Category: UFOs/Unexplained Phenomena

From New Dawn Special Issue Vol 13 No 1 (Feb 2019)

Decades after his death George Adamski remains a polarising influence in the global UFO research community: Was he a contactee, a conman or just plain crazy? The following evidence seems to tip the balance in his favour. You decide.

In 1959 Adamski conducted lectures in New Zealand and Australia as part of his world tour and strange things apparently happened. His organisers claimed they saw aliens and the contemporary newspapers on both sides of the Tasman reported UFO sightings. Firstly, let’s review the man himself.

George Adamski was born on 17 April 1891 in Bydgoszcz, Poland, and his family immigrated to New York City in 1893. He left school early, and although he continued life-long self-education, it’s generally believed his famous books were ghost written. In 1913 he joined the US Army, serving for three years with the 13^th Cavalry on the Mexican border, and saw action during the incursion by the revolutionary Pancho Villa. In 1917 he married his wife, Mary, and the couple moved to the West Coast where he worked in a series of low-paying jobs; George had no children and his wife died in 1954.

By the 1930s Adamski had emerged as a minor occult figure in the Californian esoteric scene and lectured on Tibetan mysticism. In 1940 he and a few students moved base from Laguna Beach to Mount Palomar where they founded Palomar Gardens, a retreat and camping ground. George worked there as a handyman, gave talks, and from 1947 took photographs of UFOs (using a 6” and later a 15” telescope, and a cinecamera; he took 700 images of what he claimed were mothership carriers, scout ships and telemetric saucers). In 1953 he co-wrote with (Lord) Desmond Leslie Flying Saucers Have Landed. 

In this classic UFO book, Adamski claims that on 20 November 1952 he had a strong intuitive feeling a saucer would land that day, so he asked six friends to accompany him into the Mojave Desert. The group drove about 15 km and saw a huge cigar-shaped mothership in the sky. Adamski asked to be dropped off and his friends were about one km from him when a scout craft descended and an alien emerged. Adamski communicated with the being using telepathy and sign language, while military aircraft buzzed the area; the being went back into the craft and departed. The six witnesses swore an affidavit these events took place. 

At a subsequent meeting aboard a mothership in space, the Venusians told Adamski they had chosen him to be their emissary to warn humans of the perils of nuclear annihilation. To help him with his mission they would make contact and their spacecraft would appear at opportune times. In 1956 he published Inside The Space Ships which describes his trips into space. In 1959, at the request of the Venusians, he set out on the world tour which lasted six months, and this became the topic for his third book Flying Saucers Farewell, published in 1961. Let’s examine the evidence.

Adamski commenced his visit to the lands down under on 17 January 1959, when he arrived at Auckland, New Zealand (aboard an airliner) and was met at the airport by his organisers and sponsors. In his third book he praises the hospitality of the NZ people, particularly the Maori community, writing: “The spacecraft sightings seemed always to come at the right time to awaken public interest. This was one of the reasons we enjoyed overflow crowds at all the New Zealand lectures.” 

If his organisers are to be believed, he was also helped on the ground by strange Nordic-looking young men who were immaculately attired, and had fair, tanned or orange skin, wore sunglasses and seemed disciplined and secretive; Adamski called them “the boys.”

The Kiwi writer Tony Brunt in his book George Adamski: The Toughest Job in the World, notes: “It was not so much the sightings in the sky or Adamski’s space trips that most tantalised his supporters; it was his assertion that he met the space people regularly and furtively in everyday society, and especially when he was on the lecture circuit. It was to place himself in the best possible position to exploit these private encounters that Adamski insisted on staying in hotels rather than private homes.” 

“Adamski’s whole organising committee in Auckland might have spent an unwitting few hours with one of ‘the boys’. George advised them that they had been ‘checked out’ by space people before his arrival. Thinking back on the months preceding Adamski’s visit, committee members came to the conclusion that the stand-out candidate was a fair complexioned young man of indeterminate race who had joined one of their afternoon meetings.” 

Adamski commenced his tour of the Shaky Isles at Kaikohe, where he delivered a lecture and screened his explosive UFO film, later fielding questions from the audience. He was not a particularly good speaker but the shows thrilled the public all the same. He then returned to Auckland where he spoke in front of 2,000 people in the Town Hall. On the following day he went to Ngaruawahia, the old Maori capital, for an audience with the Maori king. While he was at the royal residence UFOs appeared. In his third book he writes: 

“While I was taking pictures of the entranceway, six white streaks of light flashed overhead. This caused much interest among the Maoris, as they were not vapour trails, and Sister Heeni said it was a good omen and very significant.

“As we drove back to Hamilton, the spacecraft streaking through the sky seemed to follow us. This had happened on other occasions and I knew the [Space] Brothers felt that this was the time and place to make their presence known. 

“Shortly after reaching Napier, I was called by a newspaperman in regard to flying saucer sightings reported in the local newspaper… After talking to the reporter I picked up the local paper and read the article: ‘FLYING SAUCERS REPORTED OVER LAKE TAUPO’.” 

He reprinted the story as evidence in the book and the text reads as follows: 

“Three Rotorua people say they watched not one, but dozens of flying saucers operating high over the township of Taupo in bright sunlight on Tuesday. The trio had just farewelled Mr. George Adamski, who claims to have contact with extraterrestrial visitors, who was on his way to Napier.

“Mr. W. Miller, the local leader of the George Adamski Group, said that his wife and Mr. N. West, he was sitting on the bank overlooking the lake at the end of Taupo’s main street, at 3 P.M.

“Asked when they had seen the first flying saucer, Miller who had been interested in flying saucers for two years said: ‘Yesterday’.

“We couldn’t say how many there were, but we could have seen the same ones twice,” said Mr. Miller. Lying on their backs, they could not pick out vertical movements, nor estimate the height or size of the craft.

“In addition to these reported sightings, it is rumoured in Rotorua that many people, including more than 100 Maoris, saw two spacecraft flying in formation between Ngaruawahia and Hamilton last Sunday.” 

After an afternoon of UFO activity, and with publicity wind in his sails, he went on to fill the public halls in Wellington, Auckland, Wanganui and in New Plymouth where there was also a sighting:

“It was early twilight when the people began gathering in New Plymouth’s hall on the evening of the lecture. A minister and members of his congregation had seen a large space ship cruise over the city. This caused much excitement and as I arrived people were eagerly wondering if the space ship would return.

“I explained to them that I had no control over such things… If I were selfishly disposed and could arrange contacts, I would be a millionaire. Many people have offered large sums of money to me and to others to arrange contacts for them. Naturally I have always refused such offers.” 

After that sighting he returned to Auckland for a third lecture, and then flew to the South Island where he presented at Christchurch, Tamara and Dunedin. He then flew back to Auckland and, according to his organisers, had ‘company’ on the plane. Tony Brunt mentions in his book: “One of the New Zealand tour organisers got a shot at George’s undercover escorts. She was waiting for him at Auckland airport on his return from a flight to a southern city. ‘I noticed two good looking men with fair hair disembark from the plane among the passengers and walk across the tarmac’, she said later. ‘They could have been brothers but I didn’t pay too much attention, apart from noticing they smiled at me as they approached the gate. George was the last person off the plane and when he got to me he said excitedly, ‘did you see de boys?’… By the time they got into the terminal the men had disappeared, to her great regret’.”

The tour of NZ had been a tremendous success, with a little help from his ‘friends’ who apparently followed him across the Tasman.

The ‘silver haired space man’ arrived in Sydney in mid-February 1959 and was met at the airport by UFO study groups, the media and unruly fans. The scene became so hectic Adamski took refuge in the VIP lounge. Stan Seers, who was president of a Queensland study group at the time, relates in his book UFOs: The Case For Scientific Myopia that the confined Adamski confirmed “the ‘aliens’ were keeping a close watch on tour arrangements to make sure all went smoothly, and had actually visited him while he was in New Zealand.” 

According to Tony Brunt: “In Australia, George had a mysterious escort who shadowed him on a number of his internal flights, a woman who dressed in black and wore a seahorse brooch. She was seen and photographed by his companions. Adamski suspected that she was a space person but was reluctant to approach uninvited.”

After his arrival in Sydney Adamski discovered the preparation for his tour was in a shambles. A hotel room had not been booked as required, and he had been issued with a tourist visa and feared if he lectured he’d be deported. His sponsor, the UFO Information Centre (UFOIC), had also withdrawn its support. What was the problem? In a word: Venus.

Our nearest planetary neighbour has long fascinated humanity. In 1959 not a lot was known about it because it’s always shrouded by clouds and astronomers still hadn’t determined its rotation or surface temperature. This led to wild speculation in certain quarters that it may be inhabited by an advanced civilisation, and Adamski’s books, of course, had added high-octane fuel to the fire. The UFOIC, which was trying to be a credible organisation, believed Adamski was too “unscientific” and his lectures were attracting the “wrong crowd.” In his book, Adamski also blames the “Silence Group” based in Zurich, Switzerland, for the Sydney problems. 

In any event, after selecting a suitable city hotel room and meetings with officialdom, Adamski continued his tour and lectured to large gatherings, including 1,200 or more paying customers in Sydney. He says ruefully in his book: “…the group did not want to sponsor me as an organisation; still, they wished me to lecture for them.” After Sydney he flew to Perth where he met with study groups, and then to Adelaide where, while he delivered lectures, there were UFO sightings! In his book he records: 

“After my second successful lecture in that city, a group of us were standing outside the hall waiting for transportation. One of the ladies sighted several space ships. Some of the ladies in the group observed the craft in detail before the ships passed out of sight.”

“As I was getting ready to leave for Melbourne, I was asked why the space ships did not land in Australia. I replied that they might after I had gone.

“A landing did occur, much to their surprise! This landing took place before I left Adelaide, but was not publicised until I arrived in Melbourne. Imagine my surprise when I read in the Sunday Mail of March 28^th, the following article: ‘WE SAW A SPACE SHIP—Eerie Object Puzzles Town’.”

Adamski reprinted an excerpt from the article, written by John Pinkney, that describes an actual landing at the river town:

“In recent weeks weird, multi-coloured objects have streaked across Purnong’s skies – frightening the townsfolk. Two local men swear that on March 13^th they saw a huge dome-shaped craft take off from a field. The men were Mr Percy Briggs, Purnong Landing carrier, and Mr Carl Towill, postmaster at Claypans. Mr Towell said: ‘The thing was bigger than an airliner. Mr Briggs and I are convinced that it was intelligently controlled.’ The two men said they saw an enormous dome-shaped craft glowing in the dark and as they walked towards the mysterious object it rose silently into the air, hovered, then shot away at immense speed.” 

The Purnong flap, SE of Adelaide, continued for some time after Adamski had departed; the article reports on 20 March a young couple while driving north to Purnong saw “a blazing coin” that “shone like a sun in the darkness. It arched upward at tremendous speed and was gone”; and, days later, the Briggs family saw “two disc shaped objects, changing colour from red and blue.”A UFO research group from Victoria, and personnel from the Woomera Rocket Range, South Australia, investigated this case. 

Adamski, who was evidently on a tight schedule, flew directly to Melbourne on 16 March. Adamski’s arrival in that city coincided with the filming of ‘On The Beach’ starring Ava Gardner and Gregory Peck: Hollywood had come to Australia! This famous movie depicts life after an apocalyptic nuclear war, so Adamski’s message about the Venusian’s concerns couldn’t have come at a better time. He received wide media coverage and in an interview for the Herald newspaper he revealed he “wasn’t making a dime” from the sell-out shows, which was apparently true; Stan Seers in his book says the sponsors only paid for his hotel accommodation, travel and living expenses. He apparently wasn’t in it for the money.

After a successful two-week season in Melbourne, and a brief private trip to Hobart, he flew to Brisbane where for three weeks “hundreds were turned away and could not gain admission. I will always remember the fine cooperation of the press, the public, and the research group in Brisbane.” 

The tour of Australia had been a remarkable success, apparently with a little help from his friends.

He departed our shores on 16 April, and lectured in Asia, the Subcontinent, Middle East, Britain and Europe. According to various sources, the aliens kept in contact and their craft continued to appeared at opportune times. In Italy he contracted a chest infection so cut the tour and flew home to Los Angeles on 17 June 1959. 

On 14 November 1962, NASA’s Mariner 2 probe flew by Venus and measured the surface temperature at 427 degrees C, hot enough to melt lead. Adamski’s response to this was the Venusians are highly evolved beings who live on an etheric plane and raise their vibration so the heat doesn’t affect them. He nevertheless did have a nervous breakdown at about that time, but eventually recovered and was on a tour when he died of a heart attack on 23 April 1965 at Silver Spring, Maryland. As an ex-soldier he was afforded a burial in Arlington National Cemetery. His torch is today carried by the Adamski Foundation and a surprising number of highly credentialed UFO researchers.

The Adamski Foundation argues the scientists are lying about Venus (and indeed our solar system). The instruments on all the launches, including Mariner 2, have been pre-calibrated and the real data never disclosed; the reason for the cover up is the Venusians utilise free energy, their craft are powered by electromagnetism and can travel at the speed of light, and if their technology were transferred to Earth it would crash the world’s stock markets. In 1982 the Russian Venera-13 Lander transmitted colour images for 127 minutes from the surface of Venus and these clearly show three small ‘critters’ including a ‘scorpion’. The surface cannot be nearly as hot as we have been told.

Was Adamski the real deal? The evidence from the tour, while not a ‘smoking gun’, is intriguing: witnesses on both sides of the Tasman believed they saw his Venusian ‘escorts’ and many more watched UFOs in the sky, and there was a landing at Purnong. Maybe he was in contact with something after all. 

[alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn Special Issue Vol 13 No 1.[/alert]

[alert type=”success” dismiss=”no”]If you appreciate this article, please consider subscribing to help maintain this website.[/alert]

Footnotes

1. George Adamski, Flying Saucers Farewell, Abelard-Schuman, 1961, 130

2. Ibid, 28

3. Ibid, 132

4. Tony Brunt, George Adamski: The Toughest Job in the World, Vailima Press NZ, 2010, 18

5. Stan Seers, UFOs: The Case For Scientific Myopia, Vantage Press, 1983, 23

6. Tony Brunt, 19

7. George Adamski, 138

8. Ibid

9. Adelaide Sunday Mail, 28 March 1959, 72

10. Ibid, 6

11. See video documentary ‘UFO Secret: Alien Contacts’ (2017), directed by Michael Hesemann

12. www.sci-news.com/space/article00156.html

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
For our reproduction notice, click here.

From New Dawn 173 (Mar-Apr 2019)

What happened at Westall in Clayton, Victoria on 6 April 1966 has become one of our most prominent UFO mysteries. It has become widely known through the work of Shane Ryan and the excellent 2010 documentary ‘Westall’66 – A Suburban UFO Mystery’ directed by Rosie Jones. Here I will focus on why I think the case is credible and why the HIBAL balloon theory, still trotted out by uncritical media, does not explain what happened.

Melbourne Herald Sun journalist Mark Dunn wrote the story which was published online on 6 August 2014 with the headline “Westall ‘UFO’ incident was actually government radiation testing, reports reveal.” A shorter version of the story appears in the hard copy of the paper the following day with the headline “UFO all hot air – ‘Westall’ was a balloon.” There is no evidence of any original research by the journalist, and it is based entirely on research done by long-time researcher Keith Basterfield. To quote from the story (my comments are in brackets):

“An almost 50-year-old mystery when more than 200 people believed they had a close encounter with a UFO landing in Clayton may have finally been solved after newly-unearthed government documents revealed a secret radiation-testing program. [The HIBAL programme was not conducted in secret at the time of the Westall incident. HIBAL was openly reported in newspapers from at least 1965 and beyond 1966.]

“Although federal and state government agencies refused to comment about the 1966 ‘Westall’ incident at the time, it is now believed that, rather than a UFO, what landed was an errant high altitude balloon used to monitor radiation levels after the controversial Maralinga nuclear tests. The HIBAL program was a joint US-Australian initiative to monitor atmospheric radiation levels using large silver balloons equipped with sensors between 1960 and 1969. Documents held by the National Archives and former Department of Supply indicate one test balloon launched from Mildura may have been blown off course and came down in Clayton South in a paddock near Westall High School, alarming and baffling hundreds of eyewitnesses, including teachers and students. [No official documents have been found as of the beginning of August 2014 that refer to any HIBAL launch being the explanation for the events at Westall in April 1966. No documents have been found to confirm the scheduled 5 April 1966 launch took place.]

“After hovering over the area, it landed at an area known as The Grange, behind a grove of pine trees, before taking off again and being pursued by several light aircraft in a sighting which lasted 20 minutes from 11am on April 6, 1966. The event has ever since been shrouded in mystery.”

“But researcher Keith Basterfield, who has spent years investigating unexplained phenomenon in Australia, said a ‘runaway’ balloon from the HIBAL (high altitude balloon) project was the likely answer. Each test balloon lifted a 180kg payload consisting of an air sampling and telemetry unit in a gondola and was followed by a light aircraft tasked with tracking it and triggering its 12mtr parachute via radio signal.”

“Immediately after the Westall ‘UFO’ sighting, reports emerged of government men in suits converging on the area and asking school officials and other witnesses to not talk about the event. A contemporary witness reported these ‘suits’ stated what the students saw was part of a secret government exercise and that for national security reasons they were forbidden from discussing it…

“What is strikingly missing is a memo reporting on the actual four launches for April 1966, one of which was scheduled for 5 April 1966, the day before Westall. So we have no (official) knowledge of where flight 292 went.”

A document in the Australian HIBAL files may point towards the fact that no dramatic HIBAL related touchdown occurred at Westall on 6 April 1966. The Australian Prime Minister’s secretary in a memo to the Secretary of the Department of Supply dated 6 May 1966 (only one month after the Westall incident) indicated: “The indemnity clause was inserted in the HIBAL agreement because of the real risk of injury from descending instrument packages.” It tellingly does not refer to any HIBAL event of “descending instrument packages” coming down in populated areas, let alone suburban Melbourne. 

The original SECRET classification of this file and the absence of any reference to HIBAL-initiated hazards or security concerns related to Westall during April 1966, strongly suggests that no such incident occurred. 

A number of witnesses in the Westall incident report a heavy hand in what seemed like an official coverup. If it was a HIBAL related matter, the file would have contained references to it or at the very least an escalation in the security and liability fallout. Instead, what is seen is a dense bureaucratic dialogue being slowly resolved to permit the HIBAL programme to continue with continual references to minimal risks. No references to a crisis at Westall caused by a messy HIBAL containment and retrieval suggest a logical conclusion: There was no HIBAL event at Westall on 6 April 1966.

A scenario like the HIBAL hypothesis might take flight if you ignore or reject a lot of impressive eyewitness testimony or only utilise suggestive fragments of the fuller story. Especially considering the coherence of much of the Westall testimony, some of it revealed in 1966 and 1967, and much more since then, particularly in the last decade, primarily through Canberra researcher Shane Ryan’s work.

Ken McCracken was involved in HIBAL as a scientist from Adelaide University from at least 1965 to 1968. In his memoir Blast Off: Scientific Adventures at the Dawn of the Space Age (2008), Professor McCracken in a chapter entitled ‘Little Green Men and other Weird Tales’ writes of “the most famous occasion” when flying saucers or UFOs factored into his scientific adventures. It was a HIBAL launch, but it wasn’t Westall in 1966. In fact, it was 1968 in Sydney. This was about sightings of a high-level HIBAL balloon gone astray.

My point: if the events described at Westall in April 1966, even if we limit it to evidence gathered in 1966 and 1967, were due to a HIBAL balloon, payload or parachute (or variations of those combinations), we would have had a spectacular example of misinterpretation and hysterical contagion, which far outstrips the 1968 Sydney event as contender for “the most famous occasion” of a HIBAL “flying saucer” fallout.

I suggest that a low-level HIBAL event, while possibly creating some hysteria, would have been clearly identifiable, not as a UFO but as an obvious IFO – identified – and not a big deal other than containing it from causing injury, damage and retrieving the payload and its attachments. Photos of HIBAL parachute/payload configurations about to touch down make it pretty apparent that at a low-level people would easily confirm a parachute and payload. 

For example, Westall school student Joy Tighe’s 1966 description of two separate circular UFOs (shaped like “upright domes”) “flying in varying directions,” “faster than some light aircraft in vicinity,” then turning on edge and disappearing fast, as recorded on a Victorian Flying Saucer Research Society report form in 1966. To suggest this description supports a sighting of a parachute connected to a heavy payload, weighing up to 200 kg, seems like an incredible force-fit. It is a big stretch to suggest that winds caused a HIBAL parachute and payload to come down low, then go in varying directions, at times faster than light aircraft in the area, then turn and quickly disappear. That’s a pretty impressive performance for a balloon and payload at low altitude. In this scenario it would be a wonder that the school children and teachers were able to stand upright in the wind conditions needed to keep the balloon/payload up in the air, defying the forces of gravity, and gyrating around the sky low over Westall school, at times flying faster than light aircraft despite being at a low altitude. 

I was able to do a video interview with Joy (Tighe) Clarke at the 2006 Westall reunion event. I found her to be a compelling witness. I also videoed her 2006 drawing of the UFOs she saw. I was left with the same general impression with all the Westall witnesses I met at the reunion. They told stories of their recollections and didn’t seem to be embellishing narratives. Sure, there are problems with testimony gathered decades after an event, but I was impressed with the general coherency and consistency of the individual stories. Collectively, they appeared to support an event that goes way beyond what a HIBAL incursion might have generated.

Given that for a long time I have focused on physical trace (UFO landing) accounts, I was pleased to eventually interview Victor Zakry who described witnessing, as a Westall school student, two identical objects, like Joy, but strikingly initially at ground level, that were connected directly with ground traces. The reports of ground traces did not get the careful attention they deserved at the time. There are accounts of clandestine attention, but nothing has surfaced other than witness descriptions and a Victorian Flying Saucer Research Society photo of a grassed area suggestive of a trace, but may have been due to prosaic factors. We just don’t have certainty in that area, but there are plenty of speculations.

On 5 July 2008 I was able to undertake an onsite detailed investigation and interview Victor Zakry at Westall in Melbourne. I videoed the interview and got him to do a rough layout map of the events he witnessed. His account was consistent with a number of interviews he had given to others and me.

Victor indicated he was able to walk up close to one of the objects, while three other students stood close to the other object. A teacher and at least a dozen other students crowded along the high fence to get a view. Victor contemplated touching the object but thought better of it. The two objects suddenly rose up from the grass and took off, one to the west, the other flew up and orbited a small plane before flying down to the south-west Grange reserve area, with students in pursuit. The UFOs were described as about 1.5 metres in height and approximately 5.4 metres in width. They left behind two circles of burnt grass.

Victor went home for lunch straight after this extraordinary experience which swept up much of the rest of his school. This initially to me seemed a strange thing to do given the unfolding events, but Victor explained that at the time he felt he didn’t need to see any more that day (6 April 1966) because he had seen the exact same object a few years earlier. He was trying to take a wooden pallet from a factory site near the Westall Grange area during the early hours of the morning. His work was interrupted when a UFO flew over. It was the same looking object he would see during daylight at Westall in 1966 along with many in his school, but it was flying on edge – an appearance captured in a polaroid photo taken at the nearby suburb of Deepdene only four days before the Westall incident. There were other similar encounters during this period of the 1960s in the area around Westall and neighbouring isolated suburbs of Melbourne, which in those days was the outer edge of the city. Pockets of this area still have something of an isolated, almost country, feel to them.

Victor also impressed me as a compelling witness giving consistent testimony. While, like Joy, he spoke of seeing two objects, Victor saw them at ground level and then watched them take off and go in different directions. Like Joy, he described one of them flying faster than a light plane. Indeed, he described it as orbiting the plane, then taking off and apparently heading down to the Grange area. 

Victor later told me that he had a meeting with the school headmaster who encouraged him not to talk about the event because it might hurt his future chances of a career in art. The headmaster gave him that advice because he had witnessed something similar during the war and had experienced the pressure of being told not to talk about such things. Victor followed the headmaster’s advice, but with the growing tide of witnesses coming forward since 2006 he now felt more comfortable reporting his own experience. His artistic abilities also provided us with some striking drawings of the objects he saw.

I don’t think the evidence that witnesses like Victor share with us should be diminished simply because they were described decades after the original event. Instead, when they are told with compelling conviction, we should accept them for what they seem to be – genuine attempts at recollections of past events – and try to see how they fit into the daunting jigsaw puzzle that the large body of testimony of Westall ’66 represents. There is a measure of coherency, but many aspects remain confusing. 

This fits with Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s “black swan” concept, an interesting way of looking at things. He says: “I am interested in how to live in a world we don’t understand very well – in other words, while most human thought [particularly since the enlightenment] has focused us on how to turn knowledge into decisions, I am interested in how to turn lack of information, lack of understanding, and lack of ‘knowledge’ into decisions – how not to be a ‘turkey’. My last book The Black Swan drew a map of what we don’t understand; my current work focuses on how to domesticate the unknown.”

This approach could be used to help understand and address the UFO mystery, which is like one of Taleb’s “black swans,” a thing that “lies outside the realm of regular expectations,” “it carries an extreme impact” and “human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.” These are key attributes of Taleb’s “black swans,” events of rarity, extreme impact, and retrospective predictability.

It is with the third attribute that mainstream science and media have let us down. They tried to explain the whole phenomenon away, but it is exactly the phenomenon’s ability to remain highly improbable to mainstream perceptions, and to have high impact in incredibly mysterious and profound ways, which should guide us. We have to learn to “expect the unexpected” and learn to understand it and learn from it.

The collective testimony gathered over decades powerfully argues that the Westall incident may well be a legitimate UFO mystery. Back in 1996, in my book The OZ Files: The Australian UFO Story, I concluded: “There is little doubt that something of an extraordinary nature was seen over the Westall school area and that at least one (UFO) appears to have landed and apparently left behind some physical traces. Numerous witnesses confirm these basic details. Other more exotic details vary in credibility …”

Sceptics and debunkers may uncritically embrace a HIBAL explanation for the Westall mystery, but the impressive nature of much of the testimony deserves far better. I don’t think the answer for Westall ’66 is blowing in the wind. I suspect it may be providing us with an extraordinary insight into the impact and nature of the UFO phenomenon if we have the skills, determination and insights to go beyond the curtains of nature to reveal the real mystery being played out in our little place in the cosmos.

Thank you to all the Westall witnesses who have had the courage and interest to share their experiences and recollections. Thanks also to all the researchers, investigators and people trying to understand the mystery. It all helps stir this fascinating melting pot that is the UFO mystery and might yield great insights. The ongoing Westall controversy can be monitored at Shane Ryan’s Facebook group: www.facebook.com/groups/1966westallflyingsaucerincident

The above is largely drawn from a report Bill Chalker wrote on his OZ Files blog: http://theozfiles.blogspot.com/2014/08/westall-66-ufo-or-hibal-answer-is.html

For more on Keith Basterfield’s research, see his website: ufos-scientificresearch.blogspot.com.au and search for his HIBAL entries.

[alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn 173.[/alert]

[alert type=”success” dismiss=”no”]If you appreciate this article, please consider subscribing to help maintain this website.[/alert]

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
For our reproduction notice, click here.

From New Dawn Special Issue Vol 12 No 2 (Apr 2018)

Aimé Michel, who died in 1992, was certainly the most memorable French UFO researcher and a pioneer in this field. In the early 1950s he wrote the second French book on the subject, Lueurs sur les soucoupes volantes (published later in English as The Truth About Flying Saucers by Criterion Books, NY). He was the only one who was successful in putting some rationality into the irrationality that is the UFO phenomenon.

In 1954, he was 35 years old and worked at the French Radio and Television Broadcasting. Since the end of August, France had been literally invaded by “flying saucers.” Every day they were making headlines in the daily press. For instance, the classic case at Vernon near Paris on 23 August where one of the witnesses, Bernard Miserey, observed a huge red-orange cigar-shaped object releasing several smaller luminous craft above the Seine river; or the well-known case of the landing of a bell-shaped UFO with two little cosmonaut-looking entities experienced by Marius Dewilde on 10 September at Quarouble in the north of France, to mention only two.

One day in the fall of 1954 during a dinner, his friend Jean Cocteau (1889–1963), who had read his first book The Truth About Flying Saucers, gave him the following advice:

“You should search if all those flying saucers did not obey some order which our eyes, at first glance, could not suspect. It would be necessary to see if these objects move along certain lines, if they describe some drawings, or anything? You could see, for example, if there are coincidences between their routes and the earth magnetic lines, or other lines with any meaning possible.”

The word was out: “lines…” And it was to lead Aimé Michel towards his main contribution to Ufology, the “orthoteny.” Michel began plotting on large Michelin maps of France all the sightings of the wave of 1954. Wholly unexpected spider web-like figures appeared. In a program on UFOs, broadcast on French TV in 1965, he alluded to one of the most puzzling “alignments” he discovered.

“And doing so I found rather surprising things. For example, on September 24, 1954 there were… nine observations which had been reported to me, which I had found in the press or which had been sent to me by correspondents. These nine observations were located respectively at Lantefontaine in Lorraine, at Langeac, at Le Puy in the Massif Central and then at Vichy, at Gelles, at Ussel, at Tulle, at Lencouacq and at Bayonne. All this in the southwest quarter of France. Yet …one realises that out of nine there are… six which are strictly aligned… and when I say ‘aligned’ it must not be assumed that it is an approximate alignment, not at all, it is something extraordinarily precise.”

He reported all his discoveries in his second book on UFOs, Mystérieux Objets Célestes (Flying Saucers and the Straight-Line Mystery, Criterion Books, NY), published in 1958, which deals exclusively with the big French UFO wave of 1954. The word, “orthotenic,” coined by Michel, is derived from the Greek adjective “orthos,” meaning straight. Following Cocteau’s line of thought, he had indeed brought to light the tendency of UFO sightings to fall in several straight lines over a period of about 24 hours. The book included beautiful maps (some unfoldable) detailing the daily crisscrossing patterns of lines. Regularly where those orthotenic lines crossed, a big vertical cigar-shaped UFO, some would say a “mother ship,” was observed.

Ufologists of today cannot imagine the revolution it was, not only in France but all over the world. At last one started to find some “order” out of this festival of absurdity… The laws of orthoteny were born and every ufologist would have his map in his bedroom trying to find new “alignments” or to confirm those already discovered like the famous 24 September 1954 Bayonne-Vichy line (BAVIC) with its 6 observations.

Then a few years later came the dream-breakers. It was the computer scientist and ufologist Jacques Vallee who first began to undermine the theory of his “friend” Aimé Michel. From analysis using computers, he concluded that “among the proposed alignments, the great majority, if not all, must be attributed to pure chance.” (Vallee, Challenge to Science, Henry Regnery Co., Chicago, 1966). Then another fellow countryman, the ufologist Jean Sider, years later, in his book The 1954 File and The Rationalist Imposture (ed. Ramuel), put the last nail on the coffin, suggesting that Michel had some of his dates wrong.

In his 2000 book, UFOs: The Mechanisms of Disinformation (Ovni: Les mécanismes d’une désinformation, ed. Albin Michel) a friend of Michel, the great professional astronomer and astrophysicist Pierre Guérin (1926–2000), who advocated an extra-terrestrial origin for UFOs, wrote this:

“To say that Aimé Michel took with good heart the failure of the orthoteny [concept], which was his discovery and about which he had fully committed himself, would be a lie. He accepted it only with reluctance and bitterness. It was a subject he did not like to speak about. But, nevertheless, a deserved tribute must be paid to this thinker for having tried an impersonal scientific approach of the UFO problem.”

Among the other contributions to Ufology, Michel was the first one to discuss many now “classic” cases such as the famous Oloron and Gaillac “flying saucer-angel hair” sightings from 1952, or, in the same year, the Marignane Airport case, the first landing case reported in France.

As far as I am concerned, I remember him as being the first person to be interested and publish the UFO photos taken near Lake Chauvet, right in the centre of France.

This remarkable observation was made by an electrical engineer, André Frégnale, on 18 July 1952, at 6:10 p.m. While looking southward, he noticed in the sky a disc-shape object coming from the west. The trajectory was “horizontal and rectilinear,” the linear speed “uniform” and the regularity of pace “impressive.” The object moved in absolute silence. Frégnale seized the camera he had with him, a 24 x 36 Zeiss Ikon equipped with a 45mm objective, and took four photos. When the “mysterious machine” was too far away to be photographed, he took his binoculars to follow the object which was travelling away, and saw it disappear, almost immediately, as if it had vanished on the spot.

All in all, the observation lasted not much more than one minute. In 1954, two of the four photos were published for the first time in Aimé Michel’s book The Truth About Flying Saucers. Over the years these four photos were carefully analysed, notably by Pierre Guérin in his book UFO: The Mechanisms of Disinformation, who had definitively excluded the hypothesis of a model or of a craft of terrestrial origin. So, to this day, the object remains unidentified. 

Disappointed by the reaction of the ufological community and probably weary of several back-stabbings, Aimé Michel would later focus less on the UFO enigma. He wrote mostly about animal life, philosophy and mysticism, and I should say Catholic mysticism, for instance in many articles for the magazine France Catholique. We can feel in these articles the influence of his friend Jean Cocteau. Each article is written with great style, nearing somewhat the poetic style. Aimé Michel was above all a poet writing in prose. I would define his book Flying Saucers and the Straight-Line Mystery as a work of a poet using scientific tools – a work of a man “radiating intelligence,” as Jean Cocteau said about him in a letter, who “always goes farther than the farthest and this without the slightest vagueness.” That’s why his UFO books, and Flying Saucers and the Straight-Line Mystery in particular, will not die; you can read it for the style of the writing, for the subtle poetry that permeates it, as well as for the clarity allied with the depth of the ideas expressed.

His third and final book dealing with UFOs came out in 1969, Pour ou contre les soucoupes volantes (For or Against the Flying Saucers). This book, published by the editions Berger-Levrault, was co-authored. Michel wrote the 77-pages of the “For” part, and the aeronautical engineer Georges Lehr, playing the role of sceptic, the 75-pages of the “Against” part.

Aimé Michel died at 73 years of age in his small village of Saint-Vincent-les-Forts at the feet of the Alps, where he was born and had lived most of the time. Nature and mountain lover, his very first book in 1953, Heroic Mountains, was actually a history of mountaineering and of its heroes. The “flying saucers” had not yet entered his life.   

The author thanks Warren P Aston for editing this article. 

[alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn Special Issue Vol 12 No 2.[/alert]

[alert type=”success” dismiss=”no”]If you appreciate this article, please consider subscribing to help maintain this website.[/alert]

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
For our reproduction notice, click here.

From New Dawn Special Issue Vol 13 No 1 (Jan 2019)

Earth’s armed forces have more or less continuously engaged intruders from outer space since 1916 to the present day. Although losses of equipment and even lives have occurred on both sides, humans are still at a distinct technological disadvantage. 

Military Encounters with Extraterrestrials (Bear and Company, 2018) chronicles this unfinished, undeclared, unofficial, mostly unknown conflict from the UFO destruction of munitions factories across the United States, just before that country’s participation in World War One, to the current struggle for Syria, where rebel army commanders tell of alien craft “hunting down and systematically targeting innocent locals, using unknown, weaponised technology not of this Earth, or anything our fighters have ever seen.”¹ 

How and why did this covert, if real, War of the Worlds come about? Prior to the early 20^th century, sightings of off-world vehicles were sometimes documented in official records or depicted in visual artwork preceding the Bronze Age and Classical Epoch, throughout the Medieval Period and Renaissance, into the Industrial Era. It was only after early heavier-than-air technology developed sufficiently to drop high explosives from altitude that a perceptible shift in humanity’s relationship with extraterrestrials occurred. If they had been content to monitor our cultural growth during the millennia leading up to that lethal innovation, its actual deployment as a killing machine convinced them that intervention was necessary. 

The first, purpose-built aircraft of its type – a spindly Bristol T.B.8, powered by a single, 60 kW radial engine to 105 km/h, carrying a dozen 4.5 kg bombs over 470 kilometers – made for a crude beginning. But its appearance in the first weeks of World War One was enough for anyone with an objectively broad perspective of human progress to extrapolate today’s ‘stealth’ bomber, armed with thermonuclear warheads, from the operational debut of its biplane forerunner, after little more than one hundred years, a mere blink of the eye in human history. 

The next, self-evident step – creation of a “United States Space Force” – was taken just last year. Given the accelerating pace of scientific advancement, another hundred years will extend human reach beyond the solar system, with proportionate improvements in fire-power. Alien intelligence might view with indifference whether or not we continue to effectively kill each other in ever more destructive wars, confined as we are to a single planet. However, the inevitable expansion of our bellicose species’ potential for the conquest of outer space cannot be welcome news for non-humans elsewhere. Quite the contrary, it can only be regarded by them as nothing less than an armed invasion. Hence, extraterrestrial interest in and even interference with Earth’s military affairs.

Inter-Planetary Hostilities in 2018

Because Military Encounters with Extraterrestrials went into production some eleven months ago, its history necessarily ends in late 2017. The inter-planetary hostilities it documents, however, are on-going, and spilled over into 2018. Accordingly, it was filled with the kind of armed forces’ engagements that characterised this continuous conflict since its inception, throughout the last one hundred and three years. 

2018’s first sighting of its kind was caught on video during the late afternoon of February 26. The footage clearly shows a pair of white, luminous spheres hovering low (circa thirty meters) over the Royal Navy base at Plymouth, England. One of them in the foreground gradually vanishes, then shortly thereafter rematerialises, as though phasing in and out of another dimension or time.² 

That same night, at 19:45 hours, on the other side of the Northern Hemisphere, a trio of United States Air Force fighter jets repeatedly circled the American town of De Soto, near the east bank of the Mississippi River, in southwestern Wisconsin, before flying off in a northerly direction. Immediately following their disappearance, blue, star-like lights were observed moving “very fast across the sky with absolutely no sound.”³ 

A few days later, two USAF fighters engaged a smaller, triangular object in apparent combat over Lincoln County, Nevada, a desert area that includes the notorious Area 51, a semi-secret US Air Force base located less than one hundred thirty kilometres from Las Vegas, and allegedly involved in reverse engineering crashed alien spacecraft. According to observer Tim Doyle, “it definitely looked as though the three crafts were interacting with each other.” He “believed the trio were involved in a plane dogfight.”⁴ 

On March 3, two USAF A-10 jets were sighted in low-level close pursuit of a “darker and smaller object” over the Indiana town of LaGrange, two hundred twenty-five kilometres east of Chicago.⁵ The Fairchild Republic A-10 Thunderbolt II carries a single, 30 mm GAU-8/A Avenger rotary cannon with 1,174 rounds, plus a couple of AIM-9 Sidewinder, air-to-air missiles. 

On the night of the 21^st, military helicopter gunships chased an unspecified number of “bright lights” over Fayetteville, North Carolina, home of the US Army’s Fort Bragg, the largest military installation in the world (by population) with more than fifty thousand active duty personnel.⁶ Some of them are veterans of the fighting for Afghanistan, where UFOs have been sighted since American involvement began in 2001. During late March, three luminous objects were video recorded in stationary position over a US Army base near Surobi.⁷ 

At 03:43, in the early morning of April 23^rd, an observer was “looking northeast to Nellis Air Force Base, which is about nine kilometres from my location [North Las Vegas, Nevada]. A singular white light appears heading in my direction,” he reported to the National UFO Reporting Center, in Davenport, Washington. “The light was as bright as Jupiter, as if I was staring at a plane with headlights turned on. Then the light dimmed and starting moving southeast; the dimmed light didn’t look like any flight-related lights I’ve seen, and it didn’t have a pattern in its blinking; it looked as if it was twinkling due to it being a heat source, or due to the atmosphere, but it was definitely not a pattern typical of airplanes. There also was no sound of any kind that I would have heard in a quiet night. A helicopter sound would have been a dead giveaway, and I also checked on my smart-phone for nearby planes to see what it was, and nothing showed up for that portion of the sky… The appearance and behaviour of this object tells me it was unknown.”⁸

Just ten days later, Nellis Air Force Base was again the location for another altogether different sighting by multiple eyewitnesses who reported seeing the military installation being surveilled by a diamond-shaped craft “with six to nine oval objects around it. The diamond was very large, and looked like it was on fire, like vapor around it.” The diamond shape and its accompanying orbs “hovered for twenty to thirty minutes. No airplanes in sky, and that is not common here.”⁹ 

During the early evening of May 8, a serviceman at Holloman Air Force Base, in New Mexico, was “driving home from work on base, and casually glanced to my right (south) and noticed two, orange-yellow lights floating and casting a lot of light on the ground between two and eleven kilometres away. I pulled over to look closer, and as I was recording with my phone, when a third appeared in a triangle formation with the other two. They did not appear to move or fall. I heard no audible noise. I know they were not flares from anything, because they were stationary, and the only thing in the direction where I was looking was open desert. Nor were they aircraft. After I observed for around five minutes, they all just disappeared within quick succession.”¹⁰ 

On the afternoon of May 29, Lucas Budel video documented a highly unusual, unidentified flying object alternately diving and climbing over High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, northwest of London. The pale, white craft streamed wisps of cloud-like vapours in its strange undulations across the sky of his home town, which is not only the present location for Headquarters Air Command, but site of a former RAF base “which used to investigate UFO sightings.”¹¹

Around 22:12, June 7, two low-flying helicopters were seen closely pursuing a brightly illuminated orange sphere over Rye, New Hampshire. Another military chopper was observed hard on the heels of a smaller, metallic object above Harford County, Maryland on June 13.¹² 

Reporting for the Mutual UFO Network, Roger Marsh told how a man and his wife “were setting up a telescope in a local park on a full moon at 11:15 p.m.” on the night of June 28, in Buckeye, Arizona. “Before the telescope was fully set up,” the husband testified, “a vertically-aligned, donut-ringed object with yellow-orange light/surface appeared below the moon, travelling from southeast to northwest at extremely high velocity and low altitude, roughly one hundred fifty to three hundred meters AGL [above ground level]. The object made absolutely no sound, but at closest approach was within one kilometre of our vantage point/location. The witness is a United States Air Force veteran and Special Operations intelligence analyst who previously held a top-secret with caveats clearance.”¹³ 

On June 29, a “cigar-like shape with no wings” was observed from Belmar, on the New Jersey coast, around 15:00, “moving north-northeast over the ocean at high altitude. A couple minutes later, two fighter jets came from the west and circled back out over ocean.”¹⁴ Another cigar-shaped object, bright and silvery, was spotted “moving across the sky from west to east,” according to one eyewitness, around 08:00, July 2, over Bennett Springs, Missouri. “Approximately fifteen minutes later, four stealth bombers flew in the same direction” from Whiteman Air Force Base, located 150 kilometres north, outside the town of Knob Noster, where the 509th Bomb Wing operates Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit stealth bombers.¹⁵ 

On July 11, several helicopters were observed from the town of Warrington, eleven kilometres north, pursuing a large exceptionally bright object hovering near the Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base Willow Grove, Pennsylvania. The UFO changed it shape from oval to triangle, before vanishing after 22:00, reappearing in the same position about four hours later.¹⁶ July 15, an eyewitness sitting in his Virginia Beach, Virginia patio, around 16:00, “saw a large, brownish, rectangular object flying nonchalantly by… for about two to three minutes”, before it “went straight off into a southeasterly direction.”¹⁷ Virginia Beach is home to both the Naval Air Station Oceana and Fleet Area Control and Surveillance Facility. 

Nuclear Blast over Thule Air Base

The premiere extraterrestrial event of not only 2018, but of the last five years, took place when a nuclear blast detonated over one of America’s most important military installations. Early warning radar at Greenland’s Thule Air Base detected an in-coming meteor of substantial size, but commanders there were not afforded even enough time to sound a general alarm, given the object’s Mach 74 rate of descent. That’s 24.4 kilometres per second, or 86,905-kph. It exploded with 2.1 kilotons of force, equal to 2,100 tons of TNT, sufficient to have obliterated the Thule Air Base with a direct hit or at an altitude lower than the 43.3-kilometre air burst of July 25, just five minutes before midnight. It was the largest since a 400-kiloton superbolide blew up over Chelyabinsk, in 2013. 

While that Russian event seems to have been an entirely natural affair, the same could not be said for last year’s Greenland incident.Thule Air Base is the United States Air Force’s northernmost base, located 1,207 km north of the Arctic Circle and 1,524 km from the North Pole. It is home to the 21st Space Wing’s global network of sensors providing missile warning, space surveillance and space control to North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and Air Force Space Command. The base hosts the 12th Space Warning Squadron, which operates a Ballistic Missile Early Warning System, designed to detect and track ICBMs launched against North America. 

Thule is also host to Detachment 1 of the 23rd Space Operations Squadron, part of the 50th Space Wing’s global satellite control network. As such, it is the ideal target for a preemptive strike aimed at crippling America’s nuclear-armed missile capabilities, or alternatively, a cautionary message. “Was it a UFO-directed meteor strike fired as warning shot across the bows of the USAF base,” asked Miami Herald reporter, John Bennett, “urging humans to disarm their nuclear weapons?” 

If so, it would not have been the first time such a dramatic exhortation arrived on Earth, as documented in Military Encounters with Extraterrestrials. US Air Force reaction itself lends some credibility to such a conclusion. One might imagine that a thermonuclear blast narrowly missing one of the foremost military installations in the world would have merited abundant cause for international publicity. Yet, commanders at the Thule Air Base kept classified the story until it was first reported by Australian news media, five days later. Even then, and since, the event has received scant attention. One wonders why? “An answer may lie in another question,” Bennett writes: “Were there any reported UFO sightings before, after or in any conjunction with the recent Greenland event?” 

That question is more easily answered by numerous, visual encounters documented in the United States alone on July 25. Simultaneous, widely separated sightings occurred at 01:00 in Snohomish, Washington, where a triangular UFO with three lights at its corners was spotted, and, 2,630 kilometres away, two unusual lights, one of them brightly blinking, hovered over Isle, Minnesota. A silvery disk trailing a “long flame, travelling from west to southeast” over Tarzana, California was observed at 05:05.

Multiple witnesses in different areas of Florida’s St. George Island told how, at 21:30, “a circular, red object appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, and held its position for approximately twenty to thirty seconds, then faded out of sight completely. It was an opaque red, with an orangeish halo effect… About ten minutes later, two separate ones appeared with one about fifteen to twenty degrees off the horizon… One red light appeared, while the other two appeared in approximately the same area and degree of the first sighting. But what made this even more fascinating was that this last one actually started with one red light, then added another red light, and then another. For a total of three red lights seeming to be on one object, slightly angled. And then all five lights in the sky vanished.” Half an hour later, “several strange yellow orbs hovered over the Puget Sound,” near Gig Harbor, Washington.¹⁸ 

As some ten persons attending an August 14 party at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina watched half a dozen jets flying overhead, they noticed a circular, metallic object – “smooth, with no other design” – moving in the opposite direction from the fighters. As one of them turned toward the UFO, it flew “away at an incredible speed”¹⁹ The state’s Air National Guard is headquartered one hundred airline-miles to the west, in Columbia. 

A father and his son photographing a drill site in Perrysville, Ohio, encountered an unusual UFO on September 3. “It looked just like a sting ray, and was all black. My dad is a private pilot and former Army, and I am retired from the Marine Corps, and we both have never seen a delta-shaped craft like this. We also did not hear a jet engine or anything to indicate a craft was nearby. My dad has reached out to other pilots to help identify, without any help.”²⁰ Flying slowly at five hundred feet altitude or less, the triangular object ran front-to-back down its centre line with a slender, pointed fuselage. A pair of bulbous features protruded from the wing’s trailing edge, surmounted by two, vertical struts, the right one bent about fifteen degrees inward. The object “was heading towards the Mansfield Lahm Air National Guard Base, in the nearby city of Mansfield, where the 179th Airlift Wing (179 AW) unit is stationed.”²¹ 

September 19, at 06:19, a woman “went to the kitchen, and from my patio doors saw two, pulsating, strobe-like lights in the eastern sky. The lights flashed red and white, and were above the tree line. The lights came closer, growing in size, and hovered side by side. The one on the left moved away from the other light, and the lights of both objects pulsed faster and brighter. Then the light on the right went to the East, and [I] watched until it was out of sight. The other light went south, and was observed to move fast across the sky until it was out of sight. Neither one diverted from its path; in other words, they moved straight in a path.” The lights “were too large and too bright to be airplane lights, and moved much faster.”²² The sighting took place at the Illinois town of Belleville, home of Scott Air Force Base, one of America’s most important military installations, where a Unified Combatant Command coordinates transportation for all US services. 

Several persons in Newberry, Arkansas witnessed “a large metallic cylinder” travelling at sixty meters altitude, between 130 and 190 kmh, on September 23. About ten minutes after the UFO disappeared, seven fighter jets flew in its direction in two-to-three-minute intervals.²³ Newberry is located between Little Rock Air Force Base to the south, the Ebbing Air National Guard Base, 188^th Wing, in the west, and Blytheville Air Force Base, to the north. 

At 22:05, October 2, a crewman on the flight deck of USS Tripoli (LHA-7) observed a UFO while his 45,693-ton amphibious assault ship was berthed at the Pascagoula, Mississippi shipyard. The object “clearly was in the shape of a triangle with two, distinct, red lights at the bottom… It was flying too fast, as if it were breaking the sound barrier, without sound… As it got closer, you could clearly see the underbody of the craft. It had white lines going across the bottom connected to the red lights that I had seen.”²⁴ The USS Tripoli specialises in electronic warfare at sea. 

When a formation of “military helicopters chasing an unidentified flying object” passed over Surrey Park, Phoenix, Arizona, lower than one hundred fifty meters, “windows shook, doors rattled,” during the early morning hours of November 13. “Felt like an earthquake.”²⁵ Headquartered in Phoenix, the Arizona Air National Guard is equipped with Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters. 

A pair of RAF Typhoon interceptors “were scrambled in response to unidentified aircraft approaching the United Kingdom… the fighter jets took off from Losimos on Monday [December 10] under a quick response alert mission that was undertaken as a precautionary measure to an unknown aircraft or aircraft [plural] approaching UK airspace. No intercept took place, and the jets later returned to base in Moray, northeastern Scotland.” The Eurofighter Typhoon is a twin-engine, canard–delta wing, multi-role fighter, with a maximum speed of Mach 2, or 2,495 km/h, at a service ceiling of 19,812 meters. Despite these impressive performance statistics, the interceptors were apparently out-run by the “unknown aircraft or aircraft.”²⁶ 

UFO Delays Rocket Launch: Another Cover-up

On December 19, the CBS Sacramento website headlined, “Mysterious Light Appears In The Sky After Rocket Launch Canceled At Vandenberg Air Force Base.” The article refers to an incident seven days earlier when “the scheduled 5:44 p.m. launch of the Delta IV Heavy Rocket in Southern California was scrubbed, or cancelled, leaving many wondering what was in the sky. A representative from Vandenberg Air Force Base had no information about the sight in the sky. Travis Air Force Base also did not have information on the light, but the National Weather Service believed it may have been a meteor. There has not been an official confirmation of what caused the light, but multiple National Weather Service accounts have speculated that it was from a meteor or meteorite. The National Weather Service Bay Area is calling this a Noctilucent cloud, a cloud that can be formed from a meteor or space debris entering the upper atmosphere.”²⁷ 

These academic presumptions are contradicted, however, by numerous photographs and videos of the phenomenon which defined a perfect circle in the evening sky, unlike meteors or falling space junk which trace more or less straight lines in their descent.²⁸ Was the appearance of this uniquely “Mysterious Light” and scrubbing the Vandenberg lift-off entirely coincidental? What are the odds for that? 

Given numerous instances over the decades of missile launches aborted and even destroyed by UFOs, the Delta IV Heavy Rocket launch appears to have been cancelled by something more significant than a “Noctilucent cloud.”

Frank Joseph’s Military Encounters with Extraterrestrials is the first, comprehensive military history of armed confrontations between humans and extraterrestrials. It can be ordered from all good bookstores and online sellers.

[alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn Special Issue Vol 13 No 1.[/alert]

[alert type=”success” dismiss=”no”]If you appreciate this article, please consider subscribing to help maintain this website.[/alert]

Footnotes

1. Ken Oz, www.altheadlines.com/syria-large-ufo-sighting-8-28-13-13250773
2. www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/2018/03/ufo-naval-base-plymouth-uk-february-2018.html
3. www.nuforc.org/webreports/ndxe201802.html
4. www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/2018/03/us-fighter-jets-ufo-apparently-dogfight-lincoln-county-nevada.html
5. www.nuforc.org/webreports/ndxe201803.html
6. www.nuforc.org/webreports/ndxe201802.html
7. www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/2018/03/strange-lights-filmed-over-afghanistan.html
8. www.nuforc.org/webreports/ndxe201804.html 
9. www.nuforc.org/webreports/ndxe201805.html 
10. www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/2018/05/amazing-triangle-ufo-sighting-over-holloman-air-force-base-new-mexico-8-may-2018.html
11. Shocking moment ‘UFO’ spotted hovering near High Wycombe RAF base, www.youtube.com/watch?v=Frk1HzYRHJA 
12. UFO Seen in Maryland, www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsvkpGNqb9I
13. www.mufon.com/ufo-news, Case 93454
14. www.nuforc.org/webreports/142/S142227.html
15. www.nuforc.org/webreports/142/S142049.html 
16. www.nuforc.org/webreports/ndxp180713.html
17. www.nuforc.org/webreports/ndxe201807.html
18. www.nuforc.org/webreports/ndxe201807.html
19. www.nuforc.org/webreports/ndxe201808.html
20. www.ufostalker.com/sighting/95977
21. www.mysteriousuniverse.org/2018/10/triangular-ufo-spotted-near-site-of-famous-military-ufo-chase-in-ohio 
22. www.nuforc.org/webreports/ndxe201809.html
23. www.nuforc.org/webreports/ndxe201809.html
24. www.nuforc.org/webreports/143/S143350.html
25. www.youtube.com/watch?v=-w2rYbT-gV0
26. Jets Scrambled to Intercept “Unknown Craft” Over UK, www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCOps9VwIfE
27. sacramento.cbslocal.com/2018/12/19/did-you-see-the-bright-light-in-the-sky
28. Mysterious Cloud Trail Over California Was A Meteor Trail, www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiNPYwtUYMo

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
For our reproduction notice, click here.

From New Dawn Special Issue Vol 14 No 1 (Jan 2020)

The first nuclear weapons were successfully tested in the 1940s and have been designed with increasing sophistication and lethality ever since. They allow great powers to dominate smaller ones. They also risk the lives of everyone on the planet as even a ‘small’ nuclear exchange by accident or war could trigger a catastrophic, crop-killing nuclear winter. Yet, since the 1940s, military personnel and investigators have raised concerns in secret about unidentified flying objects (UFOs) in or around sensitive nuclear weapons installations. 

Robert Hastings is a world-renowned expert on the subject, having written the book UFOs & Nukes: Extraordinary Encounters at Nuclear Weapons Sites, and produced the documentary UFOs and Nukes: The Secret Link Revealed. We asked for his thoughts on this important topic. 

TIM COLES (TC): Tell us a bit about your background and how you became interested in UFOs and nukes.

ROBERT HASTINGS (RH): My interest in the topic of UFO activity at nuclear weapons sites began in March 1967, when I was a teenager living in Montana. Although I was never in the military myself, my father, Senior Master Sergeant Robert E. Hastings, was stationed at Malmstrom Air Force Base, where 200 nuclear missiles were deployed in the surrounding countryside. After witnessing a radar tracking of five unknown aerial craft at the base air traffic control tower, where I worked as a janitor three nights a week after high school, I excitedly told my dad about the incident. He subsequently made inquiries at his workplace – the main radar facility on base – and was told that five UFOs had indeed been tracked by multiple radars that night. Moreover, he was told, they had been manoeuvring near nuclear missile sites southeast of Malmstrom. When my dad later conveyed all of that to me, I was hooked! UFOs are real?! They’re flying around our ICBMs?! Wow! 

Years later, in 1973, I read a magazine article by Dr J. Allen Hynek – the Air Force’s civilian, scientific UFO consultant – in which he openly discussed UFO incursions at nuclear missile sites at another base, Minot, in North Dakota. At that point, I knew that the situation at Malmstrom had definitely been real and quite serious. Shortly thereafter, at first to satisfy my curiosity, I began seeking out and interviewing Air Force veterans to learn all I could about UFOs’ apparent interest in nukes. Over time – 46 years and counting – more than 160 of those individuals have told me about their personal involvement in such incidents.

TC: Why do you think that UFOs at nuclear weapons sites, as opposed to say non-nuclear military installations, are so important?

RH: Nuclear weapons have fundamentally changed the nature of warfare, given their nearly unbelievable destructive power and ability to radioactively poison the environment on a planetary scale. As we all know, during the Cold War the US and the USSR effectively held humanity hostage with their unending, nuclear sabre-rattling. The Cuban Missile Crisis, in 1962, demonstrated just how fragile our collective security really was, and how quickly a potentially civilisation-ending conflict might erupt. Apparently, someone else – an outside third party possessing revolutionary aerial craft – became interested in this existential situation and, at some point, began intervening in a limited, covert manner. Dozens of US Air Force veterans – most of whom were initially interviewed by me – have now openly discussed UFOs tampering with American ICBMs, rendering them temporarily inoperable. Documents smuggled out of Russia, in 1993, confirm that similar incidents occurred in the Soviet Union in the 1980s. 

So, for whatever reason, the outside third party – which I believe to be aliens from another world – surreptitiously made their presence known to the superpowers’ military leaders during a dangerous period in history, perhaps as a heavy hint or a warning: “Hey, humans! Nukes pose an unprecedented threat to your species and your planet. Get rid of them!” But I am, of course, speculating. Regardless, the now well-documented UFO incidents at our ICBM sites are longstanding, widespread and, I am told by my sources, ongoing.

TC: You say that the UFOs are intelligently operated, but is it possible that they are unexplained terrestrial phenomena such as electromagnetic lights or some kind of as-yet undiscovered lifeform living at high altitudes?

RH: If one reviews the eyewitness reports relating to the nuclear missile cases, it is immediately apparent that they involved unknown aerial craft of some kind. Go to www.ufohastings.com/documents and read the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) log entries relating to the incidents at Malmstrom AFB in November 1975. For example, “The [Launch Control Facility] at Harlowton, Montana, observed an object which emitted a light which illuminated the site driveway.” Or, “[Missile Site] L-1 reports that the object to their northeast seems to be issuing a black object from it, tubular in shape.” Or, “[Malmstrom Command Post] reports UFO southeast of Lewistown, orange white disc object.” Or, “L-5 reported object increased in speed – high velocity, raised in altitude and now cannot tell the object from stars.” And then there is this entry, “From four different points: Observed objects and fighters; when fighters arrived in the area, the lights went out; when fighters departed, the lights came back on.” In other words, as security personnel at four different locations watched, the UFOs played cat-and-mouse with two F-106 jet fighters that had been launched to chase them, extinguishing their illumination as the aircraft approached their position and re-illuminating themselves after the fighters returned to base.

And I might add, the only reason jets were scrambled is because the UFOs were tracked on the base’s radar, just as any non-Stealth aircraft would be. This is only one of dozens of declassified documents that summarise similar incidents at other bases’ missile sites, or at nuclear weapons storage facilities. So, no, the UFOs themselves are not some undiscovered life form; the objects look like machines, act like machines, and are undoubtedly piloted or remotely controlled by someone who, in this instance, reacted to the attempted intercept of them by US Air Force fighters by taking evasive actions. 

Are the craft terrestrial in origin? The first known UFO sightings at a nuclear facility occurred in January 1945, seven months before the atomic bombings in Japan. Declassified US Army documents confirm three separate incursions of unknown aircraft, which were tracked on radar, that hovered over the plutonium production plant known as the Hanford Site, in Washington State. US Navy fighters based nearby actually chased the objects. In 2009, I interviewed one of the pilots, Bud Clem, who told me that each UFO looked like “a bright ball of fire… so bright that you could hardly look directly at it.” The unidentified aerial craft easily outran the propeller-driven F6F Hellcat fighters sent up to pursue them. 

Now, is there any credible evidence that any country on Earth was flying such an aircraft in 1945? No, there isn’t. Despite the exotic claims one sees on the internet, there is no verifiable information confirming that the Nazis manufactured a functional flying saucer. Nevertheless, someone was operating one – or, at least, a self-illuminated flying sphere – at the Hanford plant before the end of the war. 

I again maintain that the UFOs seen at nuclear sites – from 1945 to the present day – are technologically superior vehicles being operated by some third party. According to the radar data, they can hover, perform tremendous accelerations, make instantaneous right-angle turns, and fly thousands of miles per hour. There might possibly be some secret, recently developed, ultra-sophisticated US aerial craft hidden at Area 51 capable of doing some or all of those things, but there sure as hell wasn’t any such airplane flying during World War II, or above the ICBM sites in Montana in the 1960s and ‘70s. And remember, we now know that the Soviets were being subjected to UFO incursions at their missile sites as well, some involving systems disruptions. We can’t point the finger at the Russians when attempting to explain the events at Malmstrom. No, those unidentified aerial craft were clearly not being operated by any government on Earth. So who does that leave us? 

TC: What’s really impressive about your book UFOs & Nukes is your reliance on primary documentation: first-hand eyewitness accounts, military documents, FBI memos, and so on. But if I were in government counterintelligence, I would try to neutralise the anti-nuclear weapons movement by having people believe that some outside force is looking after us by sabotaging nukes. How do you check that military and other documents are not just disinformation?

RH: Respectfully, you misunderstand the situation. No military or intelligence group, hidden or not, was actively promoting the “UFOs are Here to Save Us” narrative by disseminating data that would further your hypothetical disinformation ploy. On the contrary, the documents confirming UFO activity at nuclear weapons sites were jealously guarded and only forcibly released to researchers via the Freedom of Information Act. Sometimes, decades passed before they became available to the public. Similarly, all of my US military witnesses only went public with their accounts after I implored them to do so. Like me, they believe that Americans – and the rest of humanity – deserve to know the truth about the UFO reality and their link to nuclear weapons. 

The suggestion that the US government has been releasing bogus information to further a false history of events to influence public opinion in some manner is simply untenable. Actually, over time, the US Air Force has been doing the exact opposite, steadfastly claiming that UFOs don’t exist, even though they are secretly aware of, and are extremely concerned about, the nuclear cases. The last incident that I’ve heard about occurred at a Malmstrom-operated missile site in January 2018, so the situation is still active. 

Importantly, at the present time, we have no assurance that the disruptive activity at ICBM sites – UFOs tampering with our missiles – necessarily indicates that whomever is operating the craft is “looking after us,” as you put it. Other scenarios can be advanced to explain what has been reported by the veterans whom I’ve interviewed. For example, it’s entirely possible that the UFO beings have some nefarious plan for humans, even an invasion of Earth, and are investigating whether they can disarm us before they strike. I don’t think that’s even remotely true, but we can’t rule it out at the moment given the limited evidence in our possession.

TC: Can you tell us more about the 160 eyewitnesses: their rank, how you approached them or vice versa, and how the famous Press Club conference in 2010 was arranged?

RH: My sources are mostly US Air Force veterans, although a handful were in the Army or Navy, and range from low-level airmen to colonels. Usually, they worked with or guarded nuclear weapons, but some were radar operators, counterintelligence personnel, or pilots. In every case, they directly witnessed or were involved in follow-up activities related to UFO incursions at ICBM sites, missile warhead or bomb storage facilities, nuclear materials production sites or weapons test areas. 

In the 1970s and 80s, I asked every pertinent military veteran I encountered if they had any information they would be willing to share. From the mid-1990s onward, I’ve used the internet to locate potential witnesses who are members of Air Force alumni groups, who can be contacted via email. In other cases, the veterans had attended my lectures and approached me afterward or read one of my articles or my book, and subsequently contacted me. Not surprisingly, most of the individuals whom I randomly approached over the years had no knowledge of UFO incidents at the bases where they worked. However, slowly but surely, I amassed a body of testimony from scores of veterans who knew about such incidents, occurring from the 1950s onward. I always secured their military history record, called a DD214, before interviewing them, to confirm that they had indeed been missile officers or missile guards, and so on. In other words, all of my sources are vetted.

Regarding the 2010 press conference, one of the veterans, former Minuteman missile launch officer Captain Bob Salas – whose ten missiles were shut down by a UFO at Malmstrom AFB in 1967 – and I decided to try to get the media’s attention by co-hosting the event. CNN streamed it live and a number of major US news organisations covered it as well, as did several in foreign countries. I think we succeeded in our efforts to get some publicity for the UFO-nukes topic. But, as is the case with most news stories, it faded quickly and had no lasting impact on public perceptions, at least to any significant degree.

TC: What is the most extraordinary case discussed in your book?

RH: Another former Air Force missile launch officer, Captain David Schuur, revealed his involvement in an ICBM-activation incident at Minot AFB, North Dakota, in 1967. His security personnel reported seeing a bright aerial object moving from missile to missile, among the ten that he controlled. Meanwhile, down in the underground launch capsule, Schuur was horrified to see that the ICBMs began going into launch mode, one by one, just as the UFO hovered over a given missile. He had to flip an “Inhibit Switch” to deactivate the countdown in each one. This type of incident was also reported by another former launch officer, Captain Larry Manross, who witnessed an identical event at Minot on a different occasion. Moreover, one of the Soviet UFO-related documents smuggled out of Russia by investigative reporter George Knapp, in 1993, confirms such an incident occurring at a missile base in Soviet Ukraine in October 1982. 

Now, I don’t think that those aboard the UFOs were trying to start World War III by launching the superpowers’ ICBMs; more likely they were activating the missiles to see how the systems worked – assuming that they had the ability to monitor them remotely – probably knowing that the launch officers could disrupt the countdowns if they needed to do so in an emergency situation. Or perhaps the entities merely wished to scare the hell out of the military in both countries, in effect sending the message that they could control the ICBMs if they so chose. But I obviously don’t know the reason for the missile activations and am of course speculating.

TC: Please tell us about your film UFOs and Nukes: The Secret Link Revealed. How did it come about and what is the strongest evidence in the film?

RH: A wealthy benefactor provided the funding for the film. Between 2008 and 2015, I had declined offers to participate in 18 different UFO programs on American, British, Canadian and French television because I would have had no control over how my material was presented. When broadcast, I saw that most of those shows were factually inaccurate and sensationalised, just as I predicted. I didn’t want to lend my work to a dumbed-down presentation on UFOs meant to entertain the public. When I mentioned all of this to my benefactor, he generously gave me the money to make my own film. I’m quite happy with the result; it’s available at Vimeo.com.

As far as the most important case referenced in the film, I would say that the Big Sur Incident is unmatched for its shocking nature and historic significance. Two former US Air Force officers, Drs. Bob Jacobs and Florenz Mansmann, say that a telescopic motion picture camera inadvertently caught a UFO on film during a missile test launch at Vandenberg AFB, California, in 1964. Analysis of the film confirmed that a domed, disc-shaped craft manoeuvred near the missile’s dummy nuclear warhead in flight and then shot it down with weaponised beams of light! All of this was clearly visible when the film was analysed frame-by-frame with a magnifier. They say that the amazing motion picture was quickly confiscated by the CIA. Debunkers have unsuccessfully attempted to discredit the case by misstating the facts, but the available evidence substantiates that the event actually took place. Apparently, the entities operating the UFOs can not only tamper with the ICBMs in their underground silos but can also disrupt them in mid-flight. This is an incredible revelation!

TC: Have you been threatened or intimidated for the work that you’re doing? If so, what forms have they taken and who do you think is responsible?

RH: Yes, someone has been trying to intimidate me via my telephone for years. Often, when speaking with a military veteran about his particular UFO incident, shortly after I hang up I get a second, mysterious call where the person says nothing but breathes heavily into the phone before hanging up. I gather that they – whoever “they” are – want me to know they are keeping an eye on me and know to whom I am talking. This kind of harassment has happened dozens of times and has been going on since 1982. I suspect that the CIA is responsible but can’t prove that. Furthermore, emails between a given veteran and myself often disappear in cyberspace. We later discover, via follow-up phone calls, that our correspondence to each other never arrived. This happens routinely, always involving persons who witnessed UFO activity at nuclear weapons sites and is clearly suspicious. I knew that my activities would incur the displeasure of one or more US government agencies so none of this was unexpected. It’s so frequent that I’m used to it and not bothered by it these days. I just keep moving forward.

TC: What projects are you working on at the moment?

RH: I suspect that my answer will make some persons reading this very uneasy. The fact is, in addition to my research activities and public speaking relating to the UFO-Nukes connection, I have had, over the past 31 years, a series of unsettling-to-terrifying encounters with what I have come to believe are non-human entities. In other words, I am an experiencer or, stated more dramatically, an alien abductee. I wish this were not the case and deeply regret that this “thing” has entered my life. Whether it is a consequence of my investigations or some other factor is unknown, but I am convinced that these encounters are physical in nature and not merely misinterpreted prosaic events, or due to an overactive imagination, or the result of sleep paralysis – all theories advanced by the sceptics to explain away the abduction phenomenon. 

Moreover, seven of the 160-plus veterans whom I’ve interviewed have revealed their own face-to-face alien encounters to me. Yes, I understand that all of this is rather bizarre and hard to believe, nevertheless it is unfortunately quite real. After decades of secrecy I have now “come out” about my secret life in a new book, Confession: Our Hidden Alien Encounters Revealed, co-written with Dr Bob Jacobs who witnessed the Big Sur UFO incident mentioned earlier. In the early 1980s, he began having entity encounters as well. When I learned this fact in 2012, we began updating each other after our independent visitation/abduction experiences, which are ongoing. 

Finally, in early 2019, Jacobs and I decided to go public regarding all of this, even though we knew that our credibility would be negatively impacted and that some people – who had previously been interested in, and believed, our revelations regarding UFO incursions at nuclear weapons sites – would now recoil in sceptical disbelief at our new revelations. But it is what it is, and these strange, frightening experiences are continuing and obviously beyond our control. Openly talking about them, however belatedly, is no different than our previous efforts to publicly divulge the hidden nuclear weapons-related cases. Although not yet recognised as valid by most scientists and much of the public, the alien abduction phenomenon is real, global, and tremendously important. That these non-human entities are somehow part of humankind’s overall future seems clear to experiencers; one day it will undoubtedly be obvious to everyone.

[alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn Special Issue Vol 14 No 1.[/alert]

[alert type=”success” dismiss=”no”]If you appreciate this article, please consider subscribing to help maintain this website.[/alert]

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
For our reproduction notice, click here.