Strange Cases of Missing Time

This event occurred to me at least twelve years ago, and I still don’t know what happened.

Driving home from a Friday night shift at the newspaper, my car’s cruise control set on 55 mph, I drove by a road sign I’ve driven by hundreds of times. It reads, “Orrick: 5 Miles.” Just as I went by, the Rolling Stones “Gimme Shelter” came on the radio.

Perfect. I lived in Orrick, Missouri, at the time, and “Gimme Shelter” was not only my favorite Rolling Stones tune, it was also four minutes, thirty-seven seconds long, which would last me all the way home.

Then my drive fell out of reality.

A pull on the car engine snapped me out of the road hypnosis that had overtaken me. It took me a few seconds to realize that pull was the cruise control trying to keep the speed steady up a hill. The trouble was there were no hills between that road sign and my turnoff. Looking out the window didn’t help; a thick fog had enveloped the car and I could barely see the dotted line on the road. I slowed the car and drove up two more hills before I saw a light piercing through the fog.

Turning onto a gravel road toward the light, I found myself in the parking lot of a Jehovah’s Witness church and knew where I was – five miles on the other side of my turnoff. As I sat in the parking lot, my car in park, trying to figure out how I missed the exit, I heard something I couldn’t believe. “Gimme Shelter” still played on the radio. It continued to play for another minute and a half.

After I calmed a bit, I put the car in gear, pulled back onto the highway and went home. The fog quickly dissipated. I’d driven ten miles in three minutes at 55 mph. That wasn’t possible. What happened to me?

Cases of missing time and distance are as common as they are confusing. The Internet is littered with tales of travelers entering a fog only to discover they’re suddenly 300 miles away from home, or they’ve gone nowhere, but it’s inexplicably hours later. Explanations range from time slips, to dimensional slips, to alien abduction. Whatever the case, Brandon White of Maryville, Missouri, has experienced missing time and distance; more than once. “The first time I was about ten and I was walking out in the front yard,” White said. It was just after lunch.

As White went toward a thick ring of pine trees that surrounded his family’s farmhouse, he saw something floating on the other side of the tree line. “It was pale, sort of translucent,” he said. “It was passing between our house and the neighbor’s house. I thought it was a blimp.”

His afternoon suddenly disappeared. “The next thing I remember was coming in for dinner; 5 or 5:30,” he said. “I didn’t think about it at the time. As a kid, time was nothing.”

But five hours of his life were just gone.

In his teens, his life got stranger. “At 13 or 14 I stopped sleeping. I was deathly afraid of sleep,” he said. “I would fall to sleep, get into an REM sleep, and start screaming. I would wake up in strange places. In the yard, on the porch, upside down hanging from my bunk bed.” White said he doesn’t remember when he’s been able to catch more than four hours of sleep a night. “I had very vivid nightmares,” he said. Those nightmares often included a bird. “A big black crow. It would flap over my face, trying to take my breath.”

Later in his teens when White worked at Long John Silver’s in a town 38 miles away, he experienced more missing time. “I was riding my motorcycle. I remember that night very specifically. I worked a double shift,” he said. “Before I left town, I filled up my (gas) tank.” As he pulled onto a gravel road toward his parent’s house, he saw an orange ball hanging low in the sky. “I stopped and thought, ‘the moon’s a weird color,’” he said. “Then I saw it was not the moon. The moon doesn’t block the landscape.” As he got closer, he saw this orange ball was thirty to forty feet in diameter, and hovered five or six feet off the ground.

He got off the motorcycle three hours simply disappeared. “It’s the last thing I remember,” he said. “It was 7:35 p.m. At 10:30 p.m. I pulled into Dad’s driveway and something zoomed over me and disappeared into a valley.”

He stopped the bike and got off, leaving it running as he dashed to a fence to look for the light. It had gone. When he returned to his motorcycle, it started to sputter and the engine died. It was out of gasoline. “I filled it up, drove 38 miles, and it died,” White said.

White lost three hours of time and a tank of gasoline in what should have been a 40-minute motorcycle ride. Was the light responsible?

Years later, when White worked in nearby St. Joseph, Missouri, he stopped at a gas station around 1 a.m. to buy coffee and a candy bar to help keep him awake for the 45-minute drive home. He didn’t know something strange awaited him. “I got on the highway, next thing I knew there was a thick fog,” he said. “I didn’t know where I was. I was on this nameless dirt road.” And he was moving fast.

The narrow road, sloped on each side and covered by a canopy of trees, seemed like a tunnel. He slowed and tried to figure out where he was. “I found a field where I could turn around,” White said. “The fog was so thick I had to open my door to see the side of the road. I had no idea where I was. I was really, really fuzzy and disorientated. I know I was upset about something, but I don’t know why.”

Lights eventually bit through the fog and White pulled into the parking lot of a convenience store near the highway, but things were less than convenient. The store sat at the end of an exit that consisted of two difficult turns. White said he shouldn’t have made those turns. “I would have had to, at 70 mph, gone through those 90-degree turns while I was unconscious,” he said.

When he woke, “I was pretty fuzzy headed. It was like I’d been drugged.”

Although White concedes for the skeptic it’s within the realm of possibility he could have fallen asleep at the wheel and gotten lost in the fogbank, he was miles from where he should have been, and would have had to be amazingly lucky. “I don’t know how I could have made those turns,” he said. “I lost distance and time. I don’t have the foggiest idea how I got there.”

 TAGS: 

dimensional travel, Missing Time, time slips, time travel, UFOs

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Japan’s Defense Minister Denies Alien Invasion, Ignores UFOs

During a budget meeting in Japan’s parliament, Defense Minister Gen Nakatani was asked a question about aliens invading his country and gave this answer:

When the Air Self Defense Force detects indications of an unidentified flying object that could violate our country’s airspace, it scrambles fighter jets if necessary and makes visual observation. They sometimes find birds or flying objects other than aircraft but I don’t know of a case of finding an unidentified flying object believed to have come over from anywhere other than Earth.

Really? Perhaps some of the people of Japan who have been seeing and recording UFOs over the past few years need to give Defense Minister Nakatani a call.

On January 23, 2014, a fleet of UFOs shaped like glowing orbs was observed over Naha, a city on the island of Okinawa. Numerous reports were made by eyewitnesses who said the maneuvers by the group of UFOs lasted for 15 minutes before they flew off.

Japan has many active volcanoes which attract UFOs and, sure enough, two UFOs were spotted two days after the deadly eruption of Mt. Ontake on September 27, 2014. They reportedly came out of the volcano and disappeared into the clouds.

UFOs over Mt. Ontake

Japan has a number of nuclear power plants which are also known to be visited by UFOs. So it’s no surprise that UFOs have been seen numerous times over the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant after the meltdown in 2011. This one was observed in April 2011.

UFO over Fukushima nuclear plant after meltdown

Going back a few years, there’s the famous incident involving a Japan Air Lines Boeing 747 cargo plane traveling from Paris to Tokyo on November 17, 1986, with a load of Beaujolais wine. While flying over Alaska, the crew witnessed two UFOs whose thrusters lit up the cabin and whose heat was felt by the captain. They left quickly but a third, larger UFO showed up and the crew requested to change course, which it did. No explanation was ever given but the crew stuck by their story.

Where was the Air Self Defense Force on these occasions? Haven’t they heard the comments about UFOs from President Obama and John Podesta? Defense Minister Nakatani needs to stop denying and answer a few more questions.

 TAGS: Air Force, Air Self Defense Force, alien, aliens, Fukushima, Japan, Mt. Ontake, ufo, UFOs, volcano

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Liftoff! Vintage Photo Shows UFO Taking Off at High Speed

“Every picture tells a story”, as the old saying goes (and yes, as Rod Stewart sang in 1971). This is especially the case when it comes to alleged photographs of unidentified flying objects, where more often than not, the pictures leave much to be desired.

However, in some cases, despite a lack of clear details of the purported craft in question, visual elements in some UFO photos still may help researchers by providing clues about the behavior of the objects they claim to document. Such was the case with a particularly unusual photo shared with me recently, taken on September 23, 1967, which appeared in one of the classic Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO) Bulletin, provided to members of the group for a number of years by the husband-wife team of Jim and Coral Lorenzen.

The photograph came to my attention under rather unusual circumstances. I had been reviewing a number of the old APRO Bulletins, which have been made available online by the folks at OpenMinds here, having been obtained with the private collection of UFO researcher Lt. Colonel (USAF Ret.) Wendelle C. Stevens. Having shared them with a colleague, he recalled having seen “one image in a bulletin that I always thought the neatest and most thought provoking UFO picture I had ever seen (and still do).” Upon receiving the OpenMinds link to the old Bulletins, my friend had recalled the photo from a number of years back, but was unable to recall the date of the Bulletin in which it appeared.

“So, I just randomly hit on one bulletin from the list at Openminds,” he wrote to me quickly afterward in an email. “Guess what? The one I selected and opened in PDF looked familiar. Damn if it wasn’t the EXACT bulletin!!!” 

Quite a synchronicity, indeed. I was thrilled that my own honest dispatch of a quick link via email helped my friend recover a long-lost UFO photo of certain interest, but became even more fascinated at the prospect of being able to see if for myself. Scrolling through the short few pages of the newsletter, which dated from March/April 1973, I was able to locate the image quickly, which depicted the alleged “liftoff” of an object at high-speed, as it shot into the skies above Sedona, Arizona, in September 1967.

As mentioned previously of even the “best” UFO photos to have appeared over the years, this one certainly leaves quite a bit to the imagination. However, the analysis of the photograph, described in detail within the APRO Bulletin’s accompanying article, is what makes it interesting.

First, a bit of background. Mr. C. Dwight Ghormley, a retired schoolteacher from Texas, had been visiting his sister in Flagstaff, Arizona, and decided to drive down to Sedona. Just a mile outside Sedona, Ghormley observed a large, silvery object which he had believed was a commercial carrier tank, a little less than a mile from the road. The location of the object seemed inaccessible, and Ghormley, having his Kodak Holiday camera handy, decided to stop and photograph the “tank”. Just as the shutter snapped, he looked back to see that the object was gone, and only a cloud of smoke or dust remained where it had been.

Ghormley nearly forgot the entire incident, having thought he may have been “seeing things”, and thought little of the strange object until some time later, when he had the film developed. The photograph he took seemingly captured the object as it took off into the sky, leaving a long “track” indicating its directional path.

The APRO had certainly been impressed with Mr. Ghormley, whose story indicated he had maintained no interest in the subject of UFOs prior to the experience. However, the photo itself had been heralded by the Lorenzens at the time as “one of the big breakthroughs in UFO research.”

An analysis of the photo was carried out by Dr. James A. Harder, an expert in photography and APRO’s consultant in Civil Engineering at the time (Harder would also go on to become involved in APRO’s investigations of the 1973 Pascagoula abduction incident, involving coworkers Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker, as well as the 1975 Travis Walton abduction case). Of the “Sedona UFO Track” photo, Harder noted that, “From the standpoint of ‘proving’ the existence of UFOs [the photo] might be considered a flop, insofar as no details are seen — there is only what appears to be a sequence of spots. But from the standpoint of understanding more about UFOs it may be one of the most valuable photographs ever taken. For from it, and the data provided by the camera it was taken with, we can infer speeds, accelerations, and find even greater puzzles than we dreamed of a few short years ago.”

Without getting too heavily into the minutiae of Harder’s analysis here (more of whichcan be read in the bulletin), careful calculations based on the shutter speed and focal length of the Kodak camera Mr. Ghormley had used to capture the image led Harder to the following determinations: “At a distance of 4,000 feet from the camera, this represents a transverse distance of 700 feet traversed in approximately 29 ms. The calculated speed is thus on the order of 24,000 feet per second, or 16,000 miles per hour.”

Harder further noted that the estimated speeds of the object, while fast indeed, were nonetheless within the range of speeds which radar systems can detect, referring in his notes to the 1956 Lakenheath, England radar visual UFO case, collected by Project Blue Book. However, one curious feature about the photograph involved the multiple distinct impressions of the object in its direction of motion, rather than a simple line or “smear”. This, according to Harding’s preliminary examination, suggested one of two possibilities: that the craft in the photo had been producing a blinking or flashing illumination as it moved, or that the object was rapidly accelerating and stopping intermittently to complete its course of travel. “This is fast enough,” Harding surmised, “together with the inferred stop-and-go-character of the motion, to raise very basic questions about the mode of propulsion of these UFOs.”

(Note: I would submit that a third potential exists, pertaining to the object’s movement indicated on film: might the effect of the “blinking” have resulted from a spinning object, which, as it rotated gyroscopically, reflected — rather than emitting – light off of a highly reflective surface at various intervals as it moved?)

The questions regarding the object’s locomotion raised numerous unique questions  about the mode of operation that some UFOs may utilize. Thus, the unusual, distorted appearance of the object’s flight path in the photo further lent itself, in Harder’s mind, to the photo’s (and Mr. Ghormley’s) credibility.

As a concluding observation, Harder would develop a number of different theories about the underlying mechanisms of UFO craft, based on their behavior indicated in such studies. In 1968, Harder gave a Congressional testimony on the subject, in which he speculated that magnesium, purified of any innate crystalline defects, would be an ideal metal for the construction of a craft similar to those cited in flying saucer reports (he based this on his study of samples of magnesium recovered in Brazil in 1957, purportedly discharged from a UFO that exploded in midair). Harder also studied the UFO observation of chemist Wells A. Webb, who described observing a UFO through polaroid glasses which revealed three dark circular formations that appeared in concentric fashion around the object. Harder guessed that the concentric “rings” Webb observed were evidence of the Faraday effect, which is demonstrated in the video below:

Harder guessed that these elements were evidence of a strong magnetic field produced by the object, which further suggested a gravito-magnetic effect underlying the craft’s mode of propulsion. This notion is similar, in certain regards, to an aircraft envisioned by Nikola Tesla, which he mentioned at various times throughout his life. Whether Tesla’s visions of such an aircraft were ever formalized remains unclear; at the time of Tesla’s death, assistant director of the FBI’s New York office, P. E. Foxworth, was dispatched to his room at the New Yorker Hotel to examine possessions and documents believed to be of vital importance to the U.S. military. It was, after all, 1943, and the Allies were in the heat of conflict against the Axis powers; within two days of Tesla’s passing, representatives of the Office of Alien Property went to his room, where all of his possessions were seized.

The notion that Tesla’s ideas could be somehow related to the UFO mystery has been brought up often over the years, although this concept — and its possible implications — are outside the scope of the present discussion. The question should be offered here, however, as to whether study of the UFO phenomenon, and specific instances of UFO observation such as the “Sedona Track” photo, may yield data about the operation of UFO craft that is paralleled in other literature, or evidential of characteristics that can be confirmed in the various branches of science. If so, the nature and possible mechanism of some alleged “UFOs” may indeed eventually become attainable, rather than simply remaining “mysterious” fodder for the inquisitive among us.

 TAGS: APRO, Arizona, Project Blue Book, Sedona, ufo

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