers talk about it at breakfast; they talk about it at lunch; they talk about it when they walk out the door.” Rick Alexander and Lisa Harding, co-hosts of the morning talk show on WMDX-FM radio in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, were in T.J.’s Restaurant early on Thursday morning, and after hearing all of the excitement about the flying saucer, Alexander decided to drive out to Amberson Mountain that night, around the time when the object supposedly showed itself, to check out the situation with this UFO for himself.

Classification: CE-1 Date: Wednesday, 13 March 1996 Location: Chambersburg, borough and county seat of Franklin County, Pennsylvania, about 27 miles southeast of Fannettsburg A disc-shaped object fitting the same description as the UFO that was previously seen on Monday and Tuesday over Franklin County was spotted again by Ms. Dena McGarvey of McConnellsburg, in Fulton County, Pennsylvania, who looked out her window and saw the saucer through a pair of binoculars hovering over Chambersburg in the adjoining Franklin County, some 22 miles due east. The object seemed to be made of pure light, intensely bright. At first sight of the UFO, she thought that perhaps it might be Jupiter or Venus seen under some sort of unique weather condition that was causing the emitted light to flatten out, but then she maintained that “It moved hastily across the sky in less than two minutes. That was definitely not a planet.” Classification: CE-1 Date: Thursday, 14 March 1996 Location: Amberson Mountain, Franklin County, Pennsylvania Rick Alexander arrived at T.J.’s around 6:00 p.m. and then made his way up to Amberson Mountain, where he was told by locals that he would have the best view of the flying saucer should it return. Sure enough, the UFO arrived, making a sudden appearance above the mountain around 7:15 p.m. “Whatever it was, I saw it,” asserted Alexander, also noting that “It was spherical in nature and had spider-like legs. Occasionally, it would flash different colored lights.” When listeners of his radio program heard his account of it on the following day, one called into the show and suggested that the spider-like legs might have been some sort of landing gear. Alexander remarked, “If it was landing gear, I didn’t plan on sticking around to run into any creatures that might disembark from it.”

The UFO reported by radio announcer Rick Alexander, purportedly with “spider-like legs,” may have been a saucer deploying landing gear. Scan QR for photo source.

CHAPTER XIX SOUTHWEST PENNSYLVANIA COUNTIES RECEIVE “RASH OF UFO SIGHTINGS” Classification: CE-1 Date: Summer of 2009 Location: Rural areas in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, situated to the east of Pittsburgh, is populated with mostly rural communities that, in the summer of 2009, experienced what Richard Sanner, a correspondent for the Denver, Colorado, based news service, examiner.com, described as a “rash of UFO sightings” that began in early June and extended through the end of August. There have been intermittent reports of flying saucer activity in this county going back for decades; however, as Sanner wrote, “This is merely a continuation of a similar phenomenon that has been observed in this area for quite some time.” For the news service report, Sanner focused on two main sequences of UFO events, those taking place in Murrysville, Pennsylvania, Frame from a video where UFO and those occurring in the nearby Alleghany became obscured in a cloud bank Murrysville, Pennsylvania, on County in the unincorporated rural town of over the night of 13 August 2009. Photo Harmarville, Pennsylvania, on the fringes of source: UFO Newsclipping Service, September 2009, Number 482, the Harmar Township. Edwardsville, Illinois

Murrysville, Pennsylvania In his report filed with the examiner.com website on Thursday, 27 August 2009, Scanner found the earliest report of Thursday, 13 August 2009, that took place during the early morning hours in the sky over Murrysville. According to Sanner’s investigation of the incident, “The witness was taking video of the sky when a crescent-shaped object suddenly appeared on the right side of the screen. The witness went on to describe something ‘cloudlike’ swooping down from above. The mysterious cloud went into the object, causing it to immediately 83

vanish.” Sanner also noted that other UFO sightings had occurred that night in Murrysville and on successive nights up to the date he filed his report. The kinds of UFOs subsequently reported in the area included triangular-shaped objects, a variety of brightly colored orbs and strange lights not normally found on conventional aircraft. Classification: CE-1 Date: Summer of 2009 Location: Rural areas in Alleghany County, Pennsylvania Harmarville, Pennsylvania According to Sanner’s report for the examiner.com, pertaining to that very night of Tuesday, 25 August, a UFO was seen passing over Harmarville, heading in an easterly direction from the Pennsylvania Turnpike before making its way to the skies over the Oakmost Country Club and Golf Course. Sanner wrote, “The object had multi-colored flashing lights, was silent and appeared to be flying too low for any conventional aircraft. The object flew low over the golf course and turned on three white lights, revealing its triangular shape. The object Declassified photograph from passed over the Alleghany River and appeared the United Kingdom’s Ministry of to just make it over the tree line on a ridge on Defence depicting an unidentified aerial phenomenon (UAP) of black the opposite side of the river. triangular object. Contours of the object cannot be seen due to UAP’s possible passing through dense cloud cover.

Speculations on Triangular UFO Reports The prevalence of triangular-shaped UFOs in these reports filed by Sanner may indicate the deployment in the skies of southwestern Pennsylvania of some types of experimental military aircraft during the summer of 2009. In accordance with an Executive Summary of the Ministry of Defence Intelligence Staff of the United Kingdom on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) in the UK Air Defence Region (London, United Kingdom, 2000), “During a policy review in 1996 into the handling of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena sighting reports received by the Ministry of Defence, a study was undertaken to determine the potential value, if any, of such reports to Defence Intelligence. 84

Consistent with Ministry of Defence policy, the available data was studied principally to ascertain whether there is any evidence of a threat to the UK, and secondly, should the opportunity arise, to identify any potential military technologies of interest.” In the process of carrying out this study of UAP, with respect to the triangular-shaped Many ufologists maintain that the objects, Defence personnel in the United majority of triangular UAP reports can be explained in the context of Kingdom determined that “Black triangles are experimental, TOP SECRET advanced UFOs reported as having a triangular shape military aerospace vehicles. Photo source: Nexus Newsfeed and dark color, typically observed at night, described as large, silent, hovering, moving slowly, and displaying pulsating, colored lights which they are able to turn off.” Additionally, they concluded that “Classified military aircraft may be responsible for a number of black triangle UFO reports.” Implications of the UFO Phenomenon Gleaned from “Cold Case” Files Examiner journalist Richard Sanner’s interest in UFO investigations was sparked by a “cold case” he ran into while checking into the rash of UFO sightings occurring in southwest Pennsylvania in the summer of 2009. Sanner discovered some documents related to the cold case in question that went back 44 years to the summer of 1965. The important information pertaining to this case had been hidden for all this time, and Sanner believed that the time was ripe, given all of the sightings taking place of late, for these revelations to finally emerge into the light of day. Sanner explained, “I was placed in touch with an elderly gentleman from Florida, who was originally from Pennsylvania. He stated that he used to travel a very rural road just off Interstate 70 in Westmoreland County several times per week to drive his wife to care for an ailing relative. On several occasions, when driving along this particular stretch of country road, he would observe a brightly lit object hovering at a low altitude over a nearby wooded area. The object made no sound and appeared to be emitting a substance described by the witness as ‘looking like molten metal flakes’ showering down to the ground. Since the area was set back some distance from the road, the witness could not be sure of the exact location. The object would then take off at an incredible rate of speed until disappearing from sight.” 85

Connections to the Kecksburg, Pennsylvania, UFO Crash? The witness told Sanner that he later observed the same phenomenon on a few occasions later that year, in the fall and winter of 1965, along the same stretch of country road in Westmoreland County at locations above the woods. Since the witness was a retired Air Force veteran, Sanner noted that “I considered his report to be very credible.” The journalist also learned that the witness’ wife was with him each time that he had sighted the UFO. When Sanner asked him why he or his wife hadn’t spoken up earlier about their UFO encounters, the former airman replied, “We felt that divulging our report would only bring down a ton of ridicule on our heads. The public wasn’t as receptive to people reporting UFOs back then.” And then there was the hullabaloo throughout southwestern Pennsylvania regarding the alleged UFO crash in Kecksburg on the afternoon of 9 December 1965. Kecksburg wasn’t too far away from where this husband and wife spotted their UFO on those few occasions. The witness wondered out loud, “I wonder if there is some connection between my UFO and the object that crashed in Kecksburg.” For a possible explanation of the object that crashed in Kecksburg, your attention is invited to the chapter, “Truth of the Kecksburg, Pennsylvania ‘Meteor,’” in this book.

CHAPTER XX THE DAY THE VENUSIANS CAME TO TOWN Classification: CE-5 Date: Saturday, 24 June 2017 Location: Sandy Lake, Borough in eastern Mercer County, northwest Pennsylvania 24 June 2017 proved to be a memorable day for metaphysical students and enthusiasts in Sandy Lake, Pennsylvania, coming together in celebration of the summer solstice. Besides being the 70th anniversary of the Kenneth Arnold sighting and the birth of the Age of Flying Saucers, this was the day the Venusians came to visit. As it turned out, one African American gentleman, identifying himself by only his first name, Albert, was out walking a friend’s dog when the Venusians first came down in a column of light in a clearing in the woods. The dog started barking for no apparent reason. Suddenly, two women appeared in a shaft of light streaming down through the tree canopy and into a forest clearing. Both of the women were wearing the same type of uniform that, from head-totoe, consisted of a red beret with bee insignia/ crystal and gold pin, a reddish-maroon, blacktrimmed jacket, a red silk sash around the waist, black silk pantaloons and leather sandals with big toe loops. From Keller Venus Files: Lady One of the young women was white with Columba (L) and Lady Aurora (R) straight blondish-light brown hair and light beam into Sandy Lake, Pennsylvania, a Venusian mothership brownish-gray eyes and the other appeared from overhead. to be Asian, dark complexioned with dark brown eyes. The white one had the appearance of being in her late teens or early twenties, while the Asian woman was perhaps in her late twenties or early thirties. The white one approached the barking dog and just petted one side of its neck, whereupon the dog, a true Pennsylvania Heinz 57 mixed breed, 87

completely calmed down. The gentleman, still startled to see them, said, “Hello girls. My name is Albert. I didn’t see you! How did you get here?” The white girl was the first to speak up. “They sent us here. They beamed us in.” “Well then, welcome to the gathering,” said Albert, adding, “What planet did you come from?” “We came from Venus,” said the white woman. “I see,” said the gentleman, adding, “What are your names?” The younger woman said her name was Lady Columba and introduced her companion as Lady Aurora, whereupon Lady Aurora explained that her birth name was too hard for most Americans to pronounce, so she chose Aurora because of its ease of pronunciation. “Why are you here?” asked the gentleman. This time, Lady Columba answered, “We came to see the lecture.” Then Albert said, “Follow me, girls,” whereupon he led them out of the woods and down a slight hill into the campgrounds and the lecture hall, a converted three-car garage that was filled to capacity, seating about 60 people who were listening to a New Age speaker who had gone slightly overtime. Dr. Raymond Keller, a.k.a. “Cosmic Ray,” was still in the process of setting up his equipment as he would be the next lecturer. The sun was low in the west and rays of bright light were streaming into the lecture area from behind the two young women, somewhat obscuring their entrance. Nevertheless, when they came down to the open door of the converted garage, they stood by the north side of the open door and waved to the Cosmic Ray. The professor ran out to greet them and find out who they were so he could properly introduce them later when he started the lecture on the mysteries of Venus. What he learned was that both of the women were sent as emissaries of Queen Orda of Abejar (Venus). Lady Columba was born in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, in 1902 and became a somewhat famous esoteric painter out in California in the 1950s, where she was a close friend and occasional secretary to the contactee Truman Bethurum. After her death in 1998, she was resurrected by Venusians at their space base, Clarion, on the far side of our moon. Just prior to her death, her consciousness was downloaded into a special computer, and key DNA samples were taken to reconstitute a younger, more resilient body for conditions in outer space. Then her intelligence was re-downloaded back into her Ethereal, reconstituted and younger form.

Lady Aurora, on the other hand, was born in Rishikesh, India, at the base of the Himalayas, in 1880, under the British Raj. She worked as a guide for foreigners wanting to travel up into the sacred mountains. On 12 December 1927, however, she encountered a lost and hungry tourist in a Himalayan pass whom she took in and nourished back to health. The tourist was one of the ascended masters in disguise (an avatar) who rewarded her by making her a translated being and taking her to Venus (Shukra) with him. As the crowd was much larger than Dr. Keller or anyone else anticipated, and not knowing who might be in attendance, the professor opted to simply introduce the two women by their names and announce that they were “persons with a long-standing interest in the subject of life on Venus.” The two young women did get out into the crowd, however, and talked to many persons there and answered any questions they may have had. A gentleman of Persian ancestry, identifying himself as Al-An, drove up in a limousine with California license plates and tinted windows to serve as the security guard for the women. At all times, however, those in attendance treated the two with the utmost kindness and respect. After Cosmic Ray’s presentation, nobody could recall seeing either the girls or Al-An depart from the area. But before leaving, Lady Columba delivered to the Cosmic Ray a portfolio with some of her notes and original drawings dealing with her travels with the Venusians and other space friends from the period of 19571961. Cosmic Ray would later edit these for the purpose of writing and later publishing the international awards-winning Lady Columba Venus Revelations (Terra Alta, West Virginia: Headline Books, 2021). A synopsis of the main characters in the Lady Columba book is found below:

Lady Columba Venus Revelations is also available as an audiobook through Amazon and Headline Books. It was narrated by Terry Springs, the former weather forecaster of the CBS Television affiliate in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Central Characters in Lady Columba Venus Revelations • Annabell Krebs, a.k.a. Lady Columba: Born in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, in 1902 of humble circumstances, Annabell grows up to become a famous artist and travels around the world, studying Theosophy and the mystic arts. In the dawn of the Age of Flying Saucers, in the early 89

•

1950s, she moves to Joshua Tree in the Southern California desert, where she becomes one of the early “contactees,” those special individuals who meet extraterrestrials and even ride aboard their spaceships. We follow Annabell to secret saucer bases on invisible, floating islands in the Pacific Ocean, undersea, and even on the far side of the Moon. We learn how Annabell became Lady Columba, an ascended master transcending the limits of time, space, and dimensionality, all the while guiding the technological and spiritual advancement of humankind. Vorton: Vorton is a Venusian by birth and the communications officer onboard the Isis, one of many motherships in the Venusian Space Fleet. Vorton, selected by the Hierarchy of Light to be Annabell’s escort, senses her good heart and tutors her in all the ways of the space-faring Venusians. He reveals to Annabell the secrets of the Confederation of Planets and life throughout the solar system and beyond. As the Isis is a submersible as well as a spaceship, Vorton guides Annabell on an undersea expedition in search of pirate treasure. He also helps Annabell to go within herself and develop her latent powers to become a powerful ascended master with a mission to help advance the people of her native Earth. Alexander Kadachev: He is a captain and cosmonaut in a TOP SECRET Soviet space program of the late 1950s, conducting a reconnaissance of the Moon. The Soviet Union’s leaders have decreed that the Earth’s natural satellite should be militarized and used as a launching platform for atomic missiles directed against the United States. Kadachev and his ship are detected and intercepted by the technicians of a Venusian colony on the far side of the Moon called Clarion. With a special tractor beam, the Venusians bring the cosmonaut and his ship to Clarion, where Alexander meets Lady Columba and all the strange inhabitants of the lunar settlement, all preparatory for fantastic adventures beyond imagination across the barriers of time and space. Aura Rhanes: The stunningly beautiful and charming Aura is the Commander of Moon Base Clarion. From Aura, we meet emissaries and representatives from over 601 member planets in the Confederation who are active on the Moon, monitoring the Earth from Clarion with their satellite probes, drones, and scout ships (flying saucers). We also meet countless, near-immortal “translated” humans from Earth who are working with the Confederation in various capacities on the Moon.

Learn about the advanced Venusian technology in place on Clarion, the long-range plans that the Venusians have for the Earth, and how they can save us from the coming apocalypse.

Appendix A Looking Back at the “Philadelphia Experiment”

This photo is from The Philadelphia Experiment, a film by John Carpenter starring Michael Paré as an accidentally time-traveling sailor and Nancy Allen as a love interest who tries to help him. The movie was released by New World Pictures in 1984 and deals with a TOP SECRET United States government experiment in the midst of World War II, originally designed to create an electromagnetic cloaking device for our ships at sea.

On 28 October 1943, according to various accounts, an exceptionally strong magnetic field encircled the destroyer escort USS Eldridge (DE-173) and its crew, positioned in the harbor off the coast of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The United States Navy ship was also enshrouded in a green haze. At this point, its crew members began to “phase in and out of reality” right in front of each other. The USS Eldridge then disappeared in a flash of blue light right before the eyes 92

of the people watching from relative safety on the dock. At the very moment that the ship disappeared from the harbor in Philadelphia, it appeared in the harbor at Norfolk, Virginia, and then vanished again and reappeared in Philadelphia a few minutes later. Those sailors who have dared speak out about the event claim that several of their fellow Eldridge crew members were hospitalized immediately after the experiment with third-degree burns and feelings of disorientation. A few became permanently deranged and some even died from exposure to radiation. There are also allegations that USS Eldridge crew members were subjected to brainwashing so as to maintain secrecy about the experiment. The experiment was codenamed “Project Rainbow,”38 with details of the incident available in the book The Philadelphia Experiment by Pennsylvanian William Moore in consultation with Charles Berlitz (New York City, New York: Fawcett Crest, 1979). The authors certainly make a good case for their readers to arrive at the conclusion that a technology actually exists, as a direct result of this scientific experiment 80 years ago, that can render a ship, or anything else for that matter, invisible and then cause it to appear somewhere else hundreds of miles away and bring it back, all within the space of a few minutes. How the Philadelphia Experiment Came to Light Berlitz first heard about the story of the so-called “Philadelphia Experiment” while he was conducting research for a book he eventually wrote, The Bermuda Triangle, in 1974 (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, Inc.). In the course of being on the lecture circuit, appearing at countless venues around the world, Berlitz found that the information he included on the Philadelphia Experiment in his Triangle book, more than any other subject, was generating the keenest interest. So much fascination was aroused among his readers over the Philadelphia Experiment that even a few anonymous witnesses to the actual event came “out of the woodwork,” so to speak, revealing yet more important information about the incident to Berlitz. Occasionally, Berlitz would work with the famous ufologist William L. Moore, so he reached out to this fellow author and garnered his expertise in writing the book The Philadelphia Experiment with the documentation and research notes that he would provide him. The Authors Charles Berlitz (1914-2003) was a renowned language teacher and author of numerous books dealing with an assortment of paranormal phenomena. 38

Alternatively called “Project Invisibility.” 93

All of his books have become bestsellers, even giving rise to rival publications, academic discussions, and imaginative films. He is recognized as one of the world’s leading authorities on natural mysteries, and when he was still with us, he was in constant demand as a lecturer on sundry types of unusual anomalies and events associated with them. William Moore, now 80 years old, proved an excellent choice by Berlitz to write The Philadelphia Experiment, being a Pennsylvania native and growing up there with an intense interest in ufology since he was a teenager, even joining up with the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) in Washington, D.C. and the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO) of Tucson, Arizona. The ardent ufologist graduated from Thiel College in Greenville, Pennsylvania, in 1965, receiving a BA in foreign languages. Thus, Moore shared a background in linguistics with Berlitz. Moore was a teacher of English, French, drama, and the humanities at high schools in New York, Minnesota, and Arizona, in that order, until he retired from teaching in 1979 due to his financial success with The Philadelphia Experiment book to become a full-time researcher and writer on UFOs and paranormal subjects. In 1980, he and Berlitz yet again came up with a revelatory book, this time dealing with The Roswell Incident (New York City, New York: Grosset and Dunlap). Ufology Involvement Intensifies In May 1987, Moore, along with fellow ufologists Jaime Shandera and Stanton Friedman, revealed the alleged and legendary Majestic 12 documents that purported the existence of a high-level policy-making group overseeing UFOs and the extraterrestrial presence on Earth; and in 1988, with the dissolution of APRO, Moore became a member of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), headquartered in Seguin, Texas, and was immediately promoted to MUFON State Director for Arizona, where he was then residing. Highlights in The Philadelphia Experiment In the book The Philadelphia Experiment, we come to the realization that the scientists working at the Philadelphia Naval Yard employed Albert Einstein’s Unified Field Theory to make the ship invisible, although momentarily. Whether they expected it to reappear in Norfolk, Virginia, however, is a matter of speculation. The troubles occurred during the time that the ship remained invisible, when crew members became mad, some even claiming to have encountered alien beings from another dimension. There were even crew members suffering physical deformities and yet others becoming “mental 94

wrecks,” never being willing to let anyone know what happened to them aboard the Eldridge. The experiment had gone terribly wrong, and the government authorities at all levels of administration felt that any information regarding the Philadelphia fiasco had to be hushed up, with all records of it hidden or, better yet, destroyed. All of the participants needed to be “silenced” by any means necessary. Piece-by-piece, this incredible story has been brought to the full light of day. From the incoherent statements of former Eldridge crew members, still surviving into the late 1970s, and from the letters of the always elusive Carl M. Allen,39 a.k.a. “Carlos M. Allende,” a Merchant Marine aboard the Steam Ship Andrew Furuseth, with United States Coast Guard Commander William B. Durham at the helm, and docked in the Philadelphia Navy Yard on that fateful day the Eldridge disappeared, who testified as to witnessing the horrific events that occurred aboard that ship and to its crew from plain view aboard the deck of the Furuseth and even speculating as to the application of theory for what he saw, and from the statements of scientists, sometimes on their deathbeds, that were living in hiding or constantly discouraged and frustrated by officialdom, the truth was finally getting out there. Despite vehement denials by the Office of Naval Information in the Pentagon of the account provided in The Philadelphia Experiment book, the authors Berlitz and Moore remained steadfast in proclaiming its veracity, seeing how it was derived and validated by numerous unconnected sources. As staggering as it may seem to contemplate, on 28 October 1943, humankind stood on the threshold of unlocking mysteries previously beyond all of our collective comprehension. The implications inherent in The Philadelphia Experiment are both terrifying and exhilarating.

Carl Meredith Allen was born on 31 May 1925 in the small town of Spingdale, Pennsylvania. Springdale is a borough in northeastern Allegheny County, 18 miles northeast of Pittsburgh along the Allegheny River. 95

Appendix B Pioneering Application of Computer Technology to UFO Research

Aerial phenomena and strange creatures are always being reported up on Chestnut Ridge in southwest Pennsylvania. In the late 1980s, a young pioneering ufologist from Latrobe, Pennsylvania, applied computer technology to documenting such cases. Scan QR for artwork source.

Living Along the Chestnut Ridge Many living along the Chestnut Ridge in southwest Pennsylvania, so frequently encountering sundry phenomena in the area, have come to believe that they are situated in the midst of some kind of interdimensional window that occasionally opens up and lets various aliens, bigfoot, cryptids, and ghosts opportunely pass through into our reality. At least that is what Kim Opatka, a 96

staff writer for the Latrobe, Pennsylvania Bulletin newspaper, came to surmise after interviewing a Latrobe ufologist (UFO investigator), Gary Metzler of Hillview Avenue.40 If there was anything to be known about UFO sightings locally, nationally, or internationally or anything about the state of ufology (the science of researching UFOs), then Metzler was the “Go to Guy.” While he had never seen a UFO, Metzler has kept an open mind on the subject since his days in high school. He also maintains a bank of computers in his bedroom, where he can hook up with many of the national and international UFO computer networks. Opatka wanted to know why many people, even though they had never seen a UFO, had come to the conclusion that a good many of these objects must be manned interplanetary spaceships. She also pondered how and why an individual would spend so many hours each day investigating a phenomenon that may never even be proven to exist. Having interviewed Metzler, however, she came to feel that if anyone could provide some answers to these poignant questions, it was going to be this young man from her hometown of Latrobe. Opatka acknowledged, of course, that UFOs were at the center of a great deal of controversy over the adequate documentation of reported cases to law enforcement and military authorities spanning the globe. The cities and towns along the Chestnut Ridge area were filled with numerous UFO witnesses, amateur ufologists as members of UFO clubs, and everyday citizens with a strong interest in following the news related to UFO sightings and encounters. Interestingly, the staff writer Back in 1989, young Gary Metzler of Latrobe, Pennsylvania, was a pioneer remarked, “At the center of the controversy techie applying computer science to were many documented cases where it appears the emerging field of UFO research (ufology). Photo source: Bulletin that there was a government cover-up of vital newspaper, Latrobe, Pennsylvania UFO-related data.” Musings of the Young Computer Expert on UFOs The young Metzler’s interest in ufology has turned into something more than just a hobby. His phone bill ran up exponentially ever since he connected with sundry national and international computer UFO networks by linking his telephone line with his computer modem. Metzler informed Opatka that his fascination with UFOs since his days at Latrobe High School served as his 40

Kim Opatka, “Latrobe Man Researches ‘Ufology’ Via Computer,” Bulletin (Latrobe, Pennsylvania), 1 May 1989. 97

primary motivation for majoring in physics at Saint Vincent College in Latrobe. Since the UFOs were most likely interplanetary spaceships, they had to have some advanced form of propulsion to power their ships on the long voyage here across the vastness of outer space. By studying physics, he might come to better understand this process. Metzler does acknowledge that some critics assert that it is physically impossible for UFOs to travel such immense distances as measured in light years from planets in other solar systems, but also recognizes that “In truth, our scientists haven’t scratched the surface of what is possible and what is not.” When he watched the ABC Television documentary UFO Coverup Live on 14 October 1988, however, he literally became obsessed with the study of ufology. Keeping every newspaper clipping about UFOs and documented files from UFO groups investigating such reports, amounting to a stack of papers six inches high, Metzler succeeded in downloading all of this information onto his computer disks. And with the state of technology, as it existed in 1989, it was relatively easy for him to add to his growing UFO computer database with neardaily updates, at least as much as he could afford to download via the modemtelephone link. “Frankly,” he admitted, “recent phone bills have caused me to cut down on the use of one computer network, but this has not diminished my interest in ufology.” Problems Noted in the Emerging Field of Ufology The young ufologist pointed out a significant problem with the field of ufology that existed back in 1989 and unfortunately persists to this day. Metzler opined, “Some investigators (of UFOs) look at only one point of view and often become so convinced of one certain aspect that their whole case revolves around that, rather than stay open-minded.” He added, “I am willing to say I don’t know, and I know enough to know that I am not sure about anything.” In other words, in ufology circles, it might be for the best not to assume anything, for as the old saying goes, “If one should assume incorrectly, then that one has made an ASS of U and ME.” The UFO investigator also felt that “Sometimes I think it better to be wishy-washy about it. Nobody can shoot me down because I don’t know where I am standing. Fixation is a typical human tendency, and I don’t think there is enough open-mindedness.” Metzler also stressed the role of continuing education with respect to the UFO phenomenon. He continued, “One of the keys for people involved in the whole thing (ufology) is education. Nobody wants to say this is the physics of it and this is how it works. They have heard a little bit and try to base everything they 98

know on that. Their knowledge becomes very threaded. Their idea smells of lack of education, lack of thought.” Opaka was on board with Metzler on this line of thinking. She remarked, “Yes, some of the documents circulating in ufology appear to be more in the realm of science fiction than science fact, with tales of alien visitations and abductions, mutilation of cattle and even humans, impregnation of abducted females who then mysteriously ‘abort’ the child (which is returned to the aliens), and of aliens living in underground facilities on United States military bases.” Metzler told the journalist that he felt that it was unwise at that time to take any position on such reports. It was better, in his opinion, to put himself in a more “wait and see” frame of mind with respect to all of the above-noted issues. Government Misinformation and Secrecy Besides the lack of communication between civilian UFO investigators, Metzler sees “misinformation and secrecy by the government” with regard to UFOs as another significant obstacle to be overcome while striving for the truth. The young ufologist noted that “Even though the government stopped officially investigating UFO cases, with the deactivation of Project Bluebook in 1969, not enough data (on UFOs) has been revealed. Right now, the field (of ufology) is so compartmentalized that nobody knows the whole story, except on a select basis, to piece together much of anything. If you read the evidence, it is overwhelming that something strange is going on, but in no way can you come to any benign conclusion, which is so indicative of government involvement and coverup.” And if aliens from another planet are visiting the Earth, Metzler postulates that the government is Flying Saucers hovering over Hollywood, keeping it a secret for the reason that California. What stake do the moguls of “It could possibly be to avoid mass Hollywood have in promoting a belief in UFOs among the American public? Scan panic.” QR for photo source. Hollywood’s “Soft Disclosure” The ufologist also believes that Hollywood is working in concert with government authorities in slowly preparing the American public to accept the existence of extraterrestrials visiting the Earth in flying saucers. Metzler opined, “Some ufologists, including me, feel motion pictures such as E.T. and Star Wars 99

were made to condition people to the possibility of aliens, so they won’t be as shocked when an extraterrestrial actually does appear.” These Hollywood ET and UFO revelations in contemporary movies have been dubbed by some ufologists as “soft disclosure,” because they are easier to digest by the general public, slowly acclimating people to the truth rather than hitting them in the head with the proverbial frying pan, so to speak. Alternate Origins Metzler also thinks that some of the UFOs and their attendant occupants might be coming from underground or underwater bases here on Earth. Maybe they migrated to our world long ago from dying civilizations out in the stars, but because of the long distances they had to overcome just to get to our planet, they opted to stay here but keep their presence concealed so as not to interfere with our own path of cosmic evolution and development. “While some persons may laugh at such theories,” noted Metzler, “there is nothing to prove them and nothing to disprove them. Couldn’t there also be a world in between, like a parallel dimension that coexists with our matter, one that we don’t perceive? There are no reasons to disbelieve that there are a vast number of realities that we do not perceive here.” Internal Rivalries to Be Overcome Metzler expressed a deep concern over the internal rivalries arising in ufology. “Currently, ufology is in trouble, and I would like to see a change in the field. There are factions rising, opposing factions, and they are not getting together. Everyone has his or her own goals, and one of those is the almighty dollar. I’m referring, of course, to all of the many books and abundant literature on the subject of UFOs. Everybody is playing ‘I’ve Got a Secret,’ and the field is split up. If, in fact, it is true that the government is trying to undermine the whole thing, it barely has any work to do. Practically all the government has to do is keep the infighting going on and no work will get done. The government could be in trouble if all the people pooled together and withheld their information.” Going Forward While it is possible that many UFO sightings can be attributed to secret military projects, such as the Stealth Bomber, Metzler and other ufologists want to know why the government just doesn’t come right out and admit it. “To the general public,” said Metzler, “the field (of UFO research) may have gotten a bad name and it is not those that tell it, but those that retell it, who tend to take 100

things out of context. They can make anybody look like a fool by grabbing a sentence or a piece of a sentence.” Here he was referring to coverage of UFOs by the mass media, whose members constituted the “They” in his above remarks. Polling Data In reading the newspapers, Metzler noticed that “80 percent of Americans believe in UFOs. Many have said that, but I wonder if they really do?” Was this high figure the result of Hollywood’s soft disclosure, or was it based on personal encounters with UFOs, attending occupants of them, or other paranormal experiences?

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Appendix C Personal vs. Public Disclosure at the “Stairway To The Stars” Las Vegas, Nevada, 2023 Conference By Dr. Raymond A. Keller, Space/UAP Correspondent, Veterans Reporter News, Las Vegas, Nevada Note: Insofar as this book deals exclusively with the UFO/UAP phenomenon, the issue of disclosure can no longer be ignored in regard to it. For this reason, Dr. Raymond A. Keller, a.k.a. “Cosmic Ray,” addresses the matter within the context of personal vs. public revelations. Gaia, a television network devoted to metaphysical phenomena and UFOs, in conjunction with the Disclosure Fest Foundation, sponsored a huge conference, Stairway to the Stars, held at the Luxor in Las Vegas, Nevada, on 10-12 November 2023. Ever since the ongoing Congressional hearings on the subject of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) that began on 25 June 2021, it has come to the public’s attention that various agencies of the United States government have long been investigating UAP reports, especially those being made by active-duty military personnel. The acronym UAP has replaced the formerly Air Force Project Bluebook term of “unidentified flying object” (UFO). Whereas Project Bluebook ended in 1969, dismissing its UFO reports on file as misidentifications of astronomical or natural phenomena, conventional aircraft viewed under unusual atmospheric conditions, or even outright hoaxes, the current spate of Congressional hearings has validated the existence of UAP as a “real physical phenomenon worthy of further scientific study,” but have fallen short of disclosing the existence of UAP as manned exploration vehicles from beyond Earth or our plane of existence. At the Stairway to the Stars, metaphysicians and ufologists from around the world came together to discuss the implications of the current and possibly future UAP disclosures. Together with Su Phelps, the publisher of the Veterans 102

Reporter News in Las Vegas, Nevada, we covered a special Experiencer Panel held on Friday from 4:45 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. in Galleria C. The panel was chaired by Alexis Brooks and included experiencers Kim Carlsberg, Barry Littleton, Geraldine Orozco, Robert Potter, and Jason Quitt. Carlsberg is the author of two books focusing on UFO abductions and other close Alexis Brooks, the chairperson, is an encounters with alien entities. Littleton, an African-American author, speaker, African-American, was born with past life journalist, and host of the popular Higher Journeys podcast. memories intact and began having sundry paranormal experiences at a young age. Orozco is from San Francisco, California, and specializes in holistic energy healing and meditation. Potter is a real physical contactee with extraterrestrials from Venus and the Pleiadean star cluster and holds annual summer conventions in Mt. Shasta, California, about the mission of these extraterrestrials on Earth. Quitt examines mysticism and out-of-body experiences and their possible connections with astral intelligences. The panelists concluded that as more and more people were experiencing contact with extraterrestrials and ultra-dimensional entities on a personal level, the ultimate disclosure by the government as to their existence may only come as an acknowledging afterthought.

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By Fred Saluga, Editor, Dr. Raymond A. Keller West Virginia: Paranormal Gateway By Dr. Raymond Keller and Robert Potter The Gospels of Thomas and Mary Magdalene Books by Dr. Raymond A. Keller Venus Rising: A Concise History of the Second Planet Final Countdown: Rockets to Venus Cosmic Ray’s Excellent Venus Adventure The Vast Venus Conspiracy Flying Saucers: From Venus They Come Lady Columba Venus Revelations Flying Saucers and the Venus Legacy

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