It's a regular fact that if you write books, you'll get feedback. And, sometimes, a lot of it. With that said, I thought I would share with you some fascinating UFO cses that you may not have heard of, but which came my way. Operation Bulldog – held in September 1949, and overseen by the UK’s Fighter Command and Bomber Command – was a show of strength to the Soviets. It demonstrated that the West could take swift and decisive action in the event the Russians flexed their muscles a bit too much. And, for good measure, the operation also involved the air-forces of the United States, Belgium, France, and Holland. The Soviets took careful and concerned notice, which was the whole point. It appears it was not just the Russians that kept a beady eye on the military maneuvers. Just possibly, entities from another world did likewise. At the time Bulldog was held, the late J.R. Oliver was a radar-operator at a British Royal Air Force base called Sandwich, which was situated in the English county of Kent. Oliver said: “Even so long ago, it was almost impossible to fly a glider across the [English] Channel without it being plotted. The exercise was structured in such a way that the technical resources and personnel of the defensive screen were stretched to the limit.”

Oliver added that the staff of RAF Sandwich “were fully skilled and right on top of their job. Two watches were kept, A and B, on alternate twelve-hour shifts for the duration of Bulldog.” According to Oliver on one particular night, around midnight, “things had gone slack,” and his group was told it could “take a break.” It was a break that didn’t last for long, as Oliver noted: “Within about fifteen minutes the PBX operator came in, approached the Duty Controller and advised him that Beachy Head radar was passing a plot to us on a large flying object and would we track it?” They did exactly that. It became very clear, and very quickly, that this was no ordinary aircraft. Oliver recalled: “Reaching a position out to sea off the ‘heel’ of Kent, it abruptly turned north and as it approached the Thames estuary we passed it on to Martlesham radar, with whom we had been in contact.”

Oliver offered something remarkable: “Flying at close to 50,000 feet, the air speed of the object we had observed and plotted in accordance with RAF standard procedures was assessed at very nearly 3,000 miles per hour. The general consensus regarding its size, among the very best experienced radar personnel engaged in the operations, was that the object offered an echo similar to that of a large passenger or freight surface vessel, something in the region of 15,000 or 20,000 tons.” In typical British understatement, Oliver said there was “quite a bit of buzz about this.”

Now, let's jump to Puerto Rico and January 19, 1999. On my first visit to Puerto Rico – in the summer of 2004 and with a crew from the SyFy Channel – I had the opportunity to speak with a woman who had a hair-raising encounter in the island’s El Yunque rainforest on one particular, Saturday morning. As the woman picked plantains, she was amazed to see a definitive flying saucer – silver in color and about the size of a large car – silently descend in a nearby clearing. That amazement became trepidation, when a sliding-door on the outside of the craft opened. Trepidation was immediately replaced by sheer terror when, out of the surrounding trees, a fast-running, spiky-headed Chupacabra raced towards the unearthly craft, and jumped inside it! In seconds, the object took to the skies and was lost from view. Despite the outlandish nature of the story, the woman stood by it, even sharing the facts for the Sy-Fy Channel’s film-crew. A brief story, but an amazing one.

On January 25, 1968, secret was revealed. On this specific day, Suzanne Clarke, then of Gallipolis, Ohio was told an amazing story by her father. According to the tale, Clarke’s father decided to come clean on something that he knew of the UFO phenomenon; something amazing and, if true, having a bearing on national security – a major bearing, in fact. Clarke’s father maintained that in 1965, three years earlier, and while employed at NORAD – the North American Air Defense Command at Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado – he saw, under circumstances that he declined to explain, a series of black-and-white, aerial photographs of three small, large-headed bodies strewn around a desert floor, and which also showed a large amount of silvery, bright debris. The location, Clarke’s father said, was New Mexico, and the photos were taken in 1947. Of course, this strongly suggests the now-famous Roswell affair of 1947 – although, admittedly, Clarke’s father made no reference to Roswell. Clarke was warned by her father not to reveal what he had told her until after his death – which occurred in 1981. Such was the concern, and even fear, in his voice, however, Clarke chose to remain silent until the late-1990s. So far, there has been no knock on the door from the Men in Black.

May 19, 1986, UFOs invade Brazilian airspace: one of the most notable encounters with not just one UFO, but a squadron of them, took place in the skies of Brazil on May 19, 1986. A U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency report describes the facts: “According to sources, at least 20 unidentified objects were observed by several aircrews and on radar the night of 19 May 86. The objects were first seen by the pilot of a Xingu aircraft, transporting Ozires Silva, former President of Embraer, between Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Fighters were launched from Santa Cruz AFB at approximately 2100 hours. Although all three made radar contact, only one of the three pilots managed to see what he described as red, white and green lights. Shortly afterward, radar contact was made with similar objects near Brasilia and three Mirages were launched from Anapolis AB. All made radar and visual contact at 20,000 feet. They reported that they were escorted by thirteen of these discs with red, green and white lights at a distance of one to three miles.” The report comes to an end in a decidedly intriguing fashion: “...there is too much here to be ignored. Three visual sightings and positive radar contact from three different types of radar systems, leads one to believe that something weird arrived over Brazil on the night of 19 May.”

June 14, 2005: Located in the Piney Woods area of East Texas, the Big Thicket has a most apt moniker: it is a huge, 83,000-acre area of woodland. “Dense” barely begins to describe the massive, forested environment, which is home to numerous wild animals, including alligators and wildcats. Running through the heart of the Big Thicket is a long, thin, and incredibly sandy old road called Bragg Road. That’s not what the locals call it, though. To them, it is known as Ghost Light Road. There is a very good reason for this: for at least three centuries, people have reported seeing weird, small balls of light flitting through the trees late at night. But, we’re not talking about anything quite as down to earth as fireflies. These particular lights vary in size from – approximately – a tennis ball to a beach ball. They also exhibit evidence of intelligence: witnesses describe the lights approaching them, even circling them, in what is occasionally perceived as a playful fashion. Such is the interest that the lights provoke in the people that live there, and in visitors too, a historical marker has been erected at the start of Bragg Road and which details the strange story of the lights. I know all this, as I have seen one of the mysterious ghost lights myself, late on the night of June 12, 2005. I was standing on Bragg Road when the approximately basketball-sized light appeared – very briefly. What it was, I have no idea. But, it was there all the same. Now, onto another fascinating case.

Declassified US Government files reveal that on a particular occasion in July 1952 – the very month that Washington, D.C. was hit by a veritable tsunami of UFO encounters – a man named Karl Hunrath complained to his local police department about something very weird indeed. Who knows what the cops thought of it all, but it basically went like this: in the early hours of a Sunday morning in July, someone broke into Hunrath’s home, injected his arm full of chemicals - which rendered him into a distinctly altered state of mind - and proceeded to tell him that he had been chosen to play a significant role in the alien mission on Earth. A very groggy Hunrath could only look on amazed from his bed as the somewhat foreign-sounding – put perfectly human-appearing – alien told him: “I am Bosco. You have been chosen to enter our brotherhood of galaxies.” Typical Space-Brother spiel, in other words.

 The files continue that the suit-and-tie-wearing Bosco advised Hunrath the brothers from beyond were deeply worried by our warlike ways, and so action had to be taken against those dastardly elements of the human race that wanted to spoil everyone else’s fun. There was not to be any The Day the Earth Stood Still-style ultimatum for one and all, however. Nope. The aliens wished to recruit sympathetic humans to aid their righteous cause. Or, more correctly, get someone else to do all their dirty work while they lurked safely in the shadows. And as Hunrath came to quickly realize, he was now one of the chosen few. But there was more. Bosco, via - according to the FBI - “occult techniques,” downloaded into Hunrath’s mind countless megabytes of data on how to build a terrible weapon that had the ability to destroy aircraft; specifically, the aircraft of the US military, who the Space-Brothers viewed as being just about as dangerous to world peace as the dastardly commies. 

“I am Bosco and that will be its name, too,” boomed the alleged alien, in reference to the device that he wanted Hunrath to not just build, but also deploy. Far too stunned and drugged to move, Hunrath could only watch in a mixture of befuddlement and shock as Bosco then turned on his heels and left for his – one might be inclined to assume after an experience like that – flying saucer. There was no amazing “Beam me up, Scotty”-type exit for Bosco, however. For an alien, Bosco had a very down to earth means of making good his departure: he pulled back the curtains of Hunrath’s bedroom-window, clambered out, and vanished into the depths of the early morning blackness of Hunrath’s front-yard! The curious encounter ended as weirdly as it had begun. There's no doubt it was a classic "Contactee" case.

One particularly fascinating scenario for the sudden appearance of UFOs in the Earth’s skies was brought to the attention of officialdom by a little-known, but well-respected, source. His name was Edwin M. Bailey. In the summer of 1947, Bailey was living in Stamford, Connecticut. At the time, he was working in the Physics Division of the American Cyanamid Research Laboratories on West Main Street. In the 1970s, the American Cyanamid Company was one of the United States’ top 100 manufacturing companies. Its output included antibiotics, vaccines, industrial chemicals, pesticides, and acrylic plastics. Far more notable is the fact that at the height of the Second World War, Bailey worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Not only that, the specific branch of MIT to which Bailey was assigned was the Radiation Laboratory. It was a body that played an important role in the development of the atomic bomb, under the overall control of the Manhattan Project. On top of that, Bailey had graduated at the University of Arizona.

The FBI recorded in its files the following: “Bailey stated that the topic of ‘flying saucers’ had caused considerable comment and concern to the present day scientists and indicated that he himself had a personal theory concerning the ‘flying saucers.’” As to the specific nature of that theory, it was, to say the least, grim. The FBI noted: “Bailey stated that it is quite possible that actually the ‘flying saucers’ could be radio controlled germ bombs or atom bombs which are circling the orbit of the earth and which could be controlled by radio and directed to land on any designated target at the specific desire of the agency or country operating the bombs.” Disturbing, to say the least." Indeed!

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

A few days ago, I made a mention here at Mysterious Universe of the creature known as the Owlman - something that is close to Mothman of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, USA. But, I only made a brief review of it. Today, though, I'm going to take a bigger and deeper study of the winged phenomenon. In early 1976 the dense trees surrounding Mawnan Old Church, Cornwall, England became a veritable magnet for a diabolical beast that was christened the Owlman. The majority of those that crossed paths with the creature asserted that it was human-like in both size and design, and possessed a pair of large wings, fiery red eyes, claws, and exuded an atmosphere of menace. No wonder people make parallels with Mothman. It all began during the weekend of Easter 1976, when two young girls, June and Vicky Melling, had an encounter of a truly nightmarish kind in Mawnan Woods. The girls were on holiday with their parents when they saw a gigantic, feathery “bird man” hovering over the 13th Century church. It was a story that their father, Don Melling, angrily shared with a man named Tony “Doc” Shiels. I say “angrily” because Shiels was a noted, local magician who Melling came to believe had somehow instigated the whole affair. Or as Shiels, himself, worded it: “…some trick that had badly frightened his daughters.” Shiels denied any involvement in the matter whatsoever. But that was only the start of things.

 Another one to see the Owlman was Jane Greenwood, also a young girl. She wrote a letter to the local newspaper, the Falmouth Packet, during the summer of 1976 that detailed her own startling encounter: “I am on holiday in Cornwall with my sister and our mother. I, too, have seen a big bird-thing. It was Sunday morning, and the place was in the trees near Mawnan Church, above the rocky beach. It was in the trees standing like a full-grown man, but the legs bent backwards like a bird’s. It saw us, and quickly jumped up and rose straight up through the trees. How could it rise up like that?” Two fourteen year old girls, Sally Chapman and Barbara Perry, also had the misfortune to have a run-in with the Owlman in 1976. At around 10.00 p.m., while camping in the woods of Mawnan, and as they sat outside of their tent making a pot of tea, the pair heard a strange hissing noise. On looking around, they saw the infernal Owlman staring in their direction from a distance of about sixty feet. Sally said: “It was like a big owl with pointed ears, as big as a man. The eyes were red and glowing. At first I thought that it was someone dressed-up, playing a joke, trying to scare us. I laughed at it. We both did. Then it went up in the air and we both screamed. When it went up you could see its feet!”  Barbara added: “It’s true. It was horrible, a nasty owl-face with big ears and big red eyes. It was covered in grey feathers. The claws on its feet were black. It just flew up and disappeared in the trees.”

While there were rumors of additional sightings of the creature in the immediate years that followed, it wasn’t until the summer of either 1988 or 1989 that the Owlman put in an appearance that can be documented to a significant degree. In this case, the witness was a young boy, dubbed “Gavin” by a good friend of mine, Jon Downes (who wrote an entire book on the winged monster, titled The Owlman and Others), and his then girlfriend, Sally. The beast, Gavin told Jon, was around five feet in height, had large feet, glowing eyes, and significantly sized wings. It was a shocking, awe-inspiring encounter that Gavin and Sally never forgot. As was the case in the immediate post-1976 era, a few reports from the 1990s and 2000s have surfaced. Chiefly, however, they are from individuals who prefer not to go on the record - something which has led to understandable suspicions of fakery and hoaxing. But, one could also make a very good argument that going public about having seen a monstrous “birdman” in English woodland would not be the wisest move to make. Today, and getting ever-closer to 40 years since the original encounters occurred, the matter remains the undeniable controversy that it was back then. For some researchers, Doc Shiels is the man to blame. Jon Downes, however, suggests something else – something with which I concur.

Namely, that Shiels – dubbed the “Wizard of the Western World” – has profound knowledge of “magic.” And by that, I don’t mean people pulling rabbits out of hats. We are talking, here, about something far stranger, something ancient, and something filled with swirling mystery. In a review of Doc’s excellent book, Monstrum, I noted: “[Doc’s] is a world filled with a deep understanding of the real nature of magic (chaos and ritualistic), the secrets of invocation and manifestation, of strange realms just beyond – and that occasionally interact with – our own, and Trickster-like phenomenon. Doc’s is also a domain where, when we dare to imagine the fantastic, when we decide to seek it out, and when we finally accept its reality, we perhaps provide it with some form of quasi-existence.” Perhaps Doc, in a decidedly strange way, really did play a role in the formation of the Owlman legend. But, such was the allure of the beast it quickly stepped out of the world of imagination and story-telling, and right into the heart of the real world. And on that last point, be careful what you wish for, lest you unleash into our reality a monster that has no intention of returning to that domain from which it was originally created, imagined, or invoked.Now, we come to another aspect of what I call anomalous owls.

In 2013, I received an email from a woman now living in the English town of Lowestoft, but who previously lived very close to Mawnan – where the Owlman was seen in 1976 - and specifically in the small Cornwall village of Gweek, the distance between which, by car, is approximately six and a half miles. It transpires that in 1998 she had a profound UFO encounter while taking the road from Mawnan to Gweek. It was after 11:00 p.m. and the woman was driving home after visiting a friend in Mawnan. She had barely left the little village when she saw what she could only describe as a UFO, one that appeared at the side of the road – around the size of a large beach-ball and glowing bright orange. The next thing she knew, she was parked at the side of the road, with what she was able to determine was no less than two hours of time unaccounted for. But there was something else: as she came out of her groggy state, she caught sight of a huge owl-like creature, but which had somewhat humanoid characteristics attached to it, too. It was hovering in the air, at a height of around fifteen feet, but was not employing the use of its wings to keep it aloft. Given the fact that this was practically on the doorstep of where the Owlman was seen back in 1976 (and since, too), the idea that the two issues are unconnected is highly unlikely.

The witness admitted she knew of the Owlman legend. Living so close to Mawnan, it would be more astonishing had she not heard of it. There was little more she could tell me, beyond the facts surrounding the sighting of the curious ball of light, the period of missing time, and the appearance of a “humanoid owl,” as I term it. This particular encounter – which has not been publicized before – set me thinking. What if the Owlman of Cornwall is not a beast of cryptozoological proportions, after all? What if, instead, it is some strange manifestation of the UFO phenomenon, one that is designed to trick the witnesses into thinking they have encountered a large owl, when, in reality, the event was of an otherworldly nature? A screen-memory, in other words. Maybe we need to reevaluate the true nature of the enigmatic Owlman. My reasoning for suggesting this is simple: there are numerous cases on record that link sightings of what are perceived as owls (and sometimes as impossibly large owls) and UFOs together, both in terms of the time-frame and the geographical location. Indeed, Mike Clelland has written an entire, excellent couple of books on this very issue of how and why owls and alien incidents go together, hand in glove.

All of this brings me to two matters that, given the location – Mawnan – cannot be a coincidence. Number One: Liz Randall is a friend of mine who has compiled an excellent, two-volume collection of her writings on all things paranormal, titled From Lyonesse to Alien Big Cats and Back Again. Liz referred me to an article she wrote in 2004 that deals with something that her daughter experienced in 2003 at the church, itself . Liz said, in 2004: “Very early one morning a year ago, in the late summer of 2003, my adult daughter, who lives in Mawnan Smith, Cornwall, had a strange experience. Being a thoughtful neighbor, and not wanting to disturb anyone, at 02:00 a.m. she and a friend had wanted to listen to some music. So she took her car up to the car park of the old local church because it’s such an isolated spot.” Liz continued: “After about ten minutes my daughter and her friend suddenly became aware of a block of blue/white light above their heads. It was pulsating in that it stopped and then started again, for seconds at a time, although it remained stationary overhead. Neither were aware of any missing time, but they also had no idea how long they remained near the churchyard before they went home. And, when they reached home, both were so tired that they simply went to sleep without checking the clock.”

But, things don’t end there. Liz also directed me to the matter of ancient earthworks. Interestingly, ancient earthworks of the type referenced in the paragraph above, are very often the focus of supernatural activity. I know this, as I grew up very near to one in Staffordshire, England. Its name is Castle Ring, which was built during the Iron Age and was home to an ancient tribe called the Cornovii. I can say with certainty that Castle Ring has a long history of encounters with UFOs, Bigfoot-type creatures, spectral figures, and much more. Why? Well, that’s the big question that, unfortunately, eludes us. But what I would say, however, is that I think investigating the Olwman itself – as a solitary, stand-alone mystery – will only allow us to see a small portion of what’s afoot in this particularly mysterious part of Cornwall. In our quest for the truth of the beast, and of the Owlman/anomalous owls/UFO connection too, it is very likely Mawnan itself that we should be focusing on. It may well be an under-appreciated equivalent of one of John Keel’s legendary “window areas,” places where just anything and everything weird can be seen and encountered…

Finally, on the matter of the Owlman, we’ll take a trip to Loch Ness, Scotland – a place we have already visited and which may be home to an extraterrestrial lake-monster: Nessie. Loch Ness, Scotland – a body of water around 22-miles-long – is mostly noted for its legendary, resident monster: Nessie. It’s a fact, though, that Loch Ness has been the site of additional weirdness. Not just for years or decades, but for centuries. Long before Nessie was on the scene, Loch Ness was the haunt of Water-Horses and Kelpies. They were supernatural shapeshifters that would drag people into the deep water, drowning them and stealing their souls. Aleister Crowley (the “Great Beast”) owned a home at Loch Ness. Its name was Boleskine House. Visitors to, and subsequent owners of, Boleskine House talked of strange vibes and of shadowy, supernatural things lurking in the old house. There have been more than a few UFO encounters at Loch Ness. And Nessie-seeker Ted Holiday had a chilling encounter at the loch with a Man in Black. And, there is the matter of a curious owl seen at Loch Ness in 2007.

Owlman, as seen in the Scottish horror film Lord of Tears (2013)

The story involves a Scottish woman who I shall refer to as “Maxine,” and who I met in 2014. On a clear summer day in 2007, Maxine was walking her dog along the hills that overlook Loch Ness when she saw what, from her description, I can only describe as an “alien Grey.” When she first saw it, at a distance of a couple of hundred feet, she assumed it was a young child – chiefly because of its short height. As she got closer, and as her dog froze to the spot, she could see that not only was it not a young boy: it wasn’t even human. Maxine and the Grey stared at each other for just a few seconds, after which it stretched its arms out and, in an instant, transformed into what Maxine described as an impossibly large owl: it was practically man-sized. It immediately took to the skies and headed across the loch at a fast rate. Maxine continue to watch, with astonishment, as the alien-owl thing vanished into the trees on the opposite side of the loch. Maxine is one-hundred percent sure that she did not experience missing time. She does not have any vague memories of being taken aboard some kind of futuristic, alien craft. She is not plagued by graphic nightmares involving extraterrestrials. In fact, she is completely sure that what she recalls is exactly what she saw: a small, alien creature literally shapeshifting into the form of an owl.

Interestingly, since her experience took place, Maxine has come up with an intriguing theory to try and explain and rationalize the situation. She now believes that the Grey aliens have the ability to transform their physical appearances. This, she also suggests, means that the Greys can spy on us whenever, and wherever, they choose, without being noticed for what they really are. If we see an owl, a black cat, a German Shepherd dog – the list goes on – we may actually be seeing something very different: a shapeshifting E.T. using a piece of brilliant camouflage. Whatever you may think of Maxine’s theory (and her experience too), the fact is that there are numerous cases of UFOs and aliens being associated with, and linked to, owls. It's clear that the Owlman is more than just an unknown animal. It's far more than that.