A lot of people seem to like to poke fun at UFO witnesses and believers. The field has unfortunately drawn to it some amount of skepticism from those who think it is all a bunch of quacks and weirdos out in the boondocks. Yet, this could not be further from the truth. Many of the staunchest supporters of not only UFOs being taken seriously by the public, but also full government disclosure on what might be kept secret from the public at large, are top, eminent members of the fields that matter most.

This particular tale revolves around the legendary astronaut Leroy Gordon “Gordo” Cooper Jr., an American aerospace engineer, test pilot, United States Air Force pilot, an astronaut pioneer, who was also involved in the first human spaceflight program of the United States, Project Mercury, running from 1958 through 1963, piloting the longest and last Mercury spaceflight, Mercury-Atlas 9, and would have numerous accolades and notable achievements throughout his career. He would later go on to join several corporate boards and as technical consultant for more than a dozen companies, and he is widely considered a legend in his field. As respected as he was, he also had his share of stories to tell of strange UFO encounters in space.

Gordon Cooper

Cooper seems to have had a long history of UFO sightings, which he has spoken of in interviews and in his autobiography Leap of Faith. His earliest well-known UFO encounter apparently occurred in 1951, when he saw a circular formation of “metallic, saucer-shaped vehicles” while flying over East Germany. These objects would apparently frequently appear, and he would say, “We never could get close enough to pin them down, but they were round in shape and very metallic looking.” Shortly after this, he was transferred to the Edwards Air Force Base Flight Test Center in the California desert, where the weirdness would continue. In May of 1957, Cooper was a Project Manager at Edwards Air Force Base. He says that he and some of the other crew would sometimes see a strange object come down to hover over the nearby lake bed, of which he would say, “It was a typical circular-shaped UFO. Not too many people saw it, because it took off at quite a sharp angle and just climbed straight on out of sight!” This object would apparently come to rest on the lake bed upon an array of three “legs” that extended from the bottom.

They apparently took a lot of footage of this particular event, and it was allegedly very unnerving for all those present, all of them experienced airmen who were used to seeing experimental aircraft and whatnot. Cooper went about alerting the Pentagon as to what was going on, and he was purportedly subsequently told to send all of the negatives of what they had captured on film in a locked courier pouch. That was the last he would hear about it, with the photos just vanishing and no apparent action taken, no explanation given, despite the fact that this had been an obvious foreign craft in U.S. military airspace. Even though the government had apparently swept it all under the carpet, Cooper would have none of it. He appeared on several high profile programs such as the Merv Griffin Show, where he insisted that the incident was real and said:

I think it was definitely a UFO. However, where it (the object) came from and who was in it is hard to determine, because it didn’t stay around long enough to discuss the matter – there wasn’t even time to send out a welcoming committee! I think it’s fairly credible. I would like to see the time when all qualified people could really work together to properly investigate these stories and either refute or prove them.

Cooper’s UFO experiences would continue, when on May 15, 1963, he would allegedly witness one during his solo space mission above the Earth’s surface, saying that it was an anomalous “greenish object.” This would only add to his suspicions that something weird was going on, and in 1978 he penned a letter to the United Nations begging them to release any information they had. In the letter he expressed the importance of making contact with these entities and finding a way to “resolve our problems by peaceful means, rather than warfare.” Cooper would go on to become a major proponent of full government disclosure on the UFO phenomenon, and believed there was a massive government conspiracy covering it all up. He would claim that he knew of hundreds of cases from fellow pilots and astronauts of seeing something beyond understanding, which were subsequently kept hush hush. He would claim that there had been all sorts of evidence that had been buried as well, and he said in one interview in the late-1990s:

For many years I have lived with a secret, in a secrecy imposed on all specialists in astronautics. I can now reveal that every day, in the USA, our radar instruments capture objects of form and composition unknown to us. And there are thousands of witness reports and a quantity of documents to prove this, but nobody wants to make them public. Why?

Why, indeed. The public reaction to such allegations by such a well-respected icon of the military and space travel was to merely shrug its shoulders, after all what are you going to do when the guy is an aeronautic legend? In the meantime, Cooper continuously and tirelessly pressed for more information on what was being kept from the public, right up to his death in 2004 from complications of Parkinson’s disease, appearing in the documentary “Out of the Blue” about it and even writing at length about it all in his autobiography Leap of Faith. His whole message later in life was that the mass UFO cover-up that conspiracy theorists drone on about was all completely real, and he was a major champion of full disclosure in this area. It is hard to know how much of an effect he had, and he gained many critics, such as space historian Robert Pearlman, who wrote:

While no one can argue with someone’s experiences, in the case of Cooper’s own sightings, I found some difficulty understanding how someone so connected with ground breaking technology and science could easily embrace ideas such as extraterrestrial visits with little more than anecdotal evidence.

Cooper joins the ranks of very qualified, respectable UFO witnesses and ambassadors of disclosure who have mostly been either met with shrugged shoulders, raised eyebrows, or flat out disdain. Yet what are we to make of the claims and statements of such a well-respected member of the NASA community? Can his accounts an assertions really be written off as the ramblings of someone off their rocker, or do they perhaps deserve a little more consideration? Whether you believe him or hate him, Cooper has earned a place where he represents a certain type of witness and champion of UFOlogy that is hard to ignore.

When it comes to natural explosions on Earth, nothing tops a volcano and, in modern times, few top the Mt. St. Helens blast. In space, the biggest blasts beyond the original Big Bang belong to the supernovas – stellar explosions that usually collapse into a black hole. Now, imagine the Mt. St. Helens of supernovas. Having trouble picturing it? You don’t have to – astronomers have discovered what they believe to be the largest non-Big Bang explosion ever. How big is (or was) it?

“In some ways, this blast is similar to how the eruption of Mt. St. Helens in 1980 ripped off the top of the mountain. A key difference is that you could fit fifteen Milky Way galaxies in a row into the crater this eruption punched into the cluster’s hot gas.”

Mt. St. Helens

In a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal and summarized in a NASA press release and at Phys.org, Simona Giacintucci of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC, and lead author of the study described the discovery of the blast in the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster about 390 million light-years from Earth. A supermassive black hole in that cluster was first detected in 2016 astronomers using NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory, but at the time they couldn’t believe the even-more-massive cosmic hole in the gas surrounding the black hole was the result of an explosion. More recently, astronomers paired the Chandra X-ray data with that of the ESA’s XMM-Newton, the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) in Western Australia and the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) in India and confirmed that it was indeed a big blast.

“The radio data fit inside the X-rays like a hand in a glove. This is the clincher that tells us an eruption of unprecedented size occurred here.”

This extremely powerful eruption occurred in the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster, which is located about 390 million light-years from Earth.

Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Naval Research Lab/Giacintucci, S.; XMM:ESA/XMM; Radio: NCRA/TIFR/GMRTN; Infrared: 2MASS/UMass/IPAC-Caltech/NASA/NSF

Co-author Dr. Maxim Markevitch from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center rightly called the explosion “unprecedented” – it’s at least five times larger than the previous largest explosion. The supermassive cosmic hole was caused by explosive jets shooting away from the erupting supermassive black hole and through a cloud of gas. The radio emissions detected by the telescopes came from electrons traveling at almost the speed of light filling the hole.

While the blast took hundreds of millions of years to carve a void that 15 Milky Ways could fit into, it’s all over now. Professor Melanie Johnston-Hollitt, the director of the MWA, an expert in galaxy clusters and a co-author of the study, compares the discovery to finding dinosaur bones and then recreating the living beast. Knowing what to look for, she expects to find more massive explosions – possibly breaking the record. Putting the discovery in terms non-astronomers can understand:

“The Universe is a weird place.”

Indeed it is.

Looking at sightings reports, it seems people have encounters with UFOs all of the time, and sometimes they even see occupants of these mysterious craft. Yet rising above even this weirdness are those cases in which individuals have claimed to have actually communicated wit and even literally sat down and had a chat with these enigmatic entities. What did they have to say? Well, here we will look at a few of the more bizarre cases of people claiming to have talked with alien beings, and they are really quite outlandish to say te least.

A few surreally bizarre cases come to us from the 1950s, and one of the more colorful and memorably absurd accounts comes from someone who is actually probably what one would consider to be the most traditionally reliable witness on this whole list. In 1954, we have the very curious encounter of an Air Marshal Sir Peter Horsley, who had quite a long, illustrious military career and who would eventually be the deputy commander-in-chief of RAF Strike Command, of the United Kingdom. Horsely would write in his autobiography Sounds From Another Room, which actually talks a lot about UFOs and also tells of a bizarre chance encounter he had one day in a London waiting room while waiting to meet with a Mrs. Markham. As he sat there, Horsley says that he met the acquaintance of a man calling himself “Mr. Janus,” and who was partially obscured by shadows at another end of the room. This Mr. Janus seemed to be very interested in Horsely’s knowledge of UFOs, and he would write:

Mr. Janus dived straight into the deep end by asking me to tell him all I knew about UFOs. He listened patiently… At the end I thought I might be equally as direct and asked Janus what his interest was? He answered me a quite simply, ‘I would like to meet the Duke of Edinburgh.’

Sir Peter Horsley

OK, then. Weird for sure, but it would get weirder when he began talking about humankind’s desire to reach the stars and ow their technology was bringing them closer to this goal. He said since humans were moving along so rapidly, we were bound to discover the true mysteries of the universe awaiting us, saying:

Just as tribes found other tribes and Christopher Columbus discovered on his travels unknown centers of ancient civilizations so Man in his journeys through the universe may find innumerable centers of culture far more ancient than his own…He will discover a wealth of experiences infinitely more startling and beautiful than can be imagined: and infinite variety of agencies and forces as yet unknown: great fields of gravity and anti-gravity where objects are accelerated across space like giant sling shots, even other universes with different space and time formula. Why does Man reach for the stars? His energies have never been solely directed towards material benefits alone. From the beginning of Man’s history he has striven… towards a spirituality and grace of which he was aware but could not fully comprehend.

However, he also warned that humanity was in a sort of “Dark Age,” and that if we continued in our ways we would never live to see that achievement fulfilled. Mr. Janus would apparently say, “In his greedy quest for more complex machines Man is prepared to sacrifice almost anything – his natural environment, animals and even his fellow humans. The dreadful specter of blowing up his world hardly makes him falter in this headlong rush,” and it all seemed quite dire. Mr. Janus also complained about mankind’s nuclear weapons, and through it all he apparently displayed an incredibly deep knowledge of the military. Horsely seemed to think that he had actually met a real alien in that waiting room, and would credit his rise through the ranks to this chance encounter.

Another off-the-wall case is the story of Italian mechanic Luciano Galli. On July 7, 1957, Galli was allegedly on his way back to his small, humble workshop on his lunch break when he was approached by an enigmatic stranger in the streets, who had “piercing eyes” and asked if the business man remembered him. Galli realized that he did indeed recognize the man, recalling seeing him several times around town staring at him only to melt away. The man, who was described as “a rather tall gentleman of the dark type, with regular features and very dark eyes,” spoke perfect Italian, and invited Galli to take a ride with him in his fancy black Fiat 1100. Someone apparently never gave Galli the memo to not just go off getting into the cars of strangers they’ve just met on the street, and he accepted.

Fiat 1100

They then rode in silence in the car, where Galli claims he felt remarkably calm, until they came to an isolated place called the Croara ridge, where Galli claimed a large saucer-shaped UFO was hovering. Galli was invited aboard, and presumably figuring why not, he accepted and walked up into the craft via a metallic cylinder that descended down from it. He was then taken to a “pilot’s cabin,” which was described as “spacious” and filled with flashing lights and myriad instrument panels, and told to sit on a seat that was firmly bolted to the floor. He then noticed that a good portion of the floor was actually a window looking down, and he could see that they were rising rapidly through the atmosphere, until he could actually see the earth shrinking into the distance. Galli himself would say of this all in an interview with Italian journalist Renato Albanese:

The pilot’s cabin was spacious and round with a lot of instruments around, panels with many lights. There were also hatches, and the seats were fixed somehow to the floor. In the middle of the floor was a kind of circular window, about one meter wide. Through it we could see the earth fall away from us. First the earth looked like from one of our own planes, then – when we were already in the dark zone – it looked like the moon and later like Venus or Mars.

It only gets weirder from there. Galli would claim that they approached an immense, cigar-shaped “mothership,” reminiscent of a blimp, which dwarfed the craft they were on, and as they approached he could see hundreds of people walking about in the hangars dressed in some sort of shiny one-piece outfits. They would actually board this mothership, where Galli learned that they had come from the planet Venus, and he was shown through a massive hall to the commander’s area. After this tour was finished, he was once again asked to board the smaller craft and was taken back to where they had started, where he saw that the whole thing had lasted approximately 3 hours and 10 minutes. Galli would swear an oath that all of this was true, insisting that he was not making it up, and whether it is true of not it is still a more interesting lunch break than most people have.

We seem to have had a lot of visitors from Venus in the 1950s, because that very same year there was another rather far-out account, this time from a journalist named Hubert Lewis. He claims that he was out cycling in the countryside of Church Stretton, in Shropshire, England when he came across a metallic disc floating not far away and a very tall, human looking being approaching him. The stranger told Lewis not to be afraid, and the two began to chat for around a half an hour while that mysterious craft hovered in the background. The being told him during this conversation that he was from Venus, and that there were many of his kind living on Earth among humans, and after their talk this stranger got into the disc to shoot off into the sky. In the days after, Lewis claimed that he had been approached by mysterious military personnel who told him to forget about what had happened and to not tell anyone. It is an interesting account, given that Church Stretton is considered to be a UFO hotspot.

Coming along into the 60s, we have the insane story of German businessman Ludwig Pallman. His weird tale begins in 1966, when he was in the jungles of Peru looking for medicinal plants, operating in a very remote area south of the Colombian River port of Leticia on the Amazon River. It was here in this mosquito choked untamed wilderness that he claims to have been brought to an area that was unexplored even by the native peoples, who told him that there were savages that lived in that jungle, as well as a mysterious group of white men. This was very intriguing to Pallman, and although his native guides refused to travel further up the river, he continued on alone, thus entering a new chapter of oddness.

He soon came across the “savages” he had been told about, but rather than attack him as he had been led to believe, they instead took him to their village. Here he found some very strange dwellings, reminiscent of upside down cones and made of an unusual smooth plastic-like material. Pallman then saw that among the Natives were others who were very white looking and wearing clothing that resembled togas. Thinking they might be Americans Pallman tried speaking English to them but they showed no comprehension of what he was saying, and he got the same response when he tried Spanish and German. One of the light-skinned strangers then produced a small device and handed it to Pallman. It turned out to be some sort of translator device, and with it he could understand what they had to say, and what they had to say was bonkers.

They allegedly explained that they were from the planet Itibi, and were here to cultivate and experiment with earth plants in order to cross breed with those of their home world to create hardier species. According to them, this site was sort of like a plantation, and they hoped to take some samples for mass production on their own planet. Pallman explains that he lived with these aliens for a whole month, during which time he learned that these aliens had been living on earth since 1946, moving there when they had heard of the planet from another alien race, and that they had other such plantations as well. He also apparently saw them using disc-shaped shuttle craft to come and go. He claims that they also gifted him a ring that would glow when their kind was present. Eventually he left to head back to civilization, sadly with no evidence whatsoever other than his wild tale.

We have the weird tale of Walter Rizzi, of Bolzano, Italy just a few years later. In 1968 he says that he stopped his car after a long drive to take a nap, but would wake to the startling sight of a UFO hovering nearby and some humanoid beings approaching his car, described as being smaller than a human being, with grey skin, round hairless heads and slanted eyes. These entities communicated with him telepathically, and told him that they were there to collect samples of various species of Earth plant life, as well as tracking the evolutionary progress of the planet. They also explained that they could not stay on Earth for too long, because our planet made them somehow age faster, and oh yeah, that we were going to all die in the near future because of a cataclysmic polar shift that would cause extinction level climatic catastrophes. Was any of this real? Who knows?

There are certainly other cases of people claiming to have had communications with actual alien beings, and this is by no means a comprehensive listing of them, just some of the more curious that I have found. Were any of these beings real, and if so what did they want? Why did they choose to reveal themselves in such strange ways? Are these aliens, interdimensional travelers, or just the ravings of the imagination? Whatever the case may be, they are certainly entertaining at the very least.