UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

The annals of UFO lore are peppered with accounts of alien encounters and abductions, these mysterious entities coming for us for inscrutable reasons we may never understand. Some such cases really serve to bring on the weird, with plenty of clues and details that cloak them in a thick layer of oddness and high strangeness, leaving us to wonder just what is going on. One such surreal account played out in a rural area of the U.S. state of Indiana back in 1983, and it has gone on to become a classic example of just how truly bizarre such encounters can be.

It was a hot summer night, on June 30, 1983, and Debbie Jordan-Kauble was going about her usual routines on what had until then been a very ordinary, mundane evening. At the time she was living in a rural area near a place called Copley Woods, outside of Indianapolis, Indiana, along with her two young sons and parents and on this evening her father was off at his second shift at an automobile factory. That night Debbie, her mother, and two sons ordered take-out fried chicken, and it couldn’t have been more normal, but as she washed the dishes and the grease off her hands things would begin to get weird, spiraling into a harrowing experience that would change her life forever. She would say of what happened:

I was washing the grease off my hands before I left to go to the neighbors house to cut some more patterns out. She lived one block over and one road behind us so I wouldn’t be far in case Mom needed help getting the boys to settle down. As I stood at the kitchen sink and looked aimlessly out the window, I noticed an odd light coming out of the swimming pool pump house. First of all, I knew the door SHOULD be closed because I remembered wrestling with the rusty slide lock. I had been out there just a few hours earlier, putting some more chlorine tabs in the pool floater. It was getting dark out so the strange light really caught my eye. It was not like the incandescent bulb that was in there. It looked more like florescent, white light. And it was very bright. I pointed this out to my mother and asked her if she wanted me to stay home. She thought it was odd but told me not to worry about it. She would lock the doors and if she needed me she would call me. In the five minutes it took me to get in my car and make a quick detour to the turnabout in back of the house, to check on the light before I left, the light was gone. And the door to the pump house was closed. But the pedestrian door to the side garage attached to the house was now open. I do not know why I didn’t stop then and go back inside. I should have but I didn’t. I headed on to our neighbors’ house.

Debbie reached her neighbor’s house without incident and called her mother to tell her she had arrived safely. At this point her mother was calm and sounded normal, but shortly after this, practically right after hanging up, there was a phone call from her mother, who now sounded frightened and urgently implored her to come back home right away. It would only later turn out that Debbie’s mother had seen a “basketball-sized ball of light” hovering around in the back yard, but at the time it was not clear why she was so panicked and scared, so insistently begging Debbie to come home immediately. Debbie then excused herself, apologizing to the neighbor and driving the short distance back home, where she found her mother cowering within and frantically looking through the window outside. Debbie says of what happened next:

Once I arrived, I pulled around to the back of the house again. This time I stopped at the sun room outside access door and found Mom standing there waiting for me. As I walked in, I went for the shotgun Daddy had behind the trash compactor. Mom made a comment about the gun not being loaded and I said to her that whoever was out there didn’t know that and I could always beat the crap out of them with it. I have to say, at this point, that I do not know what came over me. I am no fool and at that time in my life, I was the biggest chicken in the world. If I had know why mom called me back that night, I would have never gone out back. I would have gone in the front door, grabbed my mom and kids and high-tailed it out of there so fast it would make your head spin.

Making the whole situation even eerier and more surreal was that at the time Debbie’s mother not only had no idea why she was in a panic, but she didn’t even remember calling her daughter. At this point, they both thought it was just an intruder, and so Debbie crept outside with the shotgun and approached the pump house, ready to wave her empty gun to frighten any trespassers, but no one was in the pump house, nor was there any sign of an intruder anywhere. The only thing out of place was her dog cowering under a truck and growling uncontrollably. As she did her search of the yard, outbuildings, and garage, she was suddenly aware of a growing, burning sensation throughout her body, which she would later equate to being splashed with acid, and whish grew in intensity until she had the sudden, undeniable urge to get out of there immediately, that her life was in danger. She would say of what happened next:

I suddenly felt as if I was on fire. All the skin on my body started burning. It felt like I was covered with acid. And I thought, “I’ve gotta get out of here RIGHT NOW!” I turned to run out the pedestrian door and that is when I was hit in the chest by something VERY bright and electrifying. I have never been hit by lightning. But if I could imagine what it would feel like, I would say it was like this. It felt as if I had first been punched by a huge, electric fist, right in the gut. The burning, electrical feeling slowly moved down my legs to my feet, out my arms to my fingertips and around my head. Then, I could feel every molecule of my body vibrating. I couldn’t move. And I couldn’t see because the flash was so bright. I know I could not have tolerated more than a few seconds of this but I swear it felt as if this lasted for several minutes. I assume it couldn’t have lasted more than a few seconds. I remember thinking, “I’m DEAD! This is what it feels like to die.” I was shaking and burning and I felt like I was vibrating to my very core. The brightness wore off fast. Then, the vibrating and shaking subsided. But I still couldn’t move. I was able to see bits and pieces. VERY much like having been ‘flashed’ in the eye by a camera flash. I had big blind spots in my vision but I could see some shadow and some movement in the yard in front of my. I can now feel someone pulling on my right shoulder, as if to pull me down a bit. Then, I felt a stabbing, burning sensation in my right ear. And I could hear someone telling me it was unfortunate that I had to feel pain.

After this, she suddenly and inexplicably found herself outside, with no idea of how she had gotten there, and above her hovered a bight light about the size and shape of a basketball. The light moved up and down, as if scanning her, and then slowly became an oval shape before disappearing. At this moment, Debbie saw another egg-shaped object, around which several humanoid figures could be seen. She explains:

I could see something about the size of the pool pump house. Maybe 8 to 10 feet tall and shaped like an egg. (Not very big as far as UFOs go.) And I could see 6 people in the yard in front of me. They are at various spots in the yard. At the same time, they all seemed to line up and slide to the left, back to this egg shaped thing in front of me. They were smaller than me. Shorter. I thought they looked like children. Bullet shaped children. Bigger in the head and getting narrow at the feet. I couldn’t see much detail, mostly just silhouettes. The rest of this event is still a blur after 20 years. The next thing I remember is hearing someone say. “It’s over.” I suddenly remembered my kids. I thought, “MY KIDS! Oh my God!” And immediately I heard the voice say that my kids were okay. I heard my name being called and I was able to move and I turned and began to walk up the lower porch steps, toward the back kitchen door. With each step I took, the memory of what had just transpired, faded until by the time I reached my mom at the back door, I did not remember anything after I entered the garage. I said to my mom, “Everything’s cool.” And with that, she became animated again. It was as if she was standing there, in a daze, until she heard my voice.

Debbie then went back to the neighbor’s house, where they told her she had been gone for 2 hours, despite the fact that to her only 15 minutes had passed. At this point, she rather oddly felt like going for a swim in the pool, inviting the neighbor and her daughter to join her. As they made their way to the pool, things would get even stranger still, of which Debbie says:

As we walked though the back yard to the swimming pool, my neighbors’ daughter suddenly jumped and yelled, “OUCH.” She said she had stepped on something that made her foot burn, and now her foot was getting numb. By the time we reached the pool, she said her foot felt numb all the way to the knee, but yet she could walk on it. We weren’t in the pool more than 10 or 15 minutes when we all started feeling nauseated, and my eyesight started getting real fuzzy, even though I had not had my head under water. I could see halos around all the outside lights and it was making me dizzy. The girls left and I went to bed. When I woke up the next morning, I could not open my eyes. They were swollen completely shut.

My mother took me to the emergency room. They, in turn, sent me directly to an eye specialist across the street from the ER because they didn’t have anyone on call in ER who was able to treat something like this. This doctor was just across the street and agreed to work me in and see me that morning. He was stunned at the extent of my injury. He kept asking me if I had looked into the arc of a welder’s torch or the sun. I had not. I was given several tubes of cream and some drops to try to heal my eyes. It took SEVERAL weeks for them to fully recover and to this day, my eyes are VERY sensitive to light. And my vision is very far-sighted. Sometimes my eyes will still suddenly burn and turn red, for no apparent reason. Fortunately, this only lasts for a few minutes.

The following week after the incident, they were having a BBQ in their backyard when one of the guests noticed an 8 foot circle with a 20 foot swath of wilted dead grass coming off of it, which for some reason instilled a sense of panic in her. This mark would prove to have some rather strange qualities, of which Debbie has said:

The mark in the yard remained there for nearly five years. Every year snow melted off of it. Animals would not walk on it. There were no bugs in the soil. Even when the grass finally did begin to grow back, the grass in that place was thick, rubbery and kind of a bluish green color. The dandelions that grew around the mark were three times the size of normal ones. The tomato plants my mom had out by the pool, were the size of grapefruits but when you tried to eat them, they were so acidic the skin on your lips would peel off. And the vines were as big around as my forearm. The leaves on a patch of trees behind the mark withered, turned brown and fell off. The power line above the mark shorted out and blew a transformer, melted the wiring and blew out the tubes on the Heathkit HAM radios in the basement of the house, which was right next to the place in the yard.

In addition to the strangeness with that mark in the yard, Debbie would over the years be plagued with inexplicable health issues, nightmares, and other odd incidents, of which she says:

The aftermath of this day was a nightmare for several years. I was ‘shell shocked’. I sat up at night, watching over my children and waiting. Waiting for something. But I didn’t remember what it was I was waiting for. I got sick and stayed sick for over a year. I developed life-threatening allergies, rashes, fevers, swollen glands, diarrhea, bleeding gums and my hair started falling out. My fingernails started growing thin, peeled and had horizontal ridges in them. I developed irregular heartbeats (PAC’s) I started having panic attacks. Almost daily for a long time.

And the dog that was out there with me that night? She had to be put to sleep about 2 and a half months later. All her hair fell out from the head down. She developed black, oozing sores all over her back, her eyes got milky white and she was obviously going deaf. Her teeth all fell out and her gums bled, as well. When we took her to the vet, he was shocked to see how quickly she had deteriorated. She was not that old (about 6 or 7 years) and the way she looked you would have thought she was 20 years old. He advised us to put her down because he felt she was suffering and he could not help her. He figured she was ‘eaten up’ with cancer of some kind. I think of my dog, and the fate she met. In my heart, I believe whatever she encountered that night was directly related to her untimely death. And there is a part of me that STILL worries I will eventually have some kind of cancer related to my experience of that night. There is nothing I can do about it right now, except take good care of myself and hope for the best.

It would also turn out that other people in the area had seen basketball-sized orbs of light flitting about at the time, and it was all weird enough that she reached out to UFO researcher Budd Hopkins, who would conduct a thorough investigation into the incident and write of it in his best-selling 1987 book Intruders – The Incredible Visitation at Copley Woods, after which it would hit the public consciousness and appear in a 1992 CBS mini-series of the same name. In 1993, Debbie’s sister would write a book on it as well, called Abducted! The Story of the Intruders Continues, and it has gone on to be one of the most shocking and intriguing alien encounter reports on record, being investigated by other notable UFO researchers such as Linda Moulton Howe. As for her own thoughts on the whole affair, Debbie herself has remained rather introspective on it all, rather bravely embracing what happened to her and looking at it as a defining moment in her life. She has said of this:

I often wonder what my life would have been like had I not had the experience. I can’t imagine. Truthfully, despite the obvious trauma, I don’t think I would change a thing. I have become a much stronger person. I don’t give credit to the experience or the ‘Intruders’, other than it FORCED ME to be strong, to survive and grow. And I kinda like that about me. That is the story of this day. You know when you can name the date and time of an event, it MUST have made quite an impression on you. June 30th, 1983, made such an impression on me that it actually crushed the old me while molding the new one. Now THAT’S a defining moment.

What was going on here? What forces came for this woman out in that remote location? Was this aliens, interdimensional interlopers, or something else altogether? What has come to be known as the “Copley Woods Encounter” has gone on to become one of the weirder bizarre incidents in UFO lore, and for good reason. It has many elements that are beyond bizarre, full of high strangeness, and while we may never get true answers it stands tall as a singularly weird account.

Alien abductions come in all shapes and sizes. They range from the odd to the full-on absurd, and everything in between. Yet one assumption that many people might have is that the aliens always get their person, and this is simply not true. Through a series of missteps and and other forces of chance, it would seem that at times these aliens fail in their missions to abduct human beings. While rare, here are some of the more spectacular such accounts.

A very strange account comes to us from the year 1964, from California, in the United States. On September 4, 1964, 28-year-old Donald Shrum and his friends went out bow hunting at Cisco Grove, in Placer County, California, and at some point, he would become separated from his group. Since nightfall was approaching, he decided to sleep in a tree for the night and catch up with his companions the following day, but sleep would not be easy for him on this night. As he drifted in and out of a half-sleep daze and daydreams, his attention was captured by a bright white light zigzagging through the dim darkness of the trees, which he at first took to be a helicopter but would soon prove to be anything but when the mysterious light approached him to begin silently hovering nearby.

Shrum tried to stay out of sight, but it was obvious that it had noticed him, and not only that, three strange beings could be seen on the ground approaching the tree. He would describe two of them as humanoid in general shape, but the other as looking like some sort of outlandish robot, and he was startled when they began shaking the tree with great force, seemingly in an effort to dislodge him and make him drop out. As this was going on, the robot apparently exuded a white mist from its mouth that caused him to fall asleep. When he awoke not long after, the strange creatures were still seemingly trying to get him out of the tree, and he fought back by dropping lit matches on them, which caused them to back off a bit but did not stop them. He then resorted to shooting at them with his bow, noticing that his arrows caused sparks when they bounced off the robot.

As the night wore on, more of the robot-like creatures appeared, and the humanoids began trying to crawl up the tree towards him. Shrum claims that he shot arrows until he ran out, after which he began hurling anything he could find at the strange entities. At one point he was gassed again by that white smoke, but he would snap out of it again to find the creatures still unsuccessfully trying to reach him. He claims that this happened until sunrise, after which they finally gave up and left him alone. Somewhat corroborating his story is that his hunting companions would also later report having seen strange lights in the area at the time.

From 1967 we have an equally harrowing encounter, this time from the vicinity of town of Ririe, Idaho. On November 2, 1967, two Native American boys by the names of Guy Tossie and Will Begay were driving south on Highway 26 when they claim to have seen a small, glowing domed object appear in front of them in a flash of light, about eight feet wide and with humanoid entities of some sort observed within the transparent dome. As the two witnesses looked on in astonishment, their car suddenly came to a stop, the engine dying for no reason, after which the dome of the bizarre craft opened as if on hinges. After this, one of the entities within exited and floated to the ground as if defying gravity, and at this point the witnesses could see that it was only about 3 feet tall, with large black eyes and a hairless head.

This creature then apparently walked right up to their car and let itself in, taking a seat behind the wheel while pushing them out of its way, after which the car began to move forward towards the UFO, which was still hovering there about 5 feet over the road. The car then veered off-road into a field of wheat as the object followed it, the terrified witnesses unable to really comprehend what was going on. When the car rolled to a stop in the field, Tossie made a run for it, heading for the farmhouse of a local farmer named Willard Hammon. The whole way he was followed by the UFO, but it gave up and headed back to the car, where Begay was still with that enigmatic being at the wheel. The creature apparently turned to him to spew forth a barrage of unintelligible sounds “like a bird,” perhaps upset that Tossie had escaped, and then left the car to go floating back up to the waiting craft, which sped off in a zigzag path.

Tossie would later bring the farmer back to his friend, and they would both file a report with the police. Although authorities at first didn’t put much stock in the story, they would find several other witnesses who described seeing strange lights in the sky and their livestock acting bizarrely. Both of the witnesses would insist that these aliens had been trying to abduct them, and that Tossie’s break for freedom had probably saved them from an inscrutable fate. Coming to 1973 we have the od case of Lyndia Morel, who was a masseuse at the Swedish Sauna in Manchester, New Hampshire. On the evening of November 2, she finished a late shift at 2:45 AM and headed towards her home in nearby Goffstown, about eight miles west of Manchester. As she drove, she intermittently saw a strange light in the sky that flashed between yellow, blue, and green colors, but she at first thought it was either an aircraft or a planet. However, it kept blinking and moving about, appearing to get brighter as she drove along. At one point, it appeared right in front of her, so close that she could se that it was a glowing orb covered in hexagonal shapes “like a honeycomb.” At this point, her head was filled with a high-pitched squeal, and she found that she could not remove her hands from her steering wheel, even as her car began moving by itself towards the object. She could see through a window on the side of the object “a smallish humanoid figure standing behind a console of some sort,” which seemed to be trying to send her a telepathic message to calm down and not be afraid. She started to feel a sense of calm come over her, a sleepiness that she couldn’t resist.

It seems that she then suddenly snapped out of a sense of calm that had come over her and managed to regain control of her car, veering off to go speeding off towards a nearby house. She would stop the car and run to the residence to pound on the door even as the UFO hovered nearby as if watching her, that high pitched shriek still assailing her ears. When the residents of the house opened the door and saw the terrified woman, they let her in and called police. It was at this time that the mysterious craft gave up trying to get her and disappeared into the night.

A very spectacular case which may or not have been an attempted abduction, but which still seems worth mentioning, is that of an incident that allegedly went down at the Alsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota in 1977. On November 16 of that year, a security alarm was received at the base, which resulted in an A-1C Jenkins & A-1C Raeke dispatched to investigate the disturbance. When the two arrived at the location of the alarm, they spotted a bright light hovering over the fence line, and Raeke went to investigate. As he climbed a low hill towards the light, he then saw “an individual dressed in a glowing, green metallic uniform and wearing a helmet with visor,” who Raeke commanded to halt and surrender. The trespasser apparently ignored these commands, upon which Raeke aimed his M-16 and once again ordered the strange to stop. This entity then pointed some sort of object at Raeke and a beam of light allegedly struck the M-16 to disintegrate it and severely burn the airman’s hands.

This was an unambiguous sign of aggression, with Raeke taking cover and radioing for backup, and Jenkins soon came to his aid. Jenkins would see two further figures approaching, and he too ordered them to stop, but they came right towards them, prompting him to fire off two rounds from his own weapon. One of the bullets allegedly struck one of the intruders in the chest, while another hit its companion in the helmet, but this did not stop them. One of the figures emitted a beam from an object in its hand, which Jenkins dodged while taking cover. The two intruders then moved off and could be seen getting into a disc-shaped object measuring around 20 feet in diameter, after which they sped off. Raeke would later be found to have suffered second and third degree burns to his hands, as well as levels of radiation found on his person.

A more recent case was given to me personally by a witness who does not want to be named. This individual told me of a surreal experience that started off as just a night drive home from work one evening in an unspecified rural area of California. The story follows some familiar beats with this sort of case, with the car’s radio going haywire and the engine dying. It was at this point he saw a glowing disk around 50 feet in diameter bloom out of the night, and simultaneously felt numbed and paralyzed. He says there was a flash of light, after which he found himself inexplicably outside of his car in the desert night, with two large-headed entities dragging him towards the object. At this point, things would get very odd. He says:

One of these things was doing most of the dragging while the other had some sort of device trained on me. I had the suspicion that this was what was keeping me paralyzed and under control, and then something funny happened. I suddenly felt sensation returning to my limbs, and this creature looked surprised. It then started inspecting its device, and I kid you not, actually smacked its hand against it like you might do with a wonky remote control. I used this moment to kick out at them, knocking one to the ground, and I ran back to my car. The two creatures then seem to have given up. They just looked at me, went into their UFO, and sped off into the night. Although I was terrified at the time, in retrospect it is kind of funny that an alien should have an equipment malfunction like that.

Although the witness in this case provided me with the details very seriously, it is unknown how much veracity it has, and all attempts to get more information have failed. Nevertheless, it seems to belong here, and the thought of an alien having its equipment malfunction is too good to pass up. All of the cases such as these and others like them serve to show that these alien entities might not be as infallible as they are made out to be. Perhaps they are just as lost and at the whims of the fates as any of us, and that is perhaps a comforting thought the next time strange entities come for you in the night.