"Our Friends from Out of Town"

       The M1 tank is "crown jewel of the American field arsenal", designed to take a direct hit from a missile, and the front and sides are the most heavily armoured sections. In 2003 they were lined up in the desert of Kuwait in units of 100: ten rows of ten tanks, preparatory to the invasion of Iraq. Then one night Luis Elizondo, in his capacity of Special Agent in Charge, received the call: "Sir, you need to get out here now. There's something you need to see."  So, having driven an hour into the desert to see for himself, Elizondo was shown a remarkable sight. A small hole, perfectly round, without rough edges, heat ablation or metal vitrification had been punched into the side of the tank. Not only that, but shining a light through it revealed an identical hole on the other side. It was just like a cookie cutter had taken a core sample of the armour - and the same holes existed in the adjacent tank. Nothing on earth could have done such a thing. The only clue to causation was that a Bedouin goatherd had seen a brilliant green flash in the night sky, directly over the tanks. But several years later Elizondo started to think it might have been produced by what his colleagues called "our friends from out of town"

"Paranormal Planet"

     If you keep your eyes and mind open, you will find that the paranormal, the miraculous, the simply inexplicable not only happen, but are not even uncommon. If you haven't had an experience which defies the paradigm of modern science, which appears to violate the laws of nature that we know, then you know somebody who has. Four years ago I published a book entitled, Apparitions: tulpas, ghosts, fairies, and even stranger things, which goes further than simple ghost stories, but explores a parallel world of non-material beings which is only occasionally perceptible to us. Now I have produced a companion volume entitled simply, Paranormal Planet in which I seek to document and explore more than a dozen aspects of the paranormal which do not involve apparitions

A Frenchman Vanishes

      4.30 am 26 November 1979, Cergy-Pontoise, northwest of Paris, France: Frank Fontaine, 19 is loading a station wagon with clothes for an open market at Gisors. He is accompanied by Jean-Pierre Prevost, 25 and Salomon N'Diaye, 25 who I presume is of African descent. Just then they saw a long, opaque trail of white lights similar to stars, and watched it for three or four minutes, when Fontaine made a prophetic remark: "I'm going there; I want to know." The other two rushed home to find a camera. When they returned, they found the car 200 metres down the road surrounded by a halo of light like a thick fog, with three or four small spheres moving around inside it. Their friend was nowhere to be seen. Then the luminous mist shot up towards the sky, but as for Fontaine, it appeared he had vanished literally off the face of the earth.

Introducing a New UFO Novel

"I can't believe it," he said. "We've actually seen a flying saucer crash in front of our eyes."

     Everything else in this blog concerns events which the witnesses claimed genuinely happened. But this is different. It is my first science fiction novel.

    Ever since my teenage years - approximately 55 years - I have been following the UFO scene, and I have become fully conversant with its many facets. I know what flying saucers are supposed to look like, and how they move. I am also familiar with the wide varieties of occupants observed in or near them, and even the weapons they are known to use.
    It will come as a surprise to most people that the interiors have been reported innumerable times, and by people's whose memories did not require hypnosis to be revealed. The descriptions are consistent: in every single case they describe light diffusing the room without any obvious source, and doors for which no visible join in the wall is evident. Over the decades, too, other bizarre phenomena have been frequently reported: truncated light beams, beings levitated on light beams, humanoid occupants passing through walls to give just a short list.
     I had long held the intention, therefore, of producing a UFO novel which would be authentic - one for which it would be possible to say: This might have happened; all the phenomena described are known to be real.
     The central theme is simple, but I don't think it has been explored before. A group of bushwalkers, or hikers, are alone in the wilderness, when they happen to witness the crash of a flying saucer. On inspection, they discover, to their amazement, that the alien pilot is still alive, but injured. What would you do in such circumstances? They feel they have no choice but to treat him like a human casualty, construct a makeshift splint and stretcher, and carry him to civilisation. They do so with mixed emotions; one is excited, one is terrified, another is full of compassion for the injured alien, and so forth. But soon they discover that there are Others interested in the alien - and of their motives and technology they know nothing.
     The novel is self-published through Kindle Direct Publishing. Yes, I know the cover is crappy, but I am not prepared to hire a professional artist. It can be ordered through Amazon in whatever country you are in, and comes in two versions: a paperback and a Kindle e-book. The former I hope will eventually filter into bookstores and libraries. As for the latter, it costs the same as a large coffee, and if you don't possess a Kindle e-reader, the app can still be downloaded for an Ipad (tablet), PC, or phone. Amazon will also allow you to look inside the novel, if you are doubtful about my narrative skills.
     Let me know what you think. If you like it, tell all your friends, and write a review. We first-time novelists need all the help we can get.

     PS I note that a reviewer has now described it as "a gripping and imaginative tale".

Traitors to the Human Race

    "The love of money", said Phocylides, "is the mother of all evils" - a maxim which was to become proverbial in the ancient world, being changed to the "metropolis of all evils" by Democritus, and the "root of all evils" by St. Paul.

     Greed for money and, as we shall see, for power can be a strong solvent of a person's morality. Thirty pieces of silver was enough to buy Judas Iscariot's treachery, and a long list could be made of those who turned traitor for the sake for pay. Greed can also dissolve the critical faculty. No-one would possibly fall for the Nigerian scam, for instance, if the prospect of enormous riches hadn't blinded him to the extreme improbability of the proposal. However, it takes a massive combination of baseness and stupidity to fall for a project which is both evil and utterly ridiculous, and one can must grant a certain grudging respect to a con artist who realised it would actually work.

Ultimate Weirdness from the Timmerman Files

It's sort of difficult to try and explain this to anybody and have them not think you are making it up, or that you're from the looney bin.

     This was the opening statement by an interviewee for John Timmerman, who took the photo exhibit of the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) around 92 malls in the United States between 1980 and 1992. In the process, he heard so many stories that, after the first two malls, he brought along a tape recorder and taped the witnesses. Mostly, what he heard were conventional UFO reports - if "conventional" can be used for such a subject. However, as you should be aware, you can't probe very deeply into this field without unearthing stories which are very weird indeed.

Tiny Craft, Tiny Pilots

     Ever since the days of Tom Thumb and Lemuel Gulliver, shrunken humans, tiny humans, and tiny humanoids have be grist to the mill of science fiction. Unfortunately, as I explained in my sci-fi blog, they are biologically impossible. That is why I find reports of such beings so intriguing. The list of shortest people reveals a number of dwarfs slightly taller and, in some cases, slightly shorter than 2 feet [60 cm]. Nevertheless, many of them had disproportionate body parts, and all of them grew up and lived among people of normal height. A breeding population of such little people might run into problems. What is certain is that any sighting of a normally proportioned adult much shorter than this is unlikely to refer to anything of flesh and blood. So what are we to make of the following reports of tiny pilots of tiny craft?

The "Mince Pie Martians" : the Original Account

     The 4th of January was the 38th anniversary of what the English press whimsically labelled the "Mince Pie Martians". It was on that date in 1979, two days from the festival of the visit of the Wise Men to Bethlehem, that a small West Midlands town allegedly received a visitation of three quite extraordinary beings. Under normal circumstances, I would provide an abridged version, but in this case I feel that it would be impossible to do justice to it without copying verbatim the written account of the alleged witness, 43 year old Mrs Jean Hingley. A briefer version originally appeared in The Dudley Herald of 12 January 1979, but it was left to a UFO researcher, Eileen Morris to interview Mrs Hingley and her husband several times, make extensive notes, and eventually type up the report, which the witness affirmed as accurate. Most of the other versions you will find on the internet refer back to secondary sources, particularly one by Alfred Budden in 1988, but this is the original, and thus has priority, so here goes. [Square brackets represent my own inserts.]

The Psychics and the Saucers

     One of the benefits of preparing last month's post was that it forced me to reread Jim Schnabel's excellent book on the U.S. psychic spies, or remote viewers. Schnabel is an excellent investigative reporter in the field of science, and he detailed his sources of information page by page, so I don't think we need doubt the broad details of his story. This is important, because one of the things the remote viewers discovered was that there was Somebody Else interested in the same things as them.

Very Strange Visitors

     "Men in Black" were an unusual feature of the North American UFO scene in the early years, and have not completely disappeared. Dressed in dark suits, and driving black cars, they would descend, usually in pairs, upon UFO witnesses or investigators, making unspecific threats which were never carried out. One suggestion involves investigators/witnesses accidentally crossing paths with government agents undertaking investigations of their own. Add a certain degree of paranoia, and a cultural myth has started. It sounds plausible, but I shall leave it to those more familiar with the subject than I. Nevertheless, once in a while a well documented case turns up which is really, really strange.

What Happened to Their Planet?

     Don't believe anything until it is confirmed, but don't throw away any information. That is the philosophy of this blog, and the reason I use it to rescue items which might otherwise be overlooked. Whether it is the paranormal, or something mundane, like an accusation of spousal infidelity, in day to day life we tend to balance the credibility of the witness with the probability of the story. If a story is really fantastic, we tend to reject it, even if the reporter would otherwise be considered reliable.
     But there is a catch. Occasionally, the really fantastic happens to be part of a rare, but genuine phenomenon. If we throw away the stories every time we hear them, the data will never accumulate, and we will never discover that they form a pattern. So, even the fantastic deserves its day in court. Put it in your file. If the story is false, it will lie there, and eventually die of loneliness. But if it happens to be true, bit by bit, its relatives will drift in to keep it company.
     And nowhere is this more important than with alien abductions, where high strangeness is par for the course, but there are legitimate concerns that the data is contaminated with confabulations.

This is NOT an Aeroplane

     Have a look at this. It is a pretty good representation of an aeroplane, wouldn't you say? There are the wings and the tailfins, vertical and horizontal, and even what appears to be an open cockpit. It was made by the Tolima Indians, southwest of Bogotá, Colombia, and it more than 500 years old - a superb example of pre-Columbian Indian goldwork, one of the very few which survived the melting-down mania of the marauding Spanish conquistadores.
     This, or something very like it, was celebrated by Erich von Däniken in his 1968 best seller, Chariots of the Gods?, and taken up by lots of band-wagoners on the theme that ancient astronauts had introduced aeroplanes to South America - perhaps to land them on the Nazca Lines, hundreds of miles to the south, some of which have the appearance of airstrips.

     Whataloadofoldrubbish!

UFOs Over Papua - the Same Nights as Father Gill

In my last post, I published chapter 5 of Fr. Cruttwell's 1960 report, Flying Saucers Over Papua, in which his friend, the Rev. William Gill told of the now famous UFO visitation which he and his congregation at Boiani witnessed on the nights of 26th, 27th, and 28th June 1959. This time we shall continue with chapter 6, which deals with the events in the nearby settlements on the very same nights. Please remember, also, that at the time, the majority of the population were uncivilised and uneducated. Who knows how many of them had similar experiences and were unable to report them?
But first we shall go to official explanations.

UFOs over Boiani - in Father Gill's Own Words

     Whenever "classic" UFO cases are catalogued, eventually one finds the name of the late Rev. William Booth Gill, the head of the Anglican mission at Boiani, on Goodenough Bay, Papua (10º 1½' S, 149º 53' E). Over three nights in June 1959, he and his entire congregation were witnesses to a remarkable close encounter of the third kind lasting several hours on each occasion. If you have read about it, it will have been on a page or so of some omnibus UFO book, itself copied from an earlier omnibus book.
    However, in the late 1970s I was lucky enough to acquire a copy of the original report in Fr. Gill's own words. It is included in a 45-page document entitled:
    Flying Saucers Over Papua
    A Report on Papuan Unidentified Flying Objects
    by the Rev. Norman E. G. Cruttwell, M.A. Oxon., of the Anglican Mission, Menapi, Papua, New Guinea.
    (dated) March, 1960.
     He got involved in collecting the reports after a sighting of his own the previous December, when he wrote to Flying Saucer Review, and was asked to be their local investigator. I presume, therefore, that at least part of this story was originally published in that journal. In any case, this is the full account. 
    The document had been updated slightly. There is a reference to a 1965 magazine article, along with a short 1976 addendum by the Vice President of the Queensland UFO Research Bureau, which presumably "published" the report. In fact, it is simply a mimeographed typescript, with the addition of a few drawings obviously traced from the originals. In other words, it is inaccessible to the vast majority of people. You would have better luck getting a close encounter of your own! For this reason, I wish to share it with you.

       The Rev. Cruttwell points out that the Boiani sightings were only three out of 79. Father Gill's report is in chapter V (pp 12-19). However, in chapter III he describes earlier sightings at Goodenough Bay, one of which is the following sighting by Father Gill.

Poor Blooming Aliens!

    The philosophy behind this blog is that even the most fantastic report deserves its day in court. It may, of course, be genuinely bogus, in which case it will sit quietly in your files and eventually die of loneliness. However, there is always the possibility that, decades later and thousands of miles away, a similar report will independently float in to back it up. If so, you would be sorry you had thrown out the original report. After all, one of the first UFO societies, N.I.C.A.P. originally discarded all reports of UFO occupants as too fantastic to be worth consideration.
     Anyone who has followed UFOs for a long period will eventually arrive at two conclusions. The first is that, just because a story sounds far-fetched, even ridiculous, it doesn't mean it is not genuine. The second, unfortunately, is also correct: just because a single witness appears completely sincere and believable, there is no guarantee that the story is true.
    The following account is an oldie, but goldie. Like many others, it relies on the unsupported testimony of a single witness, so I won't say I believe it, and I won't say I don't. But I like it.   

My UFO Sightings

     In 1973, two eleven-year-old Californian boys went to a vacant allotment in the evening to play, when they came across a dark object the size of their living room planted in the open field, and resting about 18 inches off the ground. (Later, three holes were discovered where its supports had presumably stood.) After about five minutes, the bolder of the boys tapped it a few times with his torch. Suddenly, the top of the object lit up with a brilliant red light, the object rose three or four feet in the air, a row of green lights started flashing around the periphery, and the object began to rotate with a whooshing sound. As the object disappeared into the sky, the boys ran for their lives. (Coral and Jim Lorenzen, Encounters with UFO Occupants [1976], Berkeley Medallion, pp 31-32)
    Five years earlier, an Englishman was driving his truck at about 2.30 in the morning, when he saw an object like a green egg 15 feet across moving above the tree line. As it approached, his headlights and radio failed, and he watched as the object paused, and out of the bottom came a tube like a vacuum cleaner hose, at the end of which was a box from which issued four smaller hoses.  At that point, a Jaguar arrived from the opposite direction, its lights and engine failing in the presence of the UFO. As both of them watched, transfixed, the vacuum hose moved from one side of the road to the other, sucking up gravel, grass, and dead leaves while the main object gave a high-pitched whine. Then the hose was withdrawn into the UFO, which shot up into the air. (ibid. pp 16-17).
     Nothing as exciting as that has ever happened to me. I feel left out! Nevertheless, I have witnessed unidentified flying objects on three separate occasions. I won't call them flying saucers, let alone extraterrestrial space craft. However, they were never identified, they were definitely flying, and were presumably objects. And, because I am an inveterate diarist, I do not need to refer to my memory, because a full description was written up within a few minutes of each event.

Brisbane, Australia, 1968. It was Saturday evening, 7th December. I don't know why I was outside after dark, but it must have been about 7.45 pm, when I looked up and saw what appeared to be a paint smear on the sky. At first I thought it was a comet, and I called out to my parents and younger brother to see it. But this explanation soon proved false. The contrail - for such it almost certainly was - climbed higher and higher in the sky, moving west to east, until it extended across a third of the sky. By then my watch showed 7.55. At the vague front of the contrail was a point of light no brighter than the average star. Moving with it, but some distance behind, and to the side of the contrail, was another "star", without any contrail. My brother, Warren thought that he saw a third "star" near the front one.
     At first we supposed it might have been the Europa rocket fired from Woomera, but shortly afterwards a news bulletin reported that neither the defence forces nor civil aviation knew anything about it. (This was Australia, remember. We don't go much into testing top secret, edge-of-technology aircraft over capital cities - and certainly didn't 43 years ago.) The following day, The Sunday Mail told how hundreds of people had reported it, but none could identify it.
    The above was taken almost verbatim from my diary, and it is interesting to note that the details are different in many aspects from those of my conscious memory.

Borneo, 1981. It was Sunday 19 July, and I was travelling up the broad Mahakam River in Kalimantan, or Indonesian Borneo in a 17 metre houseboat. About 8.27 pm, I was standing on the skirting board of the boat, holding on to the rail on top, and gazing over the top to admire the multitude of stars - far more than could be seen in the city. (It was, perhaps, a foolhardy occupation; although the boat was chugging along leisurely, if I had fallen off, probably no-one would have noticed.) The moon had not yet risen, and everyone but my mother and the pilot were asleep. I noticed a faint star at an elevation of about 45^o, and a slightly fainter star, a white point of light, at about the 5 o'clock position in relation to it, and about two moon widths away. For a moment it seemed a faint beam of light passed between the second and first stars, but this may have been an optical illusion. I remember thinking that it looked like a brief shooting star, except that the flash went up, not down.
     Suddenly, the second star began to blink and, still blinking, it moved in an arc to between the 2 and 3 o'clock position. Then it abruptly faded and went out. About two minutes later, while I was still dumbfounded, it appeared again in the 5 o'clock position, but a bit further out than originally. Again, blinking even more than before, it began moving in the same arc. At about the 3 o'clock position, it veered outwards fairly steeply, and again faded and went out. I stared at the spot, but that star was never seen again.
     I started writing the entry in my diary at 8.38. The moon rose at 8.43 from the direction in which I had been facing (port) ie probably from the southeast.

Southern Madagascar, 1991. Yes, I get around. This time I was with a camping tour of Madagascar, and on Friday 2nd August we had all settled down in a clearing off the road, about 35 km from Beloha, if you can find that on any map. It was around 7 pm, and we were gathered around the fire when we saw two lights in the northern sky. At first we thought they were satellites, for they were travelling rapidly on parallel paths, with the lower one in front. Suddenly the upper one exploded. It simply disappeared in a red puff. A second or two later, the second one simply vanished. No-one could give a reasonable explanation, although a "star wars" type of hunter-killer satellite was one suggestion. Maybe.

    As you can see, nothing here actually leaps out at you as a visitor from outer space. On the other hand, except possibly for the last case, neither does any mundane explanation. Any suggestions?