Those are questions I’ve been getting in the last few months. The sheer level of UFO activity that has been mentioned online and in other media (the only one for me being CNN) has clearly demonstrated that. Frankly, in my view if, tomorrow, the U.S. Government chose to reveal a bunch of dead, mangled, rotted alien bodies before the world, I don’t think that anyone would be worried, scared or even terrified. I think most people would be amazed, and eager to see what aliens really look like. That’s how I feel. But, it hasn’t happened. And, as I see it, there are only two options: (a) there will be disclosure; or (b) there  won’t be disclosure. But you knew that, right? Right! So, here’s how I see it: the reason why we aren’t getting full disclosure is because there’s something that is so monumentally bizarre or terrifying that no-one wants to reveal it. And because no-one in government wants to reveal it. The approach of the government may simply be: “We don’t know how to say it, or how reveal it, so let’s just hide it. Forever. ” I sometimes think that really is why we don’t have disclosure and may never will. Possibly, it can’t be told without fucking up all of human civilization.

(Nick Redfern)

I should stress I don’t have any new, secret rumors to support what I’m about to say now. None, at all. But, there is one picture that I believe could be the one that ensures we never get to know the complete, full picture. I’ll say this: I’m not a religious person. I have no particular stance on life after death, deities, gods, Hell, Heaven, reincarnation, and so on. Although, dogs just have to have souls. A greater animal was never created. Far better than us. Like most people, I occasionally wonder about it all, but that hardly makes things any clearer. It just means I occasionally have opinions on such controversies. There is however, one issue – directly related to all that Heaven and Hell stuff  – that I think would be the key issue that would prevent us (all of us) from being informed.  It’s a story that revolves around the human soul. Now and again, I’ve been told of tales concerning the human soul and its supposed links to the UFO subject. I started to get a lot of information on this issue in 2007 when I was researching my book, Final Events, and interviewing a few people from the so-called Collins Elite group.

Some of the C.E. members told me of a belief (not proof) in their ranks that the human soul was suspected of being a form of “fuel” for the black-eyed Grays of Ufology. In simple terms, the scenario was very similar to the picture in The Matrix: that our souls are nothing less than fodder to the aliens. Rather than being reliant on electricity, as is the picture. And, that’s why we can never be told, so it goes for some. Because it’s too terrifying: kind of like the classic words of Charles Fort: “We are someone else’s property.” I didn’t have long and lengthy conversations with the Collins Elite about all of this (I wish I did), but I can say that most of them had bought into that angle of soul-stealing ETs. And, when I did bring it up, it caused a lot of awkwardness. In some cases, fear. I’m hardly religious, but it even made me feel a bit clammy and cold when it was first shared with me.

Of course, there’s nothing new about this theory of aliens really being demons. When, however, you get the picture of it from a guy in his seventies, who worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency, and who was talking, in serious tones, about how the story cannot be told – and while leafing through the pages of Kurt Seligmann’s 1948 book, The Mirror Magic – things start to get a bit serious – and surreal. With that said, let’s take a look at what sounds eerily similar to some of the things I was told from 2007 to 2010. Probably the one person, more than any other, who concludes that the alien presence on our planet is driven by the “soul-scenario” is Nigel Kerner. He has written two books on the subject. They are The Song of the Greys and Grey Aliens and the Harvesting of Souls. Combined, they make a worryingly persuasive argument for the theory that aliens somehow “use” the human soul. Danielle Silverman, Kerner’s assistant, prepared the following for me on his theories and conclusions. She stated that Kerner,  “…went on to delineate a fascinating concept, explaining that a ‘soul’ might be a derivational information field that comes out of a natural cadence that came into the Universe with the big bang. This field holds the power to maintain information in what he called a morphogenetic electro-spatial field with an eternal scope of existence in whatever form circumstance allows. The soul is thus an ancestrally contiguous and coherent mechanism for holding information.”

(Nick Redfern) My copy of the Seligmann book

It’s also worth noting the experience of Sergeant John Healey, of the U.S. Army Reserve. On the night of October 18, 1973, he encountered a brightly-lit UFO, as he and his colleagues were on-board a UH-1H helicopter, rapidly closing in on Cleveland Hopkins, Airport, Ohio. In the aftermath of the encounter – which, in essence, was a near-collision between the two craft – Healey had several weird out-of-body experiences, as he told to UFO investigator, Jennie Zeidman. It was, he explained, as if he was dead in his bed, and that his spirit was above him, staring down at his sleeping form in the bed. That Sergeant Healey’s experiences occurred not in relation to the abduction phenomenon, but to a UFO sighting, suggests that other components of the UFO issue come into play when it comes to the relationship between UFOs, life after death, and our souls. Notably, several members of the helicopter crew were later contacted by representatives of the Department of Defense, who exhibited interest in – and deep concerns about – the UFO / soul-ingestion angle. This suggests a disturbing scenario: that certain elements of the U.S. Government may know something of the origins and agenda of the paranormal parasites.

It’s a fact that most people who have studied the claims of Bob Lazar focus their attentions on what he had to say about the UFOs allegedly held at S-4, as well as his statements concerning Element 115. There is one issue that doesn’t get the attention that it really should. It’s a part of Lazar’s story which takes things down a path that is filled with disturbing revelations involving the afterlife. One of the many briefing papers that Lazar said he read at S-4 stated that the aliens refer to us, the human race, as what we would call “Containers.” But, containers of what? Well, that’s where things get really controversial. Lazar told KLAS-TV’s George Knapp “religion was created so we have some rules and regulations for the sole purpose of not damaging the containers.” As for the “Containers,” the Knapp-Lazar discussion then went into the matter of human souls and their importance. How much of all this (some of it, all of it, none of it) is true, I have to say I don’t know. What I do know for sure, though, is that there are a lot of people in the U.S. government, and in the U.S. intelligence community, who do believe this is the real picture. And, from their perspective, that’s why we won’t get full disclosure. We’ll get a sanitized-type disclosure. Because, they say, it’s much easier on everyone. A case of what we don’t get won’t hurt us. Until, possibly, it eventually does.

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That question was put to me not long ago. It’s an interesting question, too. It took me a while to come up with a conclusion, but I finally did. I would say that the alleged (extremely alleged…) “UFO crash” at Aztec, New Mexico in March 1948 fits the bill. Either that, or it’s a complete pile of garbage. And, in-between, there’s some genuinely strange bits along the way. So, let’s begin. The strange story of the alleged UFO crash at Aztec, New Mexico in March 1948 – and the recovery of a number of dead “little men” at the site – is a real hotbed of lies, disinformation, and shady characters. Most of those same characters were best avoided by those with dollars to spare. The tale was made infamous in the pages of Frank Scully’s 1950 blockbuster, Behind the Flying Saucers; it was a book which turned out to be a huge seller. Today, the Aztec affair is seen by some ufologists as Roswell’s “little brother.” As its “skeleton in the cupboard” might be a far more apt description, however. Many researchers of the UFO phenomenon dismiss the Aztec incident as nothing but a hoax; one which was perpetrated by a shady businessman/conman named Silas Newton. His less-than-shining FBI file can be accessed at the FBI’s website, The Vault. When it came to stories of aliens from faraway worlds, making money was always the goal for Newton. And the only goal. Along for the ride with Newton was Leo Gebauer. He was a quasi-scientist and the Igor to Newton’s ego-driven Dr. Frankenstein.

(Nick Redfern) Aztec, New Mexico

There is, though, a very interesting and extremely odd aspect to the Newton/Aztec story. It serves to demonstrate how the UFO phenomenon was becoming the tool of manipulative disinformation specialists in the intelligence community. And not just of the Soviet Union. The United States was getting into the strange game, too. Back in 1998, the late Karl Pflock, ufologist and CIA employee (sometimes at the same time…), was approached by a still-anonymous source who had something very interesting to say about the Aztec caper, and about Newton too. It was a decidedly weird series of revelations that Pflock surely never anticipated receiving. To his dying day, Pflock refused to reveal the name of his informant in the shadows – rumors, however, were that the person may have been a nephew of Silas Newton – but, Pflock did say that all of the lunchtime meetings with his source occurred between July 11 and September 24, 1998 and took place in a restaurant in Bernalillo, New Mexico.

(Nick Redfern) The late Karl Pflock, who was both a Ufologist and an employee of the CIA

So the story goes, Pflock’s informant had in their hands twenty-seven pages taken, or rather torn, from an old and faded, lined journal. No prizes for guessing who that journal had belonged to. That’s right, sly, old Silas Newton. Pflock was told that Newton had kept journals and diaries not just for years, but for decades. They were jammed with entertaining tales of sexual conquests, of Hollywood starlets, of the fleecing of the rich and the gullible, and of wild adventures across the United States. The outcome of all this? Newton decided, around the turn of the 1970s, that it was right about time for him to write-up his version of the Aztec controversy. It would surely have been a definitive page-turner. Death, however, inconveniently intervened in 1972, when Newton passed away in his mid-eighties. What happened to all of those journals is anyone’s guess. As for those few pages that Pflock was allowed to see – and to transcribe word for word – they tell a tale of undeniable weirdness. By his own admittance, and a couple of years after the Aztec story surfaced in Frank Scully’s book, Newton was clandestinely visited by two representatives of “a highly secret U.S. Government entity,” as Pflock carefully and tactfully described it.

(Nick Redfern) Aztec, New Mexico: the site of a crashed UFO? It depends on who you ask

Those same representatives of the government told Newton, in no uncertain terms, that they knew his Aztec story was a complete and bald-faced lie. Utter bullshit, in fact. Incredibly, though, they wanted Newton to keep telling the tale to just about anyone and everyone who would listen. This caused Pflock to ponder on an amazing possibility: “Did the U.S. Government or someone associated with it use Newton to discredit the idea of crashed flying saucers so a real captured saucer or saucers could be more easily kept under wraps?” Far more intriguing, though, and highly relevant to the theme of this book, is the next question that Pflock posed: “Was this actually nothing to do with real saucers but instead some sort of psychological warfare operation [italics mine]?” With the Newton revelations in hand, Pflock, no later than 1999, came to believe that back in the early fifties someone in the government, the intelligence community, or the military of the United States – and maybe even a swirling combination of all three – wanted the Aztec story further circulated. The purpose: as a means to try and convince the Russians that the U.S. military had acquired, or captured, alien technology. When, in reality, it had no such thing in its possession at all. Now, you see why I consider the Aztec affair of March 1948 to have been the most complicated UFO case of all time.

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A popular sketch on The Late Show with David Letterman was “Is This Anything?”, where the host and the bandleader Paul Shaffer watched an individual or group perform an unusual stunt, then discussed whether the act was “something” or “nothing.” Archeologists excavating artifacts often seem to engage in a similar game as they attempt to figure out what is historically or monetarily valuable and what is just old stuff. A good example of this ‘game’ took place recently on the Tibetan Plateau with the discovery of hand and footprints on a wall that date back to the middle of the Pleistocene era, between 169,000 and 226,000 years ago. That’s significant, but it becomes game-changing as archeologists play a game that might be called, ‘Is This Art’? The answer could determine of this is the oldest artwork ever found or just cave kids having fun.

“The question is: What does this mean? How do we interpret these prints? They’re clearly not accidentally placed. There’s not a utilitarian explanation for these. So what are they? My angle was, can we think of these as an artistic behavior, a creative behavior, something distinctly human. The interesting side of this is that it’s so early.”

Are handprints art?

Thomas Urban, research scientist in the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell and co-author of the paper, “Earliest Parietal Art: Hominin Hand and Foot Traces from the Middle Pleistocene of Tibet,” published in Science Bulletin, tells Phys.org about his analysis of five footprints and five handprints found on a rocky promontory at Quesang on the Tibetan Plateau in 2018. The prints were found in travertine, a freshwater limestone that was soft when they were made but hardened over time. While footprints are common, handprints are rare, and Urban suspected these were examples of parietal (immobile) art similar to hand stenciling often found on prehistoric cave walls – and the children who made them had a purpose in mind. (Photos here.)

“These young kids saw this medium and intentionally altered it. We can only speculate beyond that. This could be a kind of performance, a live show, like, somebody says, ‘hey, look at me, I’ve made my handprints over these footprints.'”

The oldest confirmed examples of prehistoric art are found on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi and in the El Castillo cave in Spain and date to between 40,000 and 45,000 years ago. The famous Chauvet cave paintings in France are 30,000 years old. If the Tibetan hand and footprints are deemed to be real works of art, their age of 169,000 to 226,000 years almost pushes the others into the Museum of Modern Art, not the Museum of Natural History. Once that question is decided, an even bigger one looms. Study co-authors Matthew Bennett, Professor of Environmental and Geographical Sciences at Bournemouth University, and Sally Reynolds, Principal Academic in Hominin Palaeoecology at Bournemouth University, ask it in The Conversation:

“Were the children members of our own species, Homo sapiens, or members of another extinct archaic human species? There is nothing in the tracks to resolve this question. They may have been an enigmatic group of archaic humans referred to as the Denisovans, given other recent skeletal finds of this species on the plateau.”

As we learn more about the Denisovans, the Neanderthals and other potential archaic humans, we find more reasons to consider them as peers rather than less intelligent – and artistic — hominins.

It may have started 226,000 years ago, but there’s still a need for art in our modern world. Teach art in schools again!

Several prisoners reported seeing a UFO hovering over the jail where they are currently incarcerated and then a mysterious red rash appeared on their skin. In fact, one of the inmates stated that he never believed in UFOs or aliens until this incident and that he was left “speechless” after the encounter. The sighting occurred at HMP The Verne in Dorset, England.

The inmate wrote a letter to a prison magazine called Inside Times that read in part, “I do not believe in the supernatural or aliens from Mars, but what we recently saw here in this prison was really very strange and still leaves me speechless.”

He went on to explain the encounter, “My landing was out on exercise, all doing our own thing, some were working out and others, like me, were walking around, you get the picture.” “I spotted a hawk up on the battlements, just hovering like it had spotted a mouse or something.” At that point, he claimed, a “very bright light” appeared in the sky. “This object started to come closer and closer until it was actually hovering over our exercise area at about 100 or so foot above us.”

And he wasn’t the only one who witnessed the strange object as he wrote, “We were, by this time, all, including officers, standing with our heads tilted back and looking up at this strange thing.” “Then the object started to shrink and collapse in on itself until it sort of just dissolved into a cloud of mist.”

Incredibly, liquid began coming down from the sky which had very disturbing after-effects, “Then it started raining on us and, the next day, we all came out in a red rash.”

It’s still unclear as to what the mysterious object was but the inmate who wrote the letter stated that it could have possibly been a secret military craft from a base that’s located not too far away. But others have different theories as he noted, “I have heard many different explanations from different men.” “Some say there is a military base on Portland and that this could have been some sort of military ‘Black Project’.” “Others say it was ball lightning. I don’t know what it was except it was very strange.” And of course, the idea of it being extraterrestrial in nature has also been hypothesized.

It would be bad enough spending time behind bars without having to deal with a mysterious rash from an alleged UFO encounter.

There is no doubt that octopuses are one of the strangest creatures on Earth – so strange and intelligent for deep-sea cephalopod that some serious scientists have suggested they might be aliens. There is no doubt that flightless yet aquatic penguins are one of the strangest birds on the planet … you see where this is going. Scientists studying gentoo penguins have discovered that they produce a chemical recently detected on Venus and they’re wondering … could penguins have migrated to Earth from its cloudy neighbor or another planet?

“We’re convinced the phosphine finding is real. But we don’t know what’s making it.”

Do I look like an alien to you?

Dr. David Clements, a Natural Science and Physics professor at Imperial College London, says in The Daily Star that phosphine, an extremely flammable and toxic gas compound with the chemical formula PH3 that was recently detected on Venus, has been found in the feces of gentoo penguins (Pygoscelis papua), a species found primarily in the Falkland Islands and most known for their loud trumpeting sounds which they make with their heads thrown back like a marching band horn player. You may recall that astronomers in Hawaii and Chile detected the chemical signature of phosphine high in the atmosphere of Venus in September 2020 – a potential “this changes everything” find because phosphine on Earth is only associated with life forms.

Dr. David Clements was also involved with that research and cautioned at the time:

“It’s not a smoking gun. It’s not even gunshot residue on the hands of your prime suspect, but there is a distinct whiff of cordite in the air which may be suggesting something.”

It may not have been a smoking gun – and other scientists agreed that the phosphine on Venus could have been generated by a chemical process – but that hasn’t stopped Clements and others from continuing to study gentoo guano for hints into how gentoos create the unusual chemical … not to mention how they survive making and excreting it other than staying away from matches and open flames. The Daily Star is not considered to be a scientific journal but it appears to be the primary source reporting on this research, which it notes is connected to the upcoming December launch of the James Webb telescope which will expand by magnitudes our ability to search for life in the galaxy. Does this mean astronomers will be looking for extraterrestrial gentoo penguins?

A sign of extraterrestrial gentoo penguins?

“There are some anaerobic bacteria that produce phosphine. It’s found in pond slime and the guts of badgers and penguin guano.”

That’s right – the first extraterrestrial life future space explorers may encounter on planets or moons showing phosphine are gentoo penguins, badgers and pond slime … or their alien counterparts.

Is it too soon to start training astronauts how to play the trumpet?

One place where UFOs seem to be frequently encountered is on the lonely roads and highways of our world. These objects seem to be drawn to such desolate places, and there are numerous stories of UFOs stopping cars or even abducting people from such places. One subspecies of such encounters is that of vehicles that have been involved with chasing or being chased by these mysterious objects, and here we will look at some strange cases of this.

On the evening of August 4, 1963, 18-year old Ronnie Austin and his girlfriend, Phyllis Bruce were driving along Route 15 heading towards Wayne City, Illinois, after a trip to Mt. Vernon. At some point, at around 11:30 p.m., they noticed a large, glowing white object moving along nearby at treetop level, which they soon noticed seemed to be following them. When they slowed down, so did it, and when they sped up it gave pursuit, eerily keeping pace with them much to their astonishment. On several occasions, the UFO came very close to the vehicle, only to speed off and follow once again, and it pursued the terrified couple all the way to Phyllis’ house, where her family saw it as well. Once there, it went off to hover over a nearby electronic relay tower, where it remained motionless for a time. At this point, Ronnie decided to make a run for it, and things would get even stranger from there. Francis Ridge, who was at the time a field investigator and the subcommittee chairman of National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) would later investigate the case, and said of what happened next:

As soon as he pulled away from the Bruce home, the object began to follow. In our interview with the boy’s father (Orville) on August 12, he told us that this is what scared Ronnie, the thought that the UFO was waiting for him to be alone before it took off after him. He had to head south and the object was on his left now. When he turned east onto another gravel road, the object suddenly shot diagonally ahead of him over a barn about a mile away, just beyond the T-road. The object now changed from a brilliant white to a duller or dimmer light with an orange tinge.

Ronnie said he “really poured the coal” to the car and must have been doing 120 mph when he topped the hill on the gravel road. Then, he reported, the object flared bright orange and came straight toward him at high speed. It hovered over the car, within 100′. Just before it hovered it had swerved upward and Ronnie judged its size as that of an automobile. At the point right over the car his radio (tuned to WLS) went crazy with static, which was described as a loud whining sound. At that time, he noticed a “cooling effect”. The object made another pass at the car, this time west to east, and at this point where the object was again overhead, the engine of the car started missing. The object proceeded back to its position over the barn, hovered, changed to a duller orange. This small road running east to west is only about a mile long and the events that took place according to the witness indicates an increase in activity by the object, which really had the boy scared by now.

Ronnie now turned north at the intersection (extension of road not shown) and headed for home which was over 3 miles away. The object followed him again. As he headed west down the lane leading to his home, the object cut across the road behind him to the left. He spun his car around in the driveway in front of the house, got out of the car and ran inside. The object was now above another farmhouse in the east about 300 yards away.

He would then tell his father, Orville Austin, of what was happening, who grabbed a shotgun and ran to the door to see it for himself. The object then moved towards the house to loom nearby, and realizing that the weapon wouldn’t do too much good, Orville put it down, closed the door, and turned off the lights. They then called the police, who arrived to see the object too, and several neighbors also saw it. It would lurk about the vicinity for nearly an hour, its intentions unknown, before speeding off into the night. According to subsequent news reports and Ridge’s report, Ronnie’s car would be found to have higher radiation levels than normal, and he would also claim that the Air Force had done an investigation into it, after which they had swept it under the carpet. Ridge would say of this:

Evidence gathered by the Air Force indicates that the car was slightly radioactive or magnetized. This was determined by the type of readings called off by members of the AF team as the family watched and listened. An interesting historical note for the record, the Air Force team consisted of three men. These were Lt. Col. Robert J. Friend, then the Director of Project Blue Book; Capt. Hector Quintanilla, and Sgt. Charles R. Sharp. Later in the year or early in 1964, Quintanilla became the Project Director. The AF, and especially Quintanilla, were ridiculing many witnesses who claimed sightings of UFOs. The “explanation” issued after the investigation was “a refueling operation” or the “planet Venus. The AF must have considered this case important. They had flown in the special team of physicists from Wright-Patterson AFB, Dayton, Ohio. Normally, when investigating a case, they would send the local “UFO officer” from the nearest airbase. In this case it would have been Scott AFB at Belleville, Illinois (near St. Louis). Something strange was going on in the midwest, and AF Intelligence was interested in something that “didn’t exist.” A quick check would have eliminated a refueling operation and the need for an onsite.

The following year, on June 29, 1964, a man named Beauford E. Parham was driving home near Lavonia, Georgia, in the United States, when he was startled to see a very bright light approaching him from directly ahead. As it drew nearer, he could see that it was “a top-shaped object,” about 6 feet high and 8 feet wide, spinning and “emitting a hissing sound like a million snakes,” and there were flames spewing from several portholes around it. The mysterious object then stopped right in front of him, matching his speed, seeming to toy with him, and at this point, Parham would say that he was in some sort of daze that had washed over him. It then made several passes at him, emitting a mist or vapor of some sort, before passing right over the car to disappear. Parham would later develop a burning sensation in his arms, and noticed that the paint on his car in some spots had bubbled up as if subjected to high heat. What was going on here? We’ll probably never know.

Image by Steve Baxter

Another very spectacular encounter allegedly happened on April 17, 1966, and involved police officers. In the early morning hours of that day, at around 5 a.m., deputies Dale Spaur and Wilbur ‘Barney’ Neff, with the Portage County, Ohio, Sheriff’s Department were on patrol near the town of Ravena, Ohio, when they noticed a strange lighted object coming up over some trees from a nearby wood and experienced a deep hum like “an overloaded transformer.” Spaur would explain of what they saw:

When I looked in this wooded area behind us, I saw this thing. At this time, it was coming up… to about tree top level. I’d say about one hundred feet. It started moving toward us. As it came over the trees, I looked at Barney and he was still watching the car, and he didn’t say nothing and the thing kept getting brighter and the area started to get light. It was very bright; it’d make your eyes water. I told him to look over his shoulder, and he did. He just stood there with his mouth open for a minute, as bright as it was, and he looked down. And I started looking down and I looked at my hands and my clothes weren’t burning or anything, when it stopped right over on top of us. I was petrified, and, uh, so I moved my right foot, and everything seemed to work all right. And evidently, he made the same decision I did, to get something between me and it, or us and it, or whatever you would say. So we both went for the car, we got in the car and we sat there.

Image by Steve Baxter

When they reported it, their sergeant then told them to pursue the object, and they proceeded to chase it through the countryside as it headed over the road, illuminating the ground beneath it as it did. It was moving at a brisk pace, travelling at around 100 mph and still pulling ahead as the two officers tried to keep up with it, with other police officers joining in the pursuit as they did. Police Officer Wayne Huston of East Palestine, Ohio, near the Pennsylvania border, saw the UFO pass with the police chasing it sirens blaring, and he joined in as well, tearing off after it along with the others. They chased it for nearly 85 miles, with numerous patrol cars from different jurisdictions chasing it, and then it suddenly stopped to hover there over the road as they all screeched to a halt. There was allegedly chatter that the Air Force was scrambling fighter jets, and then the object just shot straight up into the sky at breathtaking speed. The Air Force would quickly step in to brush it all off in typical clumsy fashion, and UFO researcher Richard Hall would say of this:

The Air Force “identified” the UFO as a satellite, seen part of the time, and confused with the planet Venus. Under pressure from Ohio officials, Major Hector Quintanilla, chief of PROJECT BLUE BOOK, had an acrimonious confrontation with witnesses and refused to change the identification, although it was pointed out to him that they had seen the UFO in addition to Venus, and the moon at the conclusion of the observation. Major Quintanilla also denied that any jets had been scrambled. William B. Weitzel conducted an exhaustive investigation on behalf of the NATIONAL INVESTIGATIONS COMMITTEE ON AERIAL PHENOMENA (NICAP), obtaining taped interviews, signed statements, sketches, and all pertinent data which was assembled into a massive report that was made available to congressional investigators. When the UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO UFO PROJECT was initiated in 1966, a copy of Weitzel’s report was hand-delivered to the director, Dr. Edward U. CONDON, for his consideration. The CONDON REPORT, published two years later, does not mention the case.

From 1967, we have a case from the UK, which supposedly played out October 24, 1967 somewhere between Okehampton and Holsworthy, in Devon, England, and involved two police constables by the names of Clifford Waycott and Roger Willey. While they were driving along on patrol, they saw a “pulsating flying cross” that was “star-spangled – just like looking through wet glass,” and was moving about just over the tree line beside the road. They decided to pursue the object, which immediately started accelerating away from them as they sped along, reaching speeds of up to 90 mph before they gave up for fear of getting in an accident and the object sped off into the night to join a second object that appeared. The report was corroborated by a farmer in the area who also saw the spectacle, and others in the immediate area began calling in with reports of seeing the same “fiery cross,” suggesting that the bizarre flying object was lurking about for some time. The case, which would be mentioned in UFO Flying Saucers over Britain, by Robert Chapman, has never been explained.

Perhaps one of the strangest UFO chases of all comes from 1988, in Australia. On January 20, 1988, Faye Knowles, her adult sons Patrick (24), Sean (21) and Wayne (18), and their two dogs were making their way towards Melbourne, Australia across a vast expanse of limestone bedrock called the Nullarbor Plain. The area is a remote desert moonscape of a place, with no one around for miles and other cars a rarity, so it was considered odd when in the very early morning hours a light was spotted some distance ahead, just outside of the tiny town of Mundrabilla. The light seemed to get steadily brighter as they watched it, and as they got closer they could see that it was semi-spherical or egg shaped and was most certainly not another vehicle as it was just a single bright light and seemed to be hovering in the air over that desolate expanse.

As the family struggled to comprehend what they were seeing, the strange object allegedly emitted a beam of light that swept towards their vehicle and caused the driver, Sean, to take evasive maneuvers. The beam missed the car, but this is when Sean would claim the object had begun to follow them down that lonely roadway, easily keeping pace with them no matter how fast they went. They apparently passed another car going the other direction, after which the mysterious object stopped pursuing them and followed the other vehicle. Sean the reportedly turned the car around to follow the other car and its UFO pursuer to figure out what was going on, but thought better of it and turned around yet again. The object then must have decided to go after them again, because it was soon ominously closing in on them once again.

It purportedly got brighter and closer, passing them a few times to circle around to approach again before positioning itself right above their car as the terrified family within screamed out in fright. There was then a thump on the roof, and the car slowed down as if something very heavy were sitting atop it, leading them to the horrible realization that it had actually lowered itself to make contact with the vehicle. According to the witnesses, it then issued a shrill, ear piercing sound, and Faye would say that they were overcome with the sense of something invading their minds, later saying, “It felt like something was going into our heads,” and Patrick would say “I felt like my brain was being sucked out.” They also claimed that their voices became distorted and that they moved sluggishly, as if underwater or experiencing a slowing of time itself. Things would intensify when they then felt the car physically lift off of the road, after which they were shaken violently from side to side as a grey mist filled the car and dropped back down with such force that it blew one of their tires and disabled the vehicle to leave to leave it lying in that unforgiving place like a wounded beast. Fay Knowles would say of the otherworldly encounter:

I wound down the window and I felt this thing on the roof… all of this smoke stuff started coming into the car, the car was covered in black stuff. It was a small light and all of a sudden it became big like this, like a big ball. We thought we were dying, then we got out the car and we hid behind a little tree and the bushes and it couldn’t find us.

When the cowering family were sure the object was gone, they warily went back to their car, changed the tire, and got out of there as fast as they could, eventually making their way to Mundrabilla, where they excitedly told of what had happened to them. Interestingly, a trucker at the gas station there would tell them that he had also seen the strange, eerie light out over the desert as well. When their car was examined, it was found to be banged up, and both the exterior and interior covered with a fine film of black material like soot or ash that had an unusual odor like “a blown fuse.” The Knowles were able to get some truckers to go with them out to where the incident had supposedly occurred, where they allegedly found odd skid marks on the road that seemed to show that the vehicle has been dragged sideways by some powerful force, making it all even stranger.

The police would subsequently examine the vehicle to find a grey powder that was found to have a similar chemical composition to the coating used on NASA space shuttles. Oddly, the South Australia police were apparently very eager to distance themselves from it all, finish the investigation, and sweep it under the carpet, and the whole case was just sort of filed away even as it was hitting the news in a big way. And that was that. The rather harrowing case has been picked apart by Ufologists and skeptics ever since, but no clear answer has ever been agreed upon. What happened to this family out on that bleak stretch of road? What forces came calling for them to follow them around and terrorize them? No one really knows.

Special thanks to Steve Baxter for his artwork.

What does NASA think about the existence of extraterrestrials? NASA is a huge government organization with a lot of different opinions that are tempered by public relations people who work hard to keep any secrets from leaking out … but sometimes they do. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence falls under the department of astrobiology, so it seems appropriate that NASA astrobiologist Dr. Lindsay Hays answered the question, “Do Aliens Exist?” on an official NASA Instagram page. Does that make it NASA’s official stance? Let’s find out.

“Do aliens exist? Extraterrestrial life has never been discovered. However, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.”

In 90 seconds (that’s not a good sign that this will be a profound, in-depth and potentially this-changes-everything kind of answer), Dr. Hays takes a quick trip to Mars, where humans have done the most on-site exploring for life, and to other planets and their moons where life probably has a better chance due to an abundance of water. She then expands the definition of life on Earth to expand all of the way down to microbes, pointing out that this means every square inch of the planet is covered in life, while arguing that our definition of life on Earth is changing so our definition of extraterrestrial life must change too. And if we expand the definition of life, that leads to new ideas on the definition of ‘habitable’.

“Not just in our solar system, the more exo-planets we find around other stars, the more we learn about how many environments could exist for life.”

If you haven’t figured it out by now, this is pretty much just 90 seconds of fluff (watch it on YouTube) with nothing concrete that we could hold NASA to, and nothing anywhere near an everything-changing leak.

If you haven’t been convinced up until that point, Dr. Hays closes, not with the comments of an astronaut or a current fellow astrobiologist studying the Mars rocks – she quotes Carl Sagan instead.

“The universe is a pretty big place. If it’s just us it seems like an awful waste of space.”

That’s true. Unfortunately, the same could be said of this 90 second commentary on the NASA Instagram page. Nothing personal, Dr. Hays. You probably had much more you wanted to say, but your bosses were dangling your paycheck in front of you. One of these days, a NASA scientist will break out of the shackles and expose the truth. In the meantime, we would be wise to look at some of the other things Carl Sagan said about our lack of knowledge about space and science.

“We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.”

“We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.”

If it hasn’t already. We miss you, Carl.