Earlier this month, I wrote about an Indiana man’s very mothman Christmas, in which he saw a large flying humanoid near the Prairie Creek reservoir. Like many other big-name paranormal entities—bigfoot, fairies, the greys—where there’s mothman, there’s a heavy dose of high strangeness with him. After the recent mothman reports began circulating, other witnesses have come forward with their experiences in the Great Lakes region, including a man who has allegedly observed glowing orbs of light near the Prairie Creek reservoir for decades.

The witness contacted the Singluar Fortean Society to relate his experience. According to the 51-year-old man, his first experience with the mysterious orbs was in 1981 when he was 12:

“It was a clear summer night sky. I saw an orange/amber colored ball of light about 20 feet above the trees. It started towards me slowly so I ran in and got my mom, when we came back out it was over our trees. The actual size is hard to say but I’d guess three feet across. It was totally silent, and it moved off to the west out of sight behind the trees.”

Since the, the witness says, he has observed this phenomenon approximately 12 times since 1981. The balls of light vary in colors, sometimes appearing as orange and sometimes as white. They also appear to have an intelligence behind them, the man says, as they change color, move around, and seem to react to observers.

Or maybe it’s Indiana’s newest disco sensation lighting up the dance floor: Mothman and the Orbs.

An alleged intelligence becomes sort of a sticky wicket, as evidenced by the man’s most recent experience with the orbs in the summer of 2016:

“I was driving east coming home at night, when I spotted an orb that was orange, and it seemed like a second one right next to it was changing back and forth from red to orange and dimming to dark and back. So I got to my road turning south and I came to a stop to watch. The car window was down, so I fumbled with my phone to hit record…snap, gone.”

It’s the old joke: what if bigfoot is just blurry? The problem is that a lot of these experiences do suggest an intelligence behind them, and an intelligence—especially an intelligence with a trickster inclination—would certainly make it as difficult as possible to take a picture of it. But it also becomes an easy out when you’re just making stuff up. Which, again, fits the M.O. of a trickster intelligence. As I said, a sticky wicket.

If we are to believe—or at least entertain—this witness however, it’s another piece of a large and unbelievably complex phenomenon. According to the Singular Fortean Society, these encounters occurred near a one-acre-large, 2,000-year-old Native American burial ground, on a direct line with Prairie Creek reservoir and Mounds State Park to the west, another ancient ceremonial site with legends of trickster spirits called Pukwudgies.

Most times someone calls anything an Indian burial ground, I can’t roll my eyes hard enough. Nine times out of ten, it’s a pile of rocks left by a 19th century farmer who found he had more than he needed for his stone wall. But there are actual Native American burial and ceremonial grounds. Mounds state park is one of them. However, lines are easy to draw.

These phenomena seem to be necessarily proof proofed. Yet some of the strangeness lies in how similarly the phenomena tend to defy documentation. That similar tendency can be seen as evidence for its existence, or evidence or its nonexistence. Which could be seen as by design. Or it could be seen as an interesting psychological phenomenon. It spirals infinitely. Which could be seen as….nope, that way lies madness.

Maybe the best we can hope for is a continued collection of these stories, both genuine and otherwise, and a more complete (but never finished) picture of our strange world.

Earlier this month, I wrote about an Indiana man’s very mothman Christmas, in which he saw a large flying humanoid near the Prairie Creek reservoir. Like many other big-name paranormal entities—bigfoot, fairies, the greys—where there’s mothman, there’s a heavy dose of high strangeness with him. After the recent mothman reports began circulating, other witnesses have come forward with their experiences in the Great Lakes region, including a man who has allegedly observed glowing orbs of light near the Prairie Creek reservoir for decades.

The witness contacted the Singluar Fortean Society to relate his experience. According to the 51-year-old man, his first experience with the mysterious orbs was in 1981 when he was 12:

“It was a clear summer night sky. I saw an orange/amber colored ball of light about 20 feet above the trees. It started towards me slowly so I ran in and got my mom, when we came back out it was over our trees. The actual size is hard to say but I’d guess three feet across. It was totally silent, and it moved off to the west out of sight behind the trees.”

Since the, the witness says, he has observed this phenomenon approximately 12 times since 1981. The balls of light vary in colors, sometimes appearing as orange and sometimes as white. They also appear to have an intelligence behind them, the man says, as they change color, move around, and seem to react to observers.

Or maybe it’s Indiana’s newest disco sensation lighting up the dance floor: Mothman and the Orbs.

An alleged intelligence becomes sort of a sticky wicket, as evidenced by the man’s most recent experience with the orbs in the summer of 2016:

“I was driving east coming home at night, when I spotted an orb that was orange, and it seemed like a second one right next to it was changing back and forth from red to orange and dimming to dark and back. So I got to my road turning south and I came to a stop to watch. The car window was down, so I fumbled with my phone to hit record…snap, gone.”

It’s the old joke: what if bigfoot is just blurry? The problem is that a lot of these experiences do suggest an intelligence behind them, and an intelligence—especially an intelligence with a trickster inclination—would certainly make it as difficult as possible to take a picture of it. But it also becomes an easy out when you’re just making stuff up. Which, again, fits the M.O. of a trickster intelligence. As I said, a sticky wicket.

If we are to believe—or at least entertain—this witness however, it’s another piece of a large and unbelievably complex phenomenon. According to the Singular Fortean Society, these encounters occurred near a one-acre-large, 2,000-year-old Native American burial ground, on a direct line with Prairie Creek reservoir and Mounds State Park to the west, another ancient ceremonial site with legends of trickster spirits called Pukwudgies.

Most times someone calls anything an Indian burial ground, I can’t roll my eyes hard enough. Nine times out of ten, it’s a pile of rocks left by a 19th century farmer who found he had more than he needed for his stone wall. But there are actual Native American burial and ceremonial grounds. Mounds state park is one of them. However, lines are easy to draw.

These phenomena seem to be necessarily proof proofed. Yet some of the strangeness lies in how similarly the phenomena tend to defy documentation. That similar tendency can be seen as evidence for its existence, or evidence or its nonexistence. Which could be seen as by design. Or it could be seen as an interesting psychological phenomenon. It spirals infinitely. Which could be seen as….nope, that way lies madness.

Maybe the best we can hope for is a continued collection of these stories, both genuine and otherwise, and a more complete (but never finished) picture of our strange world.

It’s not every day that a Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist says he got to take a ride on a flying saucer… but that’s precisely what happened to Hal Boyle, a syndicated columnist who wrote articles that appeared in more than 700 newspapers during World War II.

Well, that’s sort of what happened, but we’ll get to all that. 

A journalist who, during his three-decade tenure with the Associated Press wrote more than 7,500 columns, Boyle’s career began in Kansas City in 1928 as a copy boy with the AP Bureau. He was serious enough to pursue his journalistic talent, and enrolled at the Junior College of Kansas City, later heading on to the University of Missouri, where he completed his studies in journalism. Shortly thereafter, Boyle began working for the Associated Press out of Saint Louis, and then transferred to New York in 1936.

Boyle continued his correspondence throughout the Second World War, for which he received his Pulitzer Prize in May 1945. It was not the last award he would receive for his reporting: Boyle went on to receive the Omar Bradley Award for his coverage of the Korean War.

Hal Boyle in a press photo during the war years.

However, it was shortly after World War II that the “flying saucer” craze erupted onto the American scene, with Kenneth Arnold’s now-legendary report of seeing a group of objects dodging and weaving between mountain peaks near Mount Rainier in June of that year. 

A story as juicy as this was hardly anything Boyle could resist.

Tuesday, July 8, 1947, was an important day in the history of flying saucers, to say the least. That morning, the mysterious discs had been front page news in a number of American papers, although one particular story–that of an alleged saucer wreckage recovery in New Mexico that appeared in the Roswell Daily Record–would ultimately stand out among them.

However, that same day the Associated Press carried another story that, in many ways, even rivaled the curiosity of the Roswell story. It was now Hal Boyle who was reporting on the saucers, and not just sounding off about them in his syndicated column. Having reportedly been missing for two days, Boyle now claimed he had been aboard one of these remarkable aircraft.

“Our Hal Boyle, returning from a two-day absence, insists he is the first man to come back alive from a trip on a ‘flying saucer’,” an Editor’s Note read at the beginning of Boyle’s regularly syndicated column.

Here, it would only do Boyle’s story justice to hear how it all went down in his own words:

“Here I am in the middle of [a flying saucer], zooming around the American landscape like a boomerang. These things aren’t discs or saucers at all. They’re built like a cowboy hat seven-stories tall.

“The reason you folks down below have been disagreeing about the size is you haven’t seen the whole thing. All you have seen is the reflection of the sides where patches of the infra-invisible paint were burned off these huge space ships as they passed too close to the sun on their way here from Mars.

“Yes. Mars! I am a prisoner aboard a 1947 model “flying saucer” from another planet.”

Boyle’s fantastical adventure began in, of all places, the New York Public Library (was this a possible nod to Forteans in his readership? After all, this was the very same locale where Charles Hoy Fort spent his long hours looking for clippings that smacked the face of modern science, as he saw it, offering plausible proof of anomalies in our midst).

In another of Boyle’s dispatches, he detailed just how it came to pass that he would end up aboard a flying saucer:

I left the New York Public Library at dusk the other day and dropped into a quiet bar to wash down a warm vitamin pill with a cold bottle of beer.

Finishing it, I turned to a silent figure sitting next me—the only other customer at the bar—and all but fainted. I saw a thing some eight feet tall, covered with thick green hair, with one eye a hard-boiled egg in the center of his forehead, and no visible mouth at all. He was naked, his hands were three-clawed and big enough for a Brooklyn center fielder.

Up until this point, it still seems plausible at least that Boyle had merely run into a New York regular… albeit one who had perhaps done a few extra laps in the Hudson, and bathed in the wastewater microbes dwelling there. However, what transpires next removes all doubt that Boyle’s new acquaintance was of the extraterrestrial variety:

The Green man’s yolk – yellow eye burned menacing red. One hand twisted one of a series of knobs on his chest marked “slang, American,” and noiseless words drifted to me:

“Scram, Mac. But take along some beer. You’re going on a long ride.”

Then I found myself lifted and tossed sprawling. There was the sound of a door closing and a sense of lifting rapidly into space. I scrambled to my feet and looked out the window—its infra-invisible paint is only invisible when you look at it from the outside. Manhattan was falling away beneath us like a toy town. “Well, how do you like your first ride in a flying saucer, Orson Welles?” leered the green man. “You’re on the way to a place where there are more Martians than there ever were in New Jersey.”

“You may take his story or leave it,” Boyle’s editors wrote of his alleged ordeal. “But we are turning down his expense account for $2,880 — which is what five cents a mile comes to after 48 hours in his 1,200-mile-an-hour conveyance.”

Whether you’re a hopeful skeptic or a doubter among believers, it would be awfully hard not to see the humor in a yarn of this magnitude.

Of course, while Boyle was merely poking fun at the flying saucer stories, this no doubt was met with distaste by the hopeful, early UFOlogists trying to see past the novelty of these reports, and discern whether a genuine mystery might have been present. However, there are a few interesting takeaways from our look at Boyle’s once famous, and now nearly-forgotten flying saucer “hoax” (I use quotes here since, while Boyle’s story was not true, he no doubt expected his readership would know this, and hence had not intended to mislead anyone).

Of course, there is some debate as to when, precisely, the flying saucers (which, being in the pre-Blue Book era, were not yet called UFOs at this time) began to be almost explicitly associated with the idea of extraterrestrials. Many suggest that this wasn’t truly the case until after publication of a lengthy article by Donald Keyhoe in True Magazine in 1950, where he laid out the case that an extraterrestrial source seemed most likely.

However, as with Boyle’s saucer “hoax,” we see that even before the public had time to speculate about what had (or hadn’t) happened at Roswell, New Mexico, in early July, people were insinuating that the occupants might be extraterrestrials right off the bat. In fact, even prior to Boyle’s spoof column, a June 30th, 1947 UPI article made reference to a silver-ball-shaped aircraft observed over Lexington, Kentucky, as being “Martian-like.” Indeed, it seems that insinuations about extraterrestrials were indeed taking off with the saucers almost in tandem with Arnold’s initial report, and subsequent reports of similar things in the days that followed.

Legendary newspaperman though he was, many today are probably unaware of Hal Boyle, apart from those still alive who may have read his columns decades ago (many of which were later anthologized and published as books). In his prime, however, Boyle was one of the most prolific and revered writers in American journalism, which makes it all the more interesting that he was, essentially, also one of the very first major media personalities to poke fun at UFOs, and even speculate about their “extraterrestrial” nature, in the early days of the 1947 saucer craze.

Over the years I have written a number of books on the Men in Black phenomenon. They include The Real Men in Black, On the Trail of the Saucer Spies, and The Black Diary. If there’s one thing we can say about the MIB in the real world, it’s that they are nothing like their Hollywood counterparts. I am, of course, talking about Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones. And, Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson, who will be starring in this year’s Men in Black: International movie. The Men in Black of the movies are portrayed as agents of a secret group that defends the world from hostile aliens. As for the MIB of Ufology, well, they are quite another thing altogether. People describe them as looking pale, emaciated, sometimes extremely tall and with long, spidery fingers. Bizarrely, they are occasionally described as wearing bad wings and even make-up. Their goal: to silence those who dare to dig into the UFO subject, whether witnesses to UFO activity or researchers of the phenomenon. Then there’s the matter of who or what the MIB really are.

Ironically, the least likely explanation for the presence of the Men in Black is that they are “secret agents” of the CIA, the NSA, the Pentagon or…well…the list goes on. Government people they most definitely are not. There are multiple different theories to try and understand what the MIB are and who (or what) they represent. Some researchers have suggested they are time-travelers from a distant future. Others maintain they have demonic origins. There is also the possibility that the Men in Black are biological robots, dispatched to silence those who get too close to the ufological truth. There’s another scenario that may explain a significant part of the phenomenon. It’s a theory that Thomas E. Bearden detailed in his 1980 book, Excalibur Briefing.

In his book, Bearden focused deeply and extensively on the matter of Tulpas, about which Tulpa.info state the following: “A tulpa is an entity created in the mind, acting independently of, and parallel to your own consciousness. They are able to think, and have their own free will, emotions, and memories. In short, a tulpa is like a sentient person living in your head, separate from you. It’s currently unproven whether or not tulpas are truly sentient, but in this community, we treat them as such. It takes time for a tulpa to develop a convincing and complex personality; as they grow older, your attention and their life experiences will shape them into a person with their own hopes, dreams and beliefs.”

Psychonaut Wiki provide the following: “Tulpas are seemingly sentient, autonomous mental companions subjectively experienced by the psychonaut as a separate being with their own agency, emotions, preferences, thoughts, and character. They can be likened to a separate mental consciousness, existing alongside the psychonaut. Tulpas can be considered as a type of autonomous entity distinguished by their persistence and continuity over time.”

All of which brings us back to Tom Bearden. In Excalibur Briefing, he states this: “The kindling of virtual state tulpoidal forms into the zeroth bioframe of a physical reality (materialization) can result in the materialization of living, breathing, functioning forms. There is essentially no limit on the format that may be obtained. Sasquatch, Nessie, fairies, demons, angels, mothmen, skunkmen, yeti, kangaroos, etc. are just a small sampling.” On this same matter of Tulpas, Bearden addresses the MIB in this fashion. He says: “The men-in-black syndrome is based on our own unconscious tuning; since each of us has some unpleasantness in the unconscious, sometimes the tuned-in-men-in-black can be very nasty indeed.”

The MIB as Tulpas? Maybe, yes.

The question of who built Stonehenge and for what purpose remains one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in archaeology. Researchers continue to study the mysterious ancient megalith and publish sometimes contradictory claims about the structures. Were the stones brought from far away using a sophisticated transportation system, or were the stones already in place? Was Stonehenge a party spot used for orgies and fertility rituals, or could it have been the site of human sacrifices?

So many questions, and unfortunately, despite the many studies conducted on the stones, we’re not too closer to answering any of them than we were decades ago. However, a new study published this week may help place Stonehenge in context with other known ancient structures and may offer a clue as to what inspired the mysterious stone monument. The latest new theory to be put forward about Stonehenge and other ancient megaliths claims that an unknown ancient culture from northwest France may have started building these structures over 7,000 years ago and inspired the entire practice of building these stones throughout Europe.

The new “Out-of-France” theory was developed by Bettina Schulz Paulsson of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden after a 10-year study of monument sites throughout Europe. Paulsson and her colleagues conducted exhaustive radiocarbon dating of over 2,000 of these structures and found that they appeared to have been built in three successive phases, the first of which seems to have originated in France.

According to Paulsson’s new publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, the practice of building stone megalithic monuments likely spread along sea routes throughout the Mediterranean and Atlantic coast of Europe. Paulsson argues that the gateway-like construction of these monuments along with their chronological distribution seems to imply that these structures were involved in passage grave burial rites:

Their distribution emphasizes the maritime linkage of these societies and a diffusion of the passage grave tradition along the seaway. The passage graves mark a radical change of burial rites, along with other economic and social changes in Europe. […] These are exceptional grave forms for this period in their respective regions, at a time when subterranean cists, pit burials and hypogea (dug-out subterranean burial chambers) were still the most common burial rites.

If this theory is confirmed with further research, Paulsson notes that it could radically change our conception of Stonehenge and other megaliths:

The megalithic movements must have been powerful to spread with such rapidity at the different phases, and the maritime skills, knowledge, and technology of these societies must have been much more developed than hitherto presumed.

Were Stonehenge and other monuments used as elaborate grave sites which reflected the maritime heritage of their creators? How did the knowledge of megalith construction spread so rapidly throughout Europe? Like all things Stonehenge, we’ll likely never know for sure. Hard data like radiocarbon dates are one thing, but trying to understand the meaning of ancient monuments from our modern perspective will always be problematic. How can we possibly hope to understand what ancient people were thinking from studying a pile of rocks? Ultimately, any theories about Stonehenge will reflect our thinking about the monument, not necessarily its creators’. 

{https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Over the course of the last 70 years or so, the world of Ufology has spawned a truly huge number of books. Many are very good indeed, a not-insignificant number are very bad, and some hover somewhere in between. Just occasionally, however, a title comes along that is truly revolutionary, ground-breaking and – as far as its potential implications are concerned – thought-provoking in the extreme. For me, personally, Jacque Vallee’s Messengers of Deception and John Keel’s UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse both fall into that latter category. Both books argue – albeit in different ways – that we should look beyond the extraterrestrial hypothesis for answers. Of course, for many of the longstanding players within Ufology, any talk of deceptive messengers, or of Keel’s super-spectrum, is dismissed as mere speculation and not much else. For them, UFOs have to be extraterrestrial. After all, they have upheld such notions and beliefs for decades; and to relegate them to the rubbish-bin is not an option.

Well, I have a few choice words for those people who are so rigidly set in their ways: the extraterrestrial hypothesis is itself entirely speculative and totally lacking in hard evidence. All we really know for certain is that there most assuredly is a genuine UFO phenomenon. But, as for definitive proof of its actual point of origin or origins? Please! There is none. At all. There is merely a lot of data clearly demonstrating the presence of unidentified “others” among us.

Vallee and Keel most assuredly and astutely recognized this (Vallee still does). They understood that a puzzle which – at first glance – seemed to be defined by the presence of nuts-and-bolts spacecraft and flesh-and-blood aliens in our midst, was far, far stranger than many within Ufology wanted to admit. And there was someone else who also recognized this ufological factor: Mac Tonnies. Mac was someone who I met once, corresponded with on seven or eight occasions, and chatted with now and again. We were becoming good friends when Mac’s life came to an end. Like all of his friends I was shocked when Mac passed away suddenly and tragically in 2009, at the age of only 34. But, I was pleased that Mac’s third and final book, The Cryptoterrestrials, got published – all thanks to Anomalist Books.

Like Vallee and Keel, Mac rightly recognized that not all UFO encounters could dismissed as the ravings of lunatics, the tales of the fantasy-prone, or the lies of those seeking fame and fortune. But, he was also careful not to get sucked into the near-viral mindset that practically screams (take a deep breath): UFOs = alien spaceships piloted by little gray chaps from across the galaxy, who are on a mission to save their dying race by stealing our DNA, eggs and sperm. Rather, Mac – right up until the time of his death – was chasing down the theory suggesting that the UFOnauts may actually represent the last vestiges of a very ancient race of distinctly terrestrial origins; a race that – tens of thousands of years ago – may have ruled our planet, but whose position of power was thrown into overwhelming chaos by two things: (A) the appearance of a “debilitating genetic syndrome” that ravaged their society; and (B) the rising infestation of a violent species that threatened to eclipse – in number – their own society. They are, said Mac, the Cryptoterrestrials. And that violent species that blusters around like an insane, unruly and spoiled child, and that has done more damage in its short life-time than can ever be truly imagined, is, of course, us.

With their society waning, Mac suggested, their health and ability to even successfully reproduce began to collapse. As a result, their absolute worst nightmare came true: the Human Race became the new gang in town. The Cryptoterrestrials followed what was perceived as the only viable option: they quietly retreated into the shadows, into the darkened corners of our world, below the oceans, into the deeper caverns that pepper the planet. And, in their own uniquely silent and detached way, set about a new course of action. That course of action – given that they were in some fashion genetically related to the Human Race – was to eventually resurface; to move among us in stealth; to pass themselves off as entities from far-off worlds (as part of a concerted effort to protect and hide their real point of origin); and to use and exploit us – medically – in an attempt to try and inject their waning species with a considerable amount of new blood: ours.

In addition, Mac believed, the Cryptoterrestrials were – and, by definition, still are – subtle-yet-brilliant, cosmic magicians. For them, however, there is no top-hat from which a white-rabbit is pulled. There is no hot babe sliced in half and then miraculously rejoined at the waist. No: their tricks are far more fantastic. As well as deceiving us about their origins, the Cryptoterrestrials have – via, perhaps, the use of advanced hologram-style technology, mind-manipulation and much more – led us to conclude that they have an infinite number of craft, resources and technologies at their disposal. And that, Mac added, is the trick, the ruse: in actuality, their numbers today may be very small. They may well be staging faked UFO events to try and convince us that they have a veritable armada at their disposal when, perhaps, the exact opposite is the case. And, most important of all, they desperately want us to think of them as visitors from the stars. If their plan to rejuvenate their species is to work, then stealth, subterfuge and camouflage are the essential orders of the day. Of course, the above all amounts to a theory – just like the ETH. And, Mac’s book makes it very clear that he was only theorizing, rather than being able to provide the reader with definitive proof for such an extremely controversial scenario. He did, however, offer a logical, and at times powerful, argument in support of the theme of his book.

“Alien abductions” and the clumsy, intrusive means by which ova and sperm are taken by a race of beings we are led to believe are countless years ahead of us, were also addressed by Mac. That the ability of the aliens to wipe out the memories of those they abduct is constantly and regularly overturned by nothing more than simple hypnosis was highlighted. And the unlikely scenario that our DNA would even be compatible, in the first place, with extraterrestrial entities was also firmly dissected. Mac’s conclusion: all this points not to the presence of highly-advanced aliens who are thousands of years ahead of us, but to the actions of an ancient Earth-based society whose technology may not be more than a century or so in advance of our current knowledge. Mac also noted how the “aliens” seem to spend a hell of a lot time ensuring they are seen: whether its taking “soil-samples” at the side of the road; equipping their craft with bright, flashing lights; or hammering home the point to the abductees that they are from this planet, from that star-system, or from some far off galaxy. Just about anywhere aside from right here, in fact.

For Mac, Roswell came into the equation, too: and in ingenious fashion. Those who do not adhere to the extraterrestrial hypothesis for Roswell point to the fact that many of the witness descriptions of what was found at Roswell, arecollectively suggestive of some form of large balloon-type structure having come down at the Foster Ranch, Lincoln County, New Mexico on that fateful day in the summer of 1947. The possibility that ET would be flying around New Mexico in a balloon is absurd. But, as Mac noted, a race of impoverished, underground-dwellers, highly worried by the sudden influx of military activity in New Mexico (White Sands, Los Alamos etc), just might employ the use of an advance balloon-type vehicle to secretly scope out the area late at night. Perhaps, when elements of the U.S. military came across the debris, they really did assume it was balloon-borne material and probably of American origin. Until, maybe, they stumbled across something else amid the debris, too. Unusual bodies, maybe…

The Cryptoterrestrials continued in a similar vein, to the extent that we are left with a stark and surreal image of a very ancient – and very strange – race of beings who may once have been the masters of this planet; who were sidelined thousands of years ago; and who are now – under cover of darkness and while the cities sleep – forced to grudgingly surface from their darkened lairs and interact with the very things they fear (and perhaps even hate and despise) most of all: us. Survival, Mac said, is the name of their game. And deception is the means by which it is being cunningly achieved. Whether you agree with Mac’s theorizing or not, The Cryptoterrestrials is a book that is expertly and beautifully written. It challenges the reader to throw out old, rigid views. It represents the careful studies of a man who knew he was going out on a limb – but who, thankfully, didn’t give a damn about appeasing the UFO research community in fawning style. And, for me, it truly is a Messengers of Deception for the 21st Century and for Generation-Next.

“It seems impossible, but there it is.”

These were the words of Kenneth Arnold, according to one of the many quotes attributed to him during national coverage of his famous observation of nine “discs” flying in formation near Mount Ranier, Washington, in June of 1947. According to most accounts, this was the incident that brought the public into awareness of the so-called “flying saucers.”

Hence, in the days after Arnold’s account went to print across the nation, several other reports of unusual aerial phenomena from other parts of the country began to appear. That is to say, once the news about “saucers” was on people’s minds, it was no big surprise that similar reports began to crop up elsewhere.

This is one reason why reports from prior to Arnold’s initial sighting are so interesting, where incidents involving unusual aerial phenomenon were less likely to have been influenced by all the press Arnold and his story were getting at the time.

Kenneth Arnold

Arguably, one of the most notable incidents of this kind was reported by Captain Jack Puckett of Strategic Air Command on August 1, 1946. Early that morning, Puckett was flying a twin-engine C-47 from Langley Field to MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida, reported having a near-collision with a large, rocket-like aircraft that blazed past him. Only weeks prior to that, numerous reports out of Scandinavia detailed similar encounters with smaller, rocket-like objects seen streaking through the skies, which resulted in the first government inquiry into unidentified flying objects.

Another instance of pre-Kenneth Arnold UFO sightings (which, remember, weren’t actually called UFOs until a few years later, with the institution of Project Blue Book) involved sightings of unusual nighttime lights that were being seen over Richmond, Virginia, in the weeks leading up to Arnold’s sighting.

The reports, which didn’t begin to surface until well after Arnold’s sighting made news, were first logged by staff members with the Weather Bureau in Richmond, where they had begun to receive calls over several successive evenings from people in the Richmond area that were claiming to have seen odd aerial lights.

On June 30, 1947, an Associated Press article out of Washington, D.C., described that the reports of the lights had preceded news of Arnold’s sightings by several weeks, quoting Samuel S. Trotter, an assistant meteorologist at the Richmond Weather Bureau.

“Mr. Trotter added the reports here started before anything was printed about the ‘flying saucers’,” the report states.

However, Trotter and his colleagues apparently weren’t particularly impressed with the reports. “[Trotter] said he was convinced ‘that what they see is a spotlight somewhere playing on the clouds.”

“When I tell them so, nobody believes me,” the meteorologist complained.

Apart from the fact that the “mystery lights” over Richmond provide a somewhat less than compelling UFO report from the pre-Kenneth Arnold era, it helps illustrate a few other things, too. Apparently, even prior to the “arrival” of flying saucers over Mount Rainier in June 1947, people were reporting unusual things they were seeing in the skies. And as Trotter laments in the quote above, even when he advised that these lights were probably just spotlights reflecting off clouds, people seemed to disagree, preferring to believe that they were seeing something else instead.

We can’t rule out that latter possibility, especially in light of the other reports of objects in the skies at that time. Regardless, this is interesting, particularly since it is often asserted that people were more inclined to express doubt about conventional things they had seen in the skies after the “flying saucer” craze had already begun. If Trotter’s account of people’s disbelief is accurate, at least a few folks in the Richmond area had seemed to be exhibiting this tendency several weeks before Kenneth Arnold put flying saucers on the map.

Could it be that there are psychological reasons for why some people gravitate toward belief in extraordinary things? Maybe so, although I certainly don’t think that this idea alone can “explain” or roundly debunk all UFO reports.

However, noting such things in relation to the history of UFOlogy may be useful in helping us remove certain stigmas and preconceptions about what people have seen, and how they may have interpreted it in relation to other things that were going on in the world at a given time. Hence, the Pre-Kenneth Arnold reports like these remain some of the most interesting in the collected literature from the early years of UFO research.

In late 2017, the UFOlogy and conspiracy circles were somewhat vindicated by the not-so-surprising revelation that the Pentagon operated a secret research program to investigate anomalous aerial phenomenon. While some of us are beginning to believe that those so-called “revelations” about the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, or AATIP, may actually be a smokescreen or publicity stunt, the program’s former director Luis Elizondo continues to hint that more secrets will soon be revealed.

The latest revelation about Pentagon UFO research didn’t come from Elizondo or anyone else at the “To the Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences,” but instead were brought to light by Keith Basterfield at the blog “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena – Scientific Research.” With so many headlines being written about the Pentagon’s UFO research program, Basterfield began digging through older texts and documents to see if AATIP might be the tip of a much older iceberg.

Basterfield may have found something, if his sources are to be taken at their words. After re-reading the 1990 book Out Thereby New York Times reporter Howard Blum, Basterfield discovered a few anecdotes concerning Major General James C. Pfautz, Chief of Air Force Intelligence who oversaw a $5 million UFO research program within the Pentagon.  

Major General James C. Pfautz, USAF

According to Blum’s book, the program ran from 1983 to 1985 and was kept off the Air Force’s official books to hide its massive price tag. Pfautz reportedly told Blum that the program was established to study and identify the many anomalous phenomena the Air Force regularly encounters as it carries out its principal mission of protecting America’s skies:

In 1983, six months after taking command of Air Force Intelligence [Pfautz] decided to investigate the heavens. To Pfautz’s way of thinking, the decision to establish  this secret UFO task force was not that extraordinary. The primary job of the Air Force of the United States of America was to protect and defend the airspace of this country. No intrusions could be tolerated. It was his job, he reasoned, to investigate whether unidentified objects of any sort, of any origin, were penetrating this airspace. He was simply fulfilling the responsibility of his office.

According to anonymous sources Blum cites, Pfautz was invited to address the Defense Intelligence Agency’s alleged “UFO Working Group” which went by the characteristically uninteresting name “Advanced Theoretical Physics.” While addressing the group, Pfautz is said to have become emotional in describing the threats Earth faces from unknown phenomena, even going so far as to suggest attempting to forge an alliance with the extraterrestrial beings visiting Earth.

Pfautz was eventually outed from his leadership post at Air Force Intelligence for what can be described as political reasons. Blum writes that Pfautz had initially agreed to a private interview with him to discuss the program, but cancelled suspiciously at the last minute after allegedly being notified that the program’s research remained classified. The fate of the alleged program is ultimately unknown, but it could be that it in some ways morphed into the more recent AATIP.

What’s to be made of Howard Blum’s tale? On one hand, this is merely an unconfirmed anecdote, but then again Blum is one of the most respected journalists in America and has published several New York Times best-selling works of non-fiction including Out There. Could this 1990 book contain one more crumb of truth which suggests our government may actually know more about anomalous aerial phenomena than they’re letting on? Be sure to head over to Basterfield’s blog and read the full account for yourself.