Among all of the supposed encounters with aliens and other strange entities, there are a wide range of reports ranging from the curious to the downright bizarre, and beyond. Here is where we get into truly baffling encounters with beings and entities that defy all classification and exist within their own realm of the weird on the outer fringes of the weird. Fasten your seatbelts, because we are going for a ride through some of the most outlandish and flat-out surreal reports out there. 

One of the earliest, and perhaps one of the weirdest and most bizarro cases of supposed alien contact allegedly occurred in Pasco County, in the state of Florida, and which was related in 1974 by an elderly witness named Evelyn Wendt, who claimed that this had happened to her when she was a girl. She said that she had been playing outside on the grounds of St. Joseph school when she had noticed an egg-shaped object nearby that glowed so intensely and brightly that she had to cover her eyes at first, but it then supposedly suddenly dimmed to reveal some sort of saucer-shaped metal craft. As she stood there staring wide-eyed at the strange sight, a small door suddenly opened to disgorge a procession of rather bizarre creatures, and Wendt would say of them as follows:

“Little people emerged. I think they were robots. I tried to count them, but they changed about so. They were smaller than I was and resembled animated flowers with faces where the bud would be.”

These truly bizarre “robotic sunflowers” were apparently hoisting a sinister-looking machine of some sort, which Wendt instinctively sensed was a weapon of some kind, and which they also seemed to be setting up to aim towards the school’s science building. It was at about this time that the witness claimed the entities communicated with her telepathically, telling her that they intended to destroy the science building because there were dangerous experiments going on in there behind closed doors. Bizarrely, they then suddenly changed their minds and began to file back into the craft as they invited their human companion to come along. She refused, but they supposedly promised to come back for her in later years. Wendt would say of what happened:

“They promised to come back for me in 35 years, but that was a long time ago and nothing happened that I know of. All I can remember now is that the saucer was leaden-looking and very pockmarked. Then, when it started up, its molecules expanded and it turned silvery bright. The UFO then went straight up, hovered a minute, and disappeared from sight.”

UFO researchers in later years sought to bring out any other details through hypnosis, but Wendt proved impossible to hypnotize. Bizarrely, the science building of the school at one point was destroyed by unspecified means, leading one to think that maybe the robo-flowers had come back to finish their inscrutable job. What in the world was going on here? Is this just a made-up delusional fantasy or is it at all real in any sense? If it really did happen, then what were these robotic flowers and why on earth did they want to blow up a junior high school’s science building? Who knows?

In later years, the 50s brought on some truly odd reports. In 1957, a retired teacher named Mary Starr allegedly woke up in the middle of the night in her home in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, in the U.S., to see a piercingly bright light outside of her bedroom window. The object was described as floating over her yard and seemed to be a large craft of some type with rectangular windows on its sides. Fascinated by what she was seeing, Starr then supposedly gazed into one of the windows and could see two decidedly bizarre entities moving about within, which were about 4 feet tall. According to the witness, they had translucent cubes for heads holding within them bright red cores, rubbery bodies that were like “skirts,” and handless appendages akin to tentacles. After a moment of observing the outlandish beings, the windows then apparently vanished as if they had never been there, and an antenna or protrusion of some sort came out of the craft, after which the whole thing began to glow before silently shooting straight up into the night sky.

From the following year the late author Brad Steiger covered in his book Strangers from the Skies the case of Hans Gustafsson and 30-year-old Stig Rydberg, who on December 20, 1958, were on their way along Route 45 from Höganäs to Heisenberg in Sweden in the early morning hours along a foggy road that had such poor visibility that the two friends decided to pull over near the rural village of Domsten. As they walked about outside the vehicle, they soon noticed through the haze that there was some sort of glow emanating from the surrounding forest nearby. The two decided to hike off into the darkened, glow-frosted trees to try and see where the light was coming from, and after penetrating around 150 feet into the woods they allegedly came across the source of the glow, which proved to be far more bizarre than they had anticipated. There before them was a disc-like object resting on two legs around two feet long, the whole of which cast a scintillating glow of ever-changing colors. Even odder than the sight of this apparent flying saucer was what could be seen cavorting about the vicinity, which were 3-foot-long amorphous blobs that Rydberg would describe as follows:

“They were like protozoa, just a bit darker than most, sort of a bluish color, hopping and jumping around the saucer like globs of animated jelly.”

Nowhere on the bodies were any visible limbs or sensory organs, nor any other discernible features, and it was as if they were just pulsating gobs of gelatinous goo that could somehow levitate over the ground. Things got rather tense very quickly when these unusual entities suddenly surrounded the two puzzled men and purportedly began to engulf their limbs within their pulsating, throbbing masses, described as feeling like “magnetic dough,” while at the same time exuding a terrible stench-like “ether and burnt sausage.” No matter how much the men kicked and lashed out at these mysterious entities, they were able to either dodge or absorb the blows to little effect, as if they were made of jelly. It seemed as if the blob-like creatures were trying to drag the increasingly terrified witnesses towards the glimmering disc, and no matter how hard the two witnesses fought back and struggled it did little good.

By chance, Rydberg finally managed to tear himself free and run back towards their car with the alien blobs in hot pursuit. When he reached the vehicle he leaned heavily on the car’s horn, piercing the night with a wall of noise in an effort to draw anyone’s attention to their plight, but which also seemed to have the effect of startling the creatures enough to let go of Gustafsson. The blobs then huddled under their craft, filed inside it, and shot off away into the night sky, leaving behind a screeching whistling blare, that nauseating stink, and two very shaken men who found that they were covered in strange bruises and cuts.

Gustafsson and Rydberg perhaps understandably kept the story to themselves for some time, but when it finally came out it became a minor sensation in Sweden. The two witnesses were also interviewed by police, and although the story was without a doubt off-the-wall, they could find no sign of any hoaxing going on, and even when the two were secretly monitored when they thought they were alone, they did not let on that there was any lying or trickery going on. Gustafsson and Rydberg were also found to be in fine physical and psychological health, and in the end, police concluded that the men really seemed to have been traumatized by what they at least truly believed they had seen, whatever that was. It is difficult to ascertain just what it was that these two men saw, or at least thought they saw, and with no other accounts anywhere near it we will probably never know.

From the U.S. is an account from 1961 in the sleepy rural town of Rogers, Kentucky. In the summer of that year, the witness, known only as Mrs. Quinn, was allegedly awoken one night by a strange noise, and she claimed that there had been a truly unearthly entity hovering right there next to her bed, which she described as a big black, slimy blob with no neck, a tiny round head, gigantic round eyes, and “wrinkles that glowed.” She described it as looking a bit like “a roly-poly” and “a huge tar-baby with enormous eyes.” This otherworldly being then levitated across the room towards where the woman’s daughter, Judy, was sleeping, and at the same time seemed to reach out to her telepathically, of which Judy would say:

“I knew it wanted me to go somewhere. I found myself slipping off the bed. Suddenly, the thing released its strange force and it was gone.”

It is difficult to say just what this very strange beast could have been, but there have been plenty of theories. For some it is a ghost or even a demon, for others it's some sort of creature from an alternate dimension, while others still classify it as an extraterrestrial entity. There is no way at all to know, or indeed to even be sure that this ever happened outside of the witness’s imagination. Nevertheless, it remains a singularly bizarre report that seems to defy simple classification.

Just a few years later, in 1966, we move to the state of Oregon for an equally bizarre case. On the night of April 5, 1966, a 16-year-old witness named Kathy Reeves was allegedly walking along with her friend on a secluded dark road in the small city of Newport, Oregon, when they got the sudden, unmistakable feeling that they were being followed and watched. The two girls assumed it was just someone messing around and trying to scare them, which was made clearer when they thought they could see a dimmed flashlight beam bobbing about behind them.

They picked up their pace and even tossed rocks behind them at the unseen follower, but the feeling that someone was lurking in the darkness behind them did not abate, and when they turned around at one point what they thought had been a simple flashlight suddenly erupted into a brilliant beam of incandescent light far beyond what would be expected, which was then joined by more spears of brightness jutting from the night to converge upon them. Squinting through the glare, they claimed that they could make out a large, dome-shaped object some distance off that seemed to be wreathed in some sort of fog or smoke.

The now terrified girls began to run as fast as they could towards home, but as they did their path was blocked by three unearthly creatures the likes of nothing they had ever seen. The entities were described as being headless and armless, and as looking like mobile tree stumps that moved about on what resembled spider legs and which were dressed in some sort of multi-colored cloth. The creatures thankfully did not seem to pay too much attention to the witnesses, instead scurrying across the road to scamper off out of sight towards the inscrutable dome, which still flickered in the dark behind them. The case attracted quite a lot of media attention at the time, and was covered in both Jim Brandon’s Weird America: A Guide to Places of Mystery in the United States, as well as Jerome Clark’s Extraordinary Encounters: An Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrials and Otherworldly Beings, but no further reports have ever been recorded of these enigmatic stump-like beings, leaving us to wonder just what they could have possibly been, if anything.

From later years and perhaps more famous than any of these is the encounter reported by Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker, who on October 11, 1973, were fishing on the Pascagoula River in Mississippi. As they cast their lines out they suddenly began to hear a series of strange hissing, whirring noises coming from behind them. When they turned around to look, they apparently came face to face with an egg-shaped spacecraft hovering over the river not far away, and a door then opened to regurgitate forth baffling creatures that really defy any easy classification. There standing in the doorway of the craft were three 6-foot tall beings with grey leathery, wrinkled skin and thin, carrot-like protrusions jutting out of their heads. The hands and feet were said to be fused into pinchers, and the eyes and mouths were just slits.

Just as they were reeling from the shock of seeing such a thing, the men realized that they had been somehow paralyzed by an unseen force, which kept them glued to where they were. Stuck as they were, the two witnesses made easy pickings for the bizarre aliens, who plucked them up and dragged them aboard their unearthly vessel. Hickson would later claim that he was brought aboard the ship and brought to a room with a blinding light, in which he was subjected to an examination by an oval-shaped robotic probe of some sort. After around 20 minutes, the two were deposited back onto the bank of the river and the mysterious craft floated off. Hickson then claimed that he had found Parker on the riverbank as well in a rather disheveled state, crying and praying to God.

The two went back to their car and sat there in shock for an undetermined amount of time, before heading home. They would later contact the Kessler Air Force Base and the local sheriff with their bizarre tale, which went about as well as you would expect. No one really took the eyebrow-raising story seriously, but the whole case inevitably became splashed about in local newspapers soon after. Hickson in particular went on to entertain questions on the matter and even help publish a book about the whole incident called UFO Contact at Pascagoula, while Parker ducked out of the limelight, and eventually moved out of state to avoid the constant media attention. For his part, Parker claimed that he had passed out at the beginning of the ordeal and only come to after it was over, only recalling bits and pieces under hypnosis.

The case was picked apart by some of the most eminent UFO researchers at the time, who for the most part agreed that the men at least really believed that what they had seen was real. The case of the Pascagoula aliens has since been met with a good amount of skepticism. It has been called everything from a shared hallucination to a flat-out lie, which has only been made more complicated by the fact that Hickson’s account only seemed to get more and more bizarre and complex as time went on. It has been suggested that they had a shared imaginary experience, that they were drinking, or even that they were just tripping balls on LSD at the time, but no one really knows what happened except the two witnesses themselves.

Moving on to 1977, there is the weird account of 19-year-old Lee Parish, who on January 27, 1977, claimed that he spied a rectangular UFO hovering in the sky before he was whisked into the air by a beam of light while driving home. He then found himself in some sort of spacecraft, where he was presented to three very bizarre beings. One of the entities was described as being like a black “tombstone” 20-feet high, with a robotic arm extending from its front. Another of the things was smaller and looked like a red prism of some kind, while yet another was 6 feet tall and described as being a motionless white prism with two robotic arms and a “wedge-like” head, which produced strange noises like teeth being brushed.

At the time, Lee had a strong feeling that the white one was the leader, although he did not know why he had this impression. During the encounter, the red one was seen as the most anxious, seemingly afraid of their human guest and hiding behind the others, although it did at one point extend a robotic-looking arm to try and touch him, which produced a vague, unsettling sensation of coldness and pain. Eventually, the three beings lined up and seemed to merge, after which Lee felt a warmth permeate his body and soon found himself back in his vehicle, along with 38 minutes of missing time. It is all rather odd, to say the least.

Also from 1977, we come to Paciencia, Brazil, where 33-year-old bus driver Antonia La Rubia was allegedly walking to work when he spied a rather strange object shaped like an “enormous wide hat" sitting in a field  Soon after he noticed the mysterious craft, it lashed out with a thin, bright beam of light, which caught La Rubia and whisked him away to a room of pure white. Within this room were various mechanical-looking beings with bright scales and arms like tentacles, as well as egg-shaped bodies and heads adorned with what appeared to be antennae. Instead of legs, the strange creatures reportedly sat upon rigid pedestals of some sort.

After this initial meeting, the frightened La Rubia claims that he shouted at the creatures, which seemed to have the effect of making them cower in fear. He lost consciousness again, and when he awoke he says that he was now subjected to a series of images projected onto the wall, including various surreal scenes such as a dog being melted and a train entering a tunnel, the meaning of which could not be discerned. At one point during this screening of oddities and grotesqueries, one of the robot beings apparently reached out to draw blood from one of La Rubia’s fingers, after which it splashed it across a wall to form a pattern of three circles and an “L” shape. At this point, La Rubia claims he lost consciousness once more, and when he awoke he was purportedly back in his car, vomiting and dizzy from the whole puzzling ordeal.

The following year we have a strange case from the files of paranormal researcher and author Albert S. Rosales, which supposedly occurred in Los Rios, Arroyo Hondo, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. In November of 1978, a female medical technologist in the company of her psychiatrist sister, her 10-year-old daughter and two housemaids experienced a power failure. Outside a bright light was seen moving across the sky sending out “blue light rays” before going behind a hill. After this, from out behind the hill came two small lights, one yellow, and the other red. Things would only get stranger from there, and the report reads:

“Frightened, the five witnesses ran upstairs and watched from the window as the two lights topped next to a road. As a car came along and illuminated the scene with its headlights, the women could see that the lights were worn on the abdomens of strange flying beings. These were conical, twice as large as human beings (3-3.7m) and wore translucent sheets. One witness saw three black humanoid silhouettes cross the headlights of the car, which had now stopped, and move to the driver’s side. The lights and the car headlights now vanished, and loud sounds like a metallic garage door shutting were heard by the women and their next door neighbor. Then the two small lights reappeared and flew off, caught in the lights from the house. The women and their neighbor ran out to see what had happened to the car, but there was no sign of it. The incident lasted 45 minutes.”

The year after that we have a bonkers report sent to The Fortean Times in January of 1979 from Fulham, London, England, concerning witnesses named Neil Oram and Maria Moustaka. The two had just had dinner at Maria’s flat and were sitting together on her sofa listening to music and looking out through her French windows into her garden when all of a sudden her cat went crazy, howling “like a wolf” before bolting from the room. It then began dashing back and forth, all the while making that awful howling noise and evading all attempts to catch it, even lashing out at its own owner when she tried. The report continues:

“Maria exclaimed that she’d never seen her cat behave like this. Then she shrieked and gripped Neil’s hand as a huge cat-person alighted on the wall at the end of the garden. Not a big cat, but a cat-person crouching – facing the witnesses from the top of the six foot (1.8m) high wall. Not exactly a human face. Not exactly a cat’s face. Somehow Neil knew what it was like. He felt spaced out but not afraid. It seemed to emanate a powerful, quiet ambiance as it almost floated down into the garden. Maria was shaking and digging her nail into Neil’s palm. The cat-person, roughly five feet (1.5m) tall, started to walk, upright, toward them. Almost glide-walked towards them. And as this elemental of utter strangeness approached the large French window, Neil could sense an invisible steady intense air pressure building up on the creature’s side of the window.

Neil thought the glass had cracked – but it was Maria’s cat howling even more distraughtly. The absolute black furry streak of complete cosmic strangeness raised its palms (not paws) – raised its palms so they could see them pressed against the glass. Neil thinks Maria passed out at this point, but only for a few seconds, because he pulled her awake and hissed – “just watch.” It seemed to Neil that this jet black visitor was not familiar with windows. It kept its hands on the glass for 20 seconds – the demented cat, still howling – then turned around and glided/walked back to the wall…and seemed to almost float back up a crouching position on top of the wall. It turned around and looked in their direction, then seemed to be scanning all the way around…turned its back to them…and disappeared beyond the wall. The sound of weird silence invaded the flat. The trembling cat, now silent, settled on Maria’s lap.”

What in the world was going on here? Moving onto 1990 we have several very unusual reports from Albert Rosales’ files. In the spring of that year, two brothers were canoeing at a place called Lake George, near Sabbath Day Point, Warren County, New York, at around sunset when they saw something very bizarre indeed. The report says what followed:

“At the lake side it is a boulder strewn area with cliffs rising 600 feet above the shoreline. As they were beginning to come on to this area, they saw something standing on shore. It was brownish in color and standing straight up with its arms at its side. It was about the size of a small man and very thin. Its body was facing south, looking down the shoreline when it suddenly turned its head directly towards the witnesses and looked very intently. The brothers whispered to each other and watched it while it watched them. They were about 200 feet out but could not summon up the courage to go closer. The creature had a ‘strange look’ almost a crazed grin, like a giant Lemur. The sun was set now as they continued to watch it in the shadows of the mountain. As it stood next to an old, dead pine tree, it turned and climbed, sloth-like up the tree about 20 feet to the first and only large limb and onto the crook of a branch. They paddled back around and as they approached, it again cocked its head directly at them, after a minute or so it turned its face downward onto its body and became as if it were part of the tree. Just a lump on the crook of the branch, you would not know it was there unless you saw it move. The witnesses had been in the area all their life and have never seen anything like it and have not seen it since. They also noticed that the creature did not make any sounds.”

What could this thing have possibly been? In October of that same year, from Masson, Quebec, Canada, we have the story of a witness, accompanied by his wife, his children and a 15-year-old teenager, a friend of the family, who were all traveling westbound in his vehicle on Route 148 en-route to a track meet. As they drove along, they saw a strange object floating in the air at an altitude of approximately 50 feet, which resembled a large balloon with two legs attached to it and “not normal in appearance.” The main witness would honk his horn at it, which caused it to stop moving, but would begin moving again when the witness tried to catch up with it in the car. The object would speed up and so would the witness, worrying his wife, who told him to slow down before they got into an accident. He would not slow down, and the completely bizarre report continues as follows:

“His wife begs him to stop before he causes an accident. He ignores her and accelerates at 115km hooting the car’s horn violently still trying to attract the attention of the object. The object then stops moving again. During the chase, the object appeared to move at a speed faster or comparable to a normal speeding vehicle. According to weather reports the wind on that date was blowing in the Ottawa valley at 22km per hour from the southwest, this and other factors seems to rule out a stray balloon. The witness finally catches up honking violently so that the object stops moving. By the time this occurred the witness insists that the car came to a sudden complete stop on its own accord, the sudden stop was relatively mild in spite of the great velocity, according to the witness ‘it felt like a boat in the water’.

At this point, the witness notices that there is no other vehicle on the road, and everyone agreed that since the beginning of the ‘chase’ they had only passed one or two vehicles only. The object is now hovering on the north side of the road near some electrical pylons. At this point, the object suddenly rotates on its axis but the legs do not move. The two long slender legs hang limply beneath it. The legs appear to have a major joint highly visible. Both right foot and left foot area darker than the rest of the legs, also the legs below the knee seemed flexible while above the knee they appear rigid. The ‘trunk’ or head are of an indefinable color that was close to brown yellow. Somewhere towards the top of the object a very intense red light now appears. The witnesses describe the light as ‘unearthly, something that they had never seen before’. All eyes were now riveted on the red light emanating from the ‘creature’. Not a word is exchanged in the car. Children, who were previously indifferent are now petrified. The wife then said, “look at its belly’; (at this point all the witnesses were convinced that the object was alive). The witnesses looked at the belly section and noticed that it was bright with a mixture of lime green. Then the red light decreases in intensity and then the witnesses realize that the light had originated from a pair two very large round eyes.

The legs were a little over a meter long, with 15cm thighs, and 25-inch calves. The head-trunk section was about on meter wide by just over one meter in length. The eyes were about the size of a ‘cup of coffee’. This was the only occasion that the creature was seen from the front. When the red light is extinguished, the creature resumes its course eastward and away towards some fields. The main witness recalls that at the point when the red light became intense, he felt a sort of message saying, ‘leave me in peace’. His wife confirms that she clearly felt the same message. The children did not hear it. At this point they have lost sight of the creature behind some valleys. However, the witness again accelerates his car and eventually catches up with the creature after about 3 miles. 

The creature maintains a parallel course and moves at the same speed as the vehicle. Now closer to the town of Thurso the witness takes a dirt road that leads him into a field, he turns around and stops the vehicle to watch the creature. At this point, the children began to giggle and saw a scene that their parents apparently did not have a chance to see it. They creature had come to rest over a herd of cows in the field and ‘somersaults’ over the herd, scattering them around in record time. At this point police officers had arrived at the scene and began pursuing the creature and entering the village of Thurso they lose sight of it. They then turn left on the 317 and immediately see it again. There are not alone, half a dozen vehicles are now parked, and people are standing on the pavement watching the strange spectacle in the sky. It is now approximately 50 meters above the ground and when crossing the road from left to right or west to east it rotates slowly on its axis. At this point, the main witness is tired and just wants to get back to Masson. The creature eventually disappears from sight towards the north. In the weeks that follow the main witness admits that at times during the ‘chase’ he had felt very nervous and even a sort of ‘visceral fear’.”

An equally strange case from Rosales’ files was originally reported from Seymour, Missouri, in the Seymour Webster County Citizen, and supposedly happened in the summer of 1994. It revolves around an elementary school student who was out playing “Army” one day with his friends and classmates. At one point they built a fort out of branches and sticks and hung a bag of cookies up on one of the sticks. As they were playing, things would take a sharp turn into the bizarre when they spied a “big bug thing standing there” in the woods. The report describes what happened as follows:

“The thing or creature was standing on its hind legs, just like a human stands on our legs, but across its belly it had six smaller legs or arms. He couldn’t tell which and two longer arms that it used “like we do,” Dirk explained. It was about 6 ½ feet to 7 feet tall, and it was facing in profile, but not looking at Dirk and his cousin. As the two amazed 8-year-olds watched the “big bug,” they saw that it was picking at the bag of cookies hanging on the limb of their fort. “What was so strange was that the bug looked like T.V. fuzz, it wasn’t really clear: I don’t know if this was some kind of camouflage it used or if maybe it was an android.” Dirk added. Dirk said the creature had two big pinchers, one on each side of its head, two large “insect-looking eyes and a mouth like a grasshopper or praying mantis.” After the creature moved out of sight. Dirk and his cousin cautiously walked over to the fort where the big bug had been standing touching the bag of cookies.

“I reached up and touched the plastic bag and got a shock, sort of like a shock from static electricity,” Dirk said. “There shouldn’t have been any shock coming from the bag because plastic doesn’t conduct electricity, but I got a shock, and don’t know how to explain that.” Dirk and his cousin then ran back to his house to tell his mom, “Dana” about the big bug in the woods and how they wanted her to go out there and make it get out of the woods. As Dirk and his cousin tried to explain to Dana what the big bug looked like, Dana kept thinking, they’d come across a big wood roach or maybe a large praying mantis. “I finally had the boys sit down and use a pen and paper to draw what they saw,” she said. “That’s when it first dawned on me that the “big bug” they were explaining wasn’t just a big bug, but some sort of creature that was as large as a human.”

During the 11 years that Dirk lived with his parents on their farm north of Seymour, the big bug wasn’t his only encounter with strange beings. One day, he was playing outside when he saw two ‘very tall beings, figures that had hoods or hats, and it looked like they were talking to each other,” he said. They were about 60 meters away from him and he could see they were tall. “In fact, they were so tall that they stood above some of the taller trees at the edge of the creek behind my house.” Dirk said the two beings were about 7 ½ feet to 8 feet tall, and he was close enough to see “their skin was gray, so I knew they weren’t humans.” He could also make out that both beings had an initial on their hoods or hats. “The initials sort of looked like the ‘A’ on a California Angel’s hat, but the letters were mor cursive than that on the team’s baseball hat,” he explained. Dirk said he stood there watching the two beings for several minutes and they walked off. His parents also reported strange lights in the sky and Dirk reported seeing saucer-shaped crafts over the woods.”

Odd, indeed. Even more recent, and just as wild and spectacular as any of these we have looked at so far apparently happened in a rural area of the country of Brazil in 1996. On January 20, 1996, the fire department at the town of Varginha received several calls from distraught residents claiming that a “strange creature” was lurking about frightening people. Authorities thought it might just be some pranksters messing around, and went to check it out. When they arrived, they amazingly were able to quickly find the creature in question, which was described as being in some sort of a dazed state. The creature itself purportedly had short, stumpy legs, very long arms, oversized feet, and three stalks upon its head, and it also had set within its misshappen head set of glowing red eyes. The bizarre entity was easily captured with a net, which elicited a buzzing sound from it, and it whisked off to who knows where.

Later that same day there was another of the creatures seen, this time by three girls named Lilliane Fatima, Valquira Fatima, and Andrade Xavier as they were walking through a wooded area. It looked exactly like the one that had been captured and left footprints and an obnoxious ammonia-like stench in its wake. The creature or creatures were sighted numerous times over the coming week, and another was supposedly captured. This specimen was taken to the University of Campinas, and amazingly two more were also captured and brought to the University of Sao Paulo, where at least one of them died. There were allegedly many photographs taken of the autopsy, yet none have ever been made publicly available if they even exist at all. Oddly, several of the people involved with capturing the creatures mysterious fell ill, exhibiting symptoms that could not be explained, with at least one of these people dying from their sickness.

The story created quite a stir at the time, with the Brazilian media reporting on it heavily, yet both the authorities and the universities that supposedly had harbored the “aliens” denied any knowledge of such creatures. The only hint that something might really be going on was a doctor allegedly involved with the autopsy of the dead creature, who simultaneously denied having anything to do with it while also hinting that there was more to say on the matter that he was unable to release just yet. Considering that this all happened during a major UFO sightings flap in the region the public supposed that these might have been the occupants of these mysterious craft, but considering that no real evidence has come forward this will probably remain just another unverified enigmatic report that seems destined to be buried.

If all of this isn’t weird enough for you, how about some sort of alien clown? In September of 1996, a young witness in Wallace, Nova Scotia, Canada was sitting on a large boulder in his grandparents’ backyard. He suddenly heard a strange noise and looked off across a field of tall grass to see a figure standing there “with a scarecrow pose.” The outlandish report continues:

“Arms out, straight body. His hat was cone-shaped, his face features wooden. He had a Jack-o-Lantern face with an empty nose hole, but he still looked alive. But when he talked, his mouth didn’t move. The witness could hear him in his head, like telepathy. According to the witness the entity “gave off major clown vibes,” which the witness was comfortable with as both his parents did charity events dressed as clowns. The entity was roughly 6-7 feet tall, with wide shoulders. He wore ‘scarecrow clothes,’ with patches of bright colors over pale brown and black. The entity waved a wooden hand and the witness heard a voice say, “Hello, Sam. We are all colors.?”

The witness remembers distinctly that the entity asked it as a question, and he responded with, “My name is Luke, not Sam.” He wasn’t scared, he felt calm and relaxed until the end of the encounter. The entity pointed at himself, and did a short bow, then reached out into the field next to him and opened a door. The door had not been there before, and was not attached to anything. The witness could see inside the gap of the door, and the room inside was green, with wooden chairs. He motioned for the witness to come with him. The witness remembers getting up off the boulder, walking with the entity through the door, and being enveloped in bright red and green Christmas lights. They were as bright as the sun, and the had to close his eyes to keep from going blind, so he thought. The witness woke up lying on his grandparent’s couch. It was dark outside, and his parents rushed in when he called out to them. They had found him half an hour before, asleep in the middle of the field, having called for him not hearing him answer when it got dark. The witness recalled additional details of what he saw inside the green room: He distinctly recalled that there were two empty wooden chairs, and two occupied chairs further back. The door was see-through, he never saw a doorknob. He couldn’t make out details about the other people sitting in the chairs, but they had the same outline as well the first entity, the hat, the head shape, long arms and legs. But further details are just a void. Like when someone’s face is blurred to protect their identity.”

In later years we come to 2004, when a 17-year-old motorist traveling almost 10 miles north of Aurora Indiana, in the United States, came across something very strange, indeed. He would say that he had first spied a “figure” squatting down near a puddle of water and that after he had passed it he kept an eye on it to see more details. The very weird report continues as follows:

“After passing the frail-looking figure, the driver looked into his rear view mirror and again observed---illuminated by the taillights of his car---what he described as a tall, abnormal figure that moved strangely with pointed joints that “buckled out”. He estimated the figure stood around 6 feet, seven inches. “It had protruding joints and moved very strangely.” The driver said he was able to ascertain the figure, alleged to be dark gray or black and “pencil thin” stand up and take several steps toward the woods along the roadside. The figure definitely walked on two legs and was thought somehow, to be a male, although no clothing was noted. No face or eyes could be seen, but the witness had the impression that the figure was looking straight at him. The figure was immediately thought to be something out of the ordinary, not a human being. The duration of the sighting was “hurried” and possibly within the 3 to 4 second range. The driver continued on for a small distance after passing the figure and finally put on his brakes, coming to a stop at an estimated 2 minute walking distance on the road from the location of the sighting. He looked back to further observe the entity.

At that point, a second car came into view and approached from the opposite direction, passed, and then reached the spot on the road where the figure was thought to be. The 17-year old motorist reportedly watched closely and observed the second car undertake what he thought to be an evasive maneuver near the vicinity of where he thought the figure would be situated, and then the car turned around at that spot and shortly pulled up behind him, somewhat in the grass. There was an elderly couple in the car, both in their late 60s or early 70s and both with gray hair. The driver, who wore glasses said, “Boy, did you see something back there? I’ll tell you right now, that was no person.” The passenger, an elderly female said, “It was no human being. It was no man.” The elderly couple was reportedly “spooked” but offered to follow the first witness the remainder of the trip down North Hogan Road, clearly in the opposite direction of their intended destination route. It was thought that the elderly couple observed this same figure on the opposite side of the road, and possibly had observed it more closely. Later, the 17-year old witness was said to have become hysterical, and within an hour was describing the figure as an “alien”.”

Pretty weird stuff. Most recently of all we come to a case from Albert Rosales from 2018, which happened in Germany. One evening an unnamed witness was walking his dogs along the same route he always took along the outskirts of town when the dogs just suddenly stopped and refused to go any further. The witness thought this was strange, as the dogs never did that, and then he noticed a low humming sound emanating from the sky. He at first thought it must be a low-flying plane, but he could not see anything in the clear sky above, and then things got very strange very fast. The report continues:

“It pretty much sounded like a really loud low flying airplane, so he scanned the sky but didn’t see anything. It was very weird, especially in combination with the behavior of the dogs but he didn’t really give it much thought and tried to get his dogs to keep going, but they persisted and started whining. At this point, he started to worry so he looked around the area to see what could have possibly frightened them so much. That’s when he saw this strange ‘object’ standing in a field about 15 meters off the side of the road. The field usually had horses in them so it is surrounded by an electric fence. However, on this day there were no horses there. This strange feeling of dread or primal fear filled his body completely when he stared at the figure, maybe because it didn’t look like anything he’d ever seen before. He felt like he was ‘stuck’ to the road and couldn’t move. He noticed now that the figure, which at first he believed to be some sort of machine because of its silver or chrome color, had vague human-like features.

It  had four limbs all ending in sharp edges. They had some black material or liquid on them as if it had dipped them in oil. Its head also had clear edges and looked very inorganic, like it was ‘constructed.’ It looked directly at the witness and he could see that it was sort of blinking permanently. Its nose and mouth looked more like openings in its head. The longer he looked at it, the more strange things he noticed. He felt as he were looking at something so foreign to his understanding of the world and life that he was about to ‘fall apart.’ On top of its head, it had this cone like structure cut out at the very top where some sort of orb was. It looked like a perfect golden ball and it was reflecting the sunlight. The witness also began to notice perhaps the weirdest feature of the creature which was that it was extremely muscular. Still it looked more like a shell in which muscles were carved than actually organic matter. The witness also saw what looked like cables on its upper body and arms as well as stripes on its arms and legs. Terrified, the witness tried with every fiber of his being to turn around and when after about 30 seconds, he could move again so he ran away as fast as he could with his dogs back home. He did tell his parents and brother and together they checked the spot but it was gone.”

How are we to classify such cases as we have seen here? What is behind them and what do they represent? Are these merely made-up stories, hallucinations, or hoaxes? Or are they something more? When looking at such completely bizarre and in some cases almost absurd entities, we are forced to ask if they are real at all, then where did they come from? Are these from space or perhaps something even weirder bleeding into our reality from some other reality or dimension? The answers remain elusive. 

When most of us think of UFOs, we likely cast our minds no further back than the late 1940s, which is widely considered to be the start of the modern UFO era. Likewise, when the subject of encounters with aliens and alien abduction are discussed, we almost certainly think of cases from the 1970s, eighties, or even 1990s. The fact is, though, there are many encounters on record that appear to clearly describe strange aerial objects, as well as some that even suggest interaction with otherworldly entities long before the mid-twentieth century.

Perhaps a good place to start would be with the Tulli Papyrus, and what some people have claimed is one of the earliest documented sightings of a UFO somewhere around 1500 BC. This intriguing document, it is claimed, records the appearance of a strange object over the land of ancient Egypt. The document was first discovered in 1933 while the Director of the Egyptian Museum at the Vatican, Alberto Tulli, was working in Cairo, although what makes it particularly controversial is that no one – other than Tulli, that is – has ever seen the original. According to Tulli’s account, he came across the ancient papyrus, which was written in hieratic script, while in an antique shop. However, he didn’t have enough money to purchase it. Instead, he made a copy and then translated the hieratic scripts into hieroglyphics. Of course, this has led some people to contemplate just how accurate the translations are and whether the document ever existed at all. Whatever the truth, the full translation of the document – according to Tulli – reads as follows:

“In the year 22, in the third month of winter, in the sixth hour of the day, the scribes of the House of Life noticed a circle of fire that was coming from the sky...From the mouth it emitted a foul breath. It had no head. Its body was one rod long and one rod wide. It had no voice. And from that the hearts of the scribes became confused and they threw themselves down on their bellies...then they reported the thing to the Pharaoh...His Majesty ordered...has been examined...and he was meditating on what had happened, that it was recorded in the scrolls of the House of the Life. Now after some days had passed, these things became more and more numerous in the skies. Their splendor exceeded that of the sun and extended to the limits of the four angles of the sky...High and wide in the sky was the position from which these fire circles came and went. The army of the Pharaoh looked on with him in their midst. It was after supper. Then these fire circles ascended higher into the sky and they headed toward the south. Fish and birds then fell from the sky. A marvel never before known since the foundation of their land...And Pharaoh caused incense to be brought to make peace with Earth...and what happened was ordered to be written in the Annals of the House of Life so that it be remembered for all time forward.”

It is easy to see how such a translation would be interpreted as a UFO encounter. It is claimed that once Tulli had translated the document and realized the true importance of what he had read, he disclosed the findings to the Vatican, who agreed to fund the purchase of the papyrus. However, by the time he returned to the shop, the ancient writing was no longer there – it had mysteriously disappeared. The tale, though, would take another turn two decades later in the early 1950s.

In 1953, an Italian man, Prince Boris of Rachelwiltz, claimed to have found a torn version of the ancient papyrus in a book that had once belonged to none other than Alberto Tulli. He claimed that he also translated the ancient writing and, much like Tulli, revealed a description of a disc or circle of fire. Interestingly, the Vatican denied any knowledge of the whereabouts of the apparent original document.

A decade and a half later, in 1968, the Tulli Papyrus was featured in the US Air Force-commissioned Condon Report when Samuel Rosenberg asked the Vatican to comment on the claims of the original document and translation. The Vatican offered the document was “not the property of the Vatican Museum” and that Tulli had “disappeared and was never found”, which is perhaps ominous in itself. They also stated they had discovered that Tulli was not an Egyptologist and, as such, was not qualified to have translated the document, if indeed it ever existed. Even more remarkable, they further claimed that “Rachelwitz, in a confidential letter, admitted that he had never seen the original document or Tulli’s original notes”. In short, the Vatican was not only distancing itself from the Tulli Papyrus, but they were also ensuring there was considerable doubt cast onto both Tulli and Rachelwitz.

As we might imagine, some researchers and investigators are suspicious of the Vatican’s comments, believing them to be nothing more than a cover-up of their knowledge regarding the document’s existence and authenticity. However, as intriguing and thought-provoking as the alleged document is, we need to treat the alleged documentation with a considerable pinch of salt.

While there might be doubt regarding the Tulli Papyrus, the records of ancient Rome are much more solid, especially given the meticulous procedures involved in record-keeping in the Roman Empire. And surprisingly or not, there are several documented incidents that sound very much like UFO encounters.

In the book Wonders in the Sky: Unexplained Aerial Objects from Antiquity to Modern Times, Jacques Vallee and Chris Aubeck relay just such an incident from 343 BC. The account is found in the writings of Diodorus Siculus, who documents the journey of Timoleon from Corinth to Sicily and who, ultimately, suggested that a strange light in the sky guided his route. He would write that “all through the night he was preceded by a torch blazing in the sky up to the moment when the squadron made harbor in Italy!” The insinuation that the light in question remained until Timoleon reached his destination upon which it disappeared might very well suggest some kind of purposeful interaction.

Just over a century later, between 218 to 201 BC, during the Second Punic War, the Pontifex Maximus of Rome documented several sightings of “gleaming round shields” in the Annales Maximi. Just under a hundred years later, in the year 122 BC, over the skies of Ariminium in modern-day Italy, when there were several reports of “three moons” appearing in the sky overhead. Furthermore, these “moons” were visible not only at night but also for several hours during the day. The incident was one of several documented by Pliny the Elder in his Historia Naturallis volumes, who wrote, “Three moons have appeared at once in the consulship of Gnaeus Domitius and Gaius Fannius”.

Just under 50 years later, in 74 BC in what is modern-day Turkey, a truly remarkable incident was documented by Roman historian Plutarch. According to his writings, on the day in question, under bright sunshine, Roman and Turkish soldiers were advancing toward each other in anticipation of a bloody battle when a sound like the rumble of thunder was heard, followed by a bright flash of light. The two battalions stopped their advances and looked upwards to the sky, where they saw a “huge flame-like body” that proceeded to “fall between the two armies!” Plutarch wrote that the object was shaped like a “wine jar” and was silver in color. Incidentally, both armies retreated a short time later, which perhaps should make us contemplate whether the intention of the landing was to cause the battle to be abandoned, and if that was true, it would suggest a definite interference in human affairs by the intelligence behind the object.  

There is another interesting sighting documented from the year 12 BC, and while there is not a great amount of detail, it features a detail that has been witnessed several times in UFO sightings of our contemporary era. According to the ancient report, residents of Rome witnessed the appearance of a “comet-like” object that hovered over the city for several days. After this, it then “melted”, with witnesses stating that pieces that melted away looked similar to flashing torches. What is interesting is that in the twenty-first century, there have been several sightings of glowing objects hovering overhead that then emit several “drips” that look similar to pieces melting from it. Whether these objects are extraterrestrial vehicles or not, it is interesting to see a report detailing an almost identical event.

A particularly thought-provoking incident was documented by historian Josephus and took place in Judea in the year 65, where the residents of the city witnessed what can only be described as a battle between aerial objects. In fact, Josephus would write that the account would “likely have been deemed a fable were it not for the narratives of eyewitnesses!” He continued that on the day in question, “armed battalions (were) hurtling through the clouds”, which then forced the ground to shake. Another historian, Tacitus, also documented the remarkable affair, writing that “in the sky appeared a vision of armies in conflict, of glittering armor!”

Documented reports of what we would determine from a modern perspective as being a battle between UFOs can be found a millennium and a half later on two separate occasions. The first occurred on April 14th, 1561, in the city of Nuremberg in Germany and was documented in an illustrated broadsheet the following week by Hanns Glaser, a “letter-painter” of the city. Glaser offered that the residents of the city were witness to “a very frightful spectacle” overhead as globes of “blood-red, bluish, or black” hung in the sky. Among these globes were “plates and blood-colored crosses”. Glaser continued that several of these objects were “three in a row”, which perhaps suggested they were in some kind of formation. Also mentioned was the presence of huge tube-shaped objects from which further “globes” emerged, perhaps suggesting they were motherships. Glaser went on to detail how these strange aerial vehicles went on to “fight one another” until “they all fell…from the sun and sky down to the earth as if everything was on fire!” When the flames died down all that was left was “immense smoke”.

Just over five later, during the course of several weeks between late July and early August 1566, in Basel, Switzerland, further apparent aerial battles were witnessed. These sightings would culminate just before dawn on August 7th, when “many large black globes were seen in the air, moving before the sun with great speed!” The incident was documented by Samuel Coccius, who stated that the black globes were “turning against each other as if fighting. Some of them became red and fiery and afterward faded and went out!” We might conclude that the “red and fiery” refers to some kind of aerial explosion that caused these craft to fall to the ground.

According to an account that can be found in the book Best UFO Cases – Europe by Illobrand Von Ludwiger, at around 2 pm on the afternoon of April 8th, 1665, in Stralsund, Germany, near the Baltic Sea, several fishermen noticed what they thought was a particularly large swarm of birds over the water. However, the longer they watched this swarm, the more they noticed that they “changed to battleships in the sky!” Clearly, we can conclude that no physical transformation took place, but that the birds were, in fact, aerial vehicles that simply became clearer to the fishermen the closer they got. The strangeness, though, was just beginning.

As the fishermen looked on, the object began fighting “one against the other” which caused a “lot of smoke” to develop. Even more amazing, further objects arrived in the sky, each joining the aerial battle that was clearly taking place. The fishermen watched this bizarre show for several hours. According to the 1680 writings of Erasmus Francisci (who was one of Ludwiger’s sources for his account), these aerial battles “were frequent in the medieval age” and were regarded as “air visions” that were often seen as a warning.

Then, the battle seemed to come to a stop and the objects dispersed before a huge object suddenly appeared overhead. Francisci described this “flat round form” as looking very much “like a plate” or “like the big hat of a man” and was “the color of the moon!” It proceeded to move slowly across the sky before coming to a stop directly over St. Nikolai Church. It remained there for several hours with multiple residents of the area now aware of its presence. While many witnesses at the time – who already, according to Francisci, believed these aerial displays were divine visions – believed its decision to stop over the church was a further sign of divinity, we should perhaps consider that as one of the tallest buildings of the times, it is understandable that apparent aerial visitors would focus on them as a point of interest. Whatever the truth, the large object eventually left the region and disappeared.

The following day, however, the main witnesses to the bizarre events, the fishermen, became suddenly ill, with descriptions offering that they were “trembling all over and (had) pain in (their) head and limbs!” One detail states that one of the men had even been physically sick “on his feet!” Two of the fishermen were eventually “interrogated” by local authorities, and it was determined that the entire episode had been a vision from God. Today, though, we can see the event for what it seemingly was: some kind of aerial battle involving vehicles that very well could have been from another world.

There are several things for us to quickly consider here. We have already examined two similar encounters from the previous century that took place in the same region of Europe. As bizarre as it might sound, should we contemplate that there was some kind of aerial conflict taking place on Earth between two warring cosmic visitors from elsewhere in the Universe, and if so, why had such potential alien civilizations chosen the Earth for this battle? Or might we consider that these futuristic vehicles belonged to two civilizations already present on Earth, and if this was the case, who were these advanced civilizations and where did they go?

Just over four centuries earlier, in 1180 in Kii Province in Japan, as documented in The Book of Ghosts, UFOs, and the Unexplained by James Paton, several fishermen witnessed a bright object they described as an “earthen-ware vessel” in the night sky. An earthen-ware vessel, incidentally, is similar to a soup bowl or saucer – similar to how objects were often described at the start of the modern UFO era. The fishermen offered that the object had first appeared from the direction of Mount Nyoigadake before suddenly changing direction and disappearing into the distance with great speed.

Just over half a century later, also in Japan, in 1235, according to an account documented in the medieval Japanese text, the Azuma Kagami, General Yoritsune ordered what could possibly be regarded as the first UFO investigation on record. The orders were issued after Yoritsune and his men witnessed several strange lights dancing in the night sky as they camped for the night. They watched them for several hours as they performed bizarre maneuvers overhead. Following the lights vanishing, Yoritsune gathered his most intelligent men and ordered them to investigate what the lights might have been and report their findings to him. Incidentally, his men insisted that the lights were “completely natural” and that the aerial anomaly was likely the result of “the wind making the stars sway!”

Another account detailed in James Paton’s The Book of Ghosts, UFOs, and the Unexplained occurred just short of 20 years later, on New Year’s Day 1254 in St. Albans in Hertfordshire, England. On the night in question, several monks had gathered at the local church in order to celebrate the New Year festivities and witnessed “a kind of large ship, elegantly shaped and of marvelous color!” According to the writing of the incident – documented by Matthew of Paris – hovered silently over the church, clearly standing out against the stars in the early evening sky. The object remained where it was for several minutes before ascending high into the sky and disappearing from sight. Whatever the object was, it is widely agreed by UFO investigators and historians alike that they most certainly saw something very strange.

Across the Atlantic in the New World that would become the United States of America, we find many more sightings of strange, out-of-place aerial objects. Arguably, the first recorded sighting of what we would today call a UFO occurred on the banks of the Muddy River near Boston, Massachusetts, one evening in 1638. Jeff Belanger relays the account in the book Picture Yourself Legend Tripping: Your Complete Guide to Finding UFOs, Monster, Ghosts, and Urban Legends in Your Own Backyard, offering the incident was first recorded in the journal of Governor John Winthrop. Winthrop wrote that a local man named James Everell – widely regarded as a “sober, discreet” man – along with two other unnamed men, witnessed a large, bright light moving across the night sky on the evening in question. Further, according to the report, the object stopped and hovered momentarily – where it would “flare up” – before moving once more, when it “took on the shape of a swine” (we might imagine that the object Winthrop was trying to describe was cigar or tube-shaped). The report continues that the witnesses followed the object for around a mile, noting that it was “swift as an arrow”, before it eventually disappeared into the distance.

At around 9 pm on the evening of June 30th, 1790, in the Schoharie County region of New York, a “bright shining light” was witnessed by a local German immigrant to the United States while sitting on his porch, who would eventually speak of the incident in 1823 in an official statement to the Historical Philosophical Society of the State of New York. At the same time that he noticed the light, he heard a “great roar” that seemed to come from the glowing object. The brightness of the object continued to increase, so much so that the witness stated it appeared as though he was sitting in the “noonday sun!”

To begin with, this strange craft moved across the sky in a similar fashion to a meteorite. However, after several moments, it leveled out somewhat and maintained the same altitude as it carried on its path just above the treetops before it ascended slightly with the speed of a “galloping horse” as it went over Owelus Sowless Hill. The witness further described the object as being around 300 yards long and a similar shape to a snake but with a shape similar to “the roots of a tree plucked up by force” where the head should be. The exterior of the object, according to the witness’s statement, “closely resembled a welding hot iron and sparked similar to it!” Even more remarkable, the witness claimed to have felt a considerable heat coming from the craft, despite being a significant distance away from it. In fact, such was the heat coming from the object that it warmed his entire house. What’s more, an aroma of burning sulfur and tar permeated the air around him and remained until well into the next day long after the object had gone.

Around half a century later, in the November 26th, 1846, edition of the Official Gazette of the Empire of Brazil newspaper, we can find what is widely agreed to be Brazil’s first officially documented UFO encounter. Furthermore, and lending immediate credibility to the case, the writer of the article, who was also the main witness, was a highly respected and decorated member of the Brazilian Navy, Augusto Lerverger.

The incident unfolded just before 6 am one morning in June 1846, when Lerverger was leading two gunboats down the Paraguay River, which runs between Paraguay and Brazil’s Matto Grasso area, on their way to Asuncion, the capital of Paraguay (the expedition was said to be a “military muscle-flexing” exercise on the part of the Brazilian government). They were just under 20 miles away from their destination when they witnessed a “phenomenon never seen before!” Lerverger wrote that out of the clear and calm sky, a “luminous globe performed with instant speed a 30-degree curve” ahead of them. He continued that a “light band” was connected to this globe, along which were “three bodies whose brightness was much more lively!” This object – as well as the three separate objects – continued to increase in brightness. Lerverger further stated that the three objects were separate from each other and were different shapes – one being circular, one an “irregular quadrangle” and the last “an arc of a circle” – with a “ribbon of very faint light” moving around them in a zig-zag motion.

The crew watched the object as it moved, noting that it began to change shape once more, this time appearing like a “flat elliptical shape” before it disappeared into the distance. In total, it was in view for around 25 minutes. By the time they arrived at their destination a short time later, it was clear to all onboard – including the Brazilian Ambassador, Dr. Jose Antonio Bueno, who was also present - that many other people had also seen the aerial anomaly. Lerverger speculated whether they had witnessed a meteor or some other kind of atmospheric phenomena. However, certainly, when examined from a modern perspective, it would appear the crew witnessed some kind of nuts-and-bolts mechanical craft.

As strange as it might sound, 1846 appears to have been quite the year for UFO sightings, with several others on record around the world. A little over a month later, at around 2:30 am on August 25th, 1846, in Saint-Apre, France, Dr. Moreau was making his way home following a late-night house call to one of his patients. As he walked along, a strange light suddenly appeared and enveloped him. When he looked up, he saw a mysterious globe that opened. A moment later, “hundreds of star-like objects” emerged from the globe and went into the air. This bizarre display continued for five minutes before the object disappeared back into the night sky.

Several weeks later, also in France in La Salette on September 19th, 11-year-old Maximin and 14-year-old Melanie Calvat were herding cattle when they reported seeing a suddenly appearing bright light flash across the sky. Although the sighting unfolded during the middle of the day, Melanie offered that the object was “shining more brightly than the sun!” Melanie recalled that she was immediately captivated by the strange glow, stating that as she watched, “something inconceivably fantastic passed” through her. Then, things turned even stranger. Melanie recalled that she witnessed a “lady” emerge from the light, a lady that she claimed was the “Virgin Mary” and that her appearance was a warning or omen.

In November 1846, on the Rangoon River in China, several people onboard a ship making its way down the river noticed a strange light suddenly appear in front of it. The main witness, the ship owner’s wife, and her four-year-old child, along with the ship’s captain, were standing at the front of the vessel when the light appeared. They recalled how the light had the appearance of a “compact flame” which appeared to move for several moments along the water’s edge.

According to another account in the book Wonders in the Sky, several months later, at around 8:30 pm on the evening of March 19th, 1847, in London, England, a witness referred to only as “A”, along with a friend, was walking down Albion Road when the evening took a most unusual turn. The pair suddenly noticed what they believed to be a balloon descending out of the night sky. However, as they watched it, and the lower it got, they quickly realized from “its intense brightness” that the object was “not an Earthly thing!” They continued to watch, noting that every now and then, several “fiery coruscations” were projected from the object as it took on the appearance of an “intensely radiant cloud!” The witness further offered that the object was so bright that it “cast a brilliant light on the houses” below. Both looked on as a second object appeared and descended to the same altitude as the first one. They both hovered in the air for around two minutes before the first object “absorbed” the second one and then began to ascend and disappear into the night sky.

In a letter to the Scientific American, Professor A.C. Carnes relayed another account of a strange aerial object that unfolded in the early hours of June 1st, 1854, on the campus of a Tennessee college. According to the report, several students awoke on the morning in question to see two strange objects hovering in the sky overhead. The witnesses claimed that one of the objects appeared moon-like while the other appeared like a star. The moon-like object began to decrease in size until it eventually disappeared. Then, the other object began to grow. Eventually, it began to change form, first into a globe or spherical object and then into an elongated shape.

In his letter, Carnes wrote, “The first (object) became visible again, and increased rapidly in size, while the other diminished, and the two spots kept changing thus for about half an hour!” After watching the objects until they disappeared, the students sought the advice of their professors, including Carnes, but none of them could offer an explanation. The incident remains a complete mystery today.

Another intriguing incident occurred a little over half a decade later, in March 1861, a short time after the inauguration of President Abraham Lincoln’s first term as President of the United States, once more in New York, a city still far from the sprawling metropolis it is today, but still a jungle of tall buildings that was a “cramped urban setting” for the people who resided there. On the night in question, in an area known as Five Points, Mrs. Kinder was looking out of her bedroom window at the church near her upper-floor apartment when she saw a “cross-like object with a flaming luminosity” moving across the sky. She immediately woke her husband, who also saw the bizarre aerial anomaly. The pair watched the object at the window until it disappeared into the distance. Mrs. Kinder would speak of the encounter to her priest at St. Peters Church in Jersey City, who would document the report in his Baptismal records. Also of interest, around the same time as the sighting, only six blocks from Kinder’s apartment, an entire block of buildings was brought to the ground by a raging fire. Whether there is a connection between this brutal blaze of the fiery object witnessed by Kinder remains open to debate.  

While there have undoubtedly been apparent encounters with alien entities long before the twentieth century (some of which we will examine shortly), there is little doubt that an encounter from early 1917 – an account I relay in From Deep Within The Archives Of UFO Insight: History’s Most Bizarre, Outlandish, And Controversial UFO And Alien Encounters -  is worth our time exploring here, not least as it features some of the specific details of the alien abduction phenomenon that would sweep the planet decades after the start of the modern UFO era.

According to most sources, the account first appeared in the June 9th, 1978, edition of the Finnish newspaper Kurkijokelainen, in an article written by Latomaen Aino, and documents what appears to be a classic case of alien abduction. According to the account, somewhere between January and Easter of 1917, in the North Karelia region of Finland, a local woman, Anni Lattu, who lived in a small house near the church of Kurkijoki, disappeared for several days before reappearing just as mysteriously. Although many of the local villagers thought it strange that she had seemingly left without saying anything to anyone, they assumed she had gone to visit family, and so no alarm was raised. When Anni returned, however, she did so with a bizarre tale.

She claimed that one morning, while going about her usual chores, a “large apparatus, like a big wash basin” appeared in the sky overhead and descended to the ground near her home. It is worth noting straight away that Anni’s description of this apparent aerial object is disc-shaped, just like many of the objects that would be reported over the second half of the twentieth century, as wash basins in Finland during this time were shaped like large soup bowls. That, though, was far from the only detail that resonated very nicely with close encounters of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

She stated that several moments after the strange object landed on the ground outside her house, a ladder emerged from the side of the craft and stretched slowly to the ground. A moment after that, several “small creatures” that she referred to as “little devils” appeared on the ladder. They walked down it and over to where she was standing. Although she wasn’t certain how, she knew that these creatures wanted her to go with them, and although she attempted to resist, the figures forcibly took her aboard. She stated that the walls of this futuristic craft shone brightly and that a moment after stepping foot inside, the object was moving. She stated it “traveled very quickly” and that “many wonders were shown to her!” Perhaps most interesting of all, in terms of details that can be found in UFO and alien abduction reports decades later, was that this strange vehicle was silent and “did not make any noise as in the train!” There were, though, further revelations from her remarkable tale.

She went on to describe being taken “above the world” and “between the stars”, clearly indicating she had left the planet and was taken into space. She further claimed that although she didn’t at all know their language, she understood everything the strange entities said to her, leading some researchers to question if her apparent abductors were using telepathy to communicate, something else that often shows up in other alien abduction encounters. The next thing she recalled was standing outside her house. To Anni, she had been gone only a short time. It was only when she spoke to friends and neighbors that she realized several days had passed.

According to the article, Anni was happy to speak to anyone who would listen about her fantastic adventure. However, as we might expect, most of the villagers dismissed her account, suspecting she had hallucinated the entire thing, perhaps as a result of suffering an intense fever from exposure to the cold, they reasoned. Or perhaps she had suffered a mental breakdown. Anni, though, never wavered from her version of events.

Several months after the publication of the article in the summer of 1978, Finish UFO investigator Mauritz Heitamaki took an interest in the case. So much so, in fact, that he ventured to the village where the apparent abduction had taken place. Even more remarkable, during his investigation, he managed to track down a witness who claimed to have known Anni shortly after the abduction happened.

The witness – referred to in Heitamaki’s report only as NM – claimed that when she was seven years old, her mother was Anni’s neighbor, and the pair would often speak. NM would listen to these conversations and clearly remembered hearing Anni speaking of the bizarre affair with her mother on several occasions. As was reported in the newspaper article, NM insisted that Anni always told the exact same story, never once differing in her account.  NM also offered that despite reports that Anni was a widow, she was, in fact, married, although her husband often left Anni alone for weeks at a time. Further, according to NM, Anni remained in the same village where the encounter took place until her death in 1930.

It is also worth our time to examine an account of an alien encounter that occurred in the small town of Lodi in California. According to reports, one evening during the summer of 1896, Colonel HG Shaw was traveling to Fresno by horse and carriage with a friend for an upcoming exhibition that they were to organize. However, out of nowhere, their horse would suddenly come to a complete stop. Not only would it refuse to move forward, but it was clearly in a severe state of fright and stress.

At this point, Shaw and his friend decided to investigate, and upon looking ahead of the horse, they could make out three tall figures standing a little way off in the middle of the road. The description Shaw gave of these creatures – large, hairless heads with large dark eyes and legs and arms that appeared too thin and out of proportion to their frames – is the same as many of the descriptions of grey aliens from throughout the Modern UFO era, and we should keep in mind, this report came six decades before the Roswell incident.

The two men watched the three figures for several moments and noticed how, every so often, they would place a bag with some kind of tube attached to their mouths, perhaps suggesting that it was some kind of breathing aid or apparatus. On the other hand, each figure carried some kind of glowing lamp. Furthermore, the two men could hear these mysterious creatures speaking to each other in a language they were unfamiliar with.

Several moments later, the three figures suddenly turned around and walked toward a nearby bridge. The two men watched them go, the light from their lamps revealing a hovering, metallic object close to the bridge. The three figures entered the hovering craft, which then began to ascend, eventually disappearing into the night sky. Although he wasn’t entirely sure what he and his friend had seen that night (although he stated in his report these figures could have been from Mars), he was certain they had witnessed something quite extraordinary.

There have been many other apparent encounters worth exploring. On the morning of August 5th, 1608, in Nice, France, for example, multiple residents of the city witnessed three glowing objects overhead. According to the reports, the objects revolved in the air as they moved in the direction of the city fortress. The three aerial vehicles continued across the fortress and headed out toward the Mediterranean Sea. They eventually came to a stop where the witnesses claimed to see them float on the water. Even more remarkable, as the witnesses watched the object, they could clearly see two humanoid figures emerge from one of them, a tube connected to their bodies from inside the craft. They each had a “large head” with “luminous eyes” and wore silver and red clothing. It appeared the entities were carrying out repairs of some kind before they reentered the craft. Following this, the three objects ascended high into the sky and then sped off into the distance.

A particularly intriguing account that could very well be a case of alien abduction in the seventeenth century can be found in the 1841 publication by Charles McKay, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. The case in question features Major Thomas Weir, a respected Scottish soldier and commander of the Edinburgh Town Guard who, in 1670, while gravely sick and bed-ridden, seemingly confessed to bizarre activities involving his sister, Jean Weir, to the Lord Provost, activities that appeared to be ground in the Occult. When his sister was confronted with her brother’s confession, she broke down, claiming they had been involved in a lifetime of strange and bizarre events.

Of most interest to us here, though, is an account offered by Jean that took place at some time in 1648, when a mysterious stranger arrived out of nowhere in a “fiery coach” and proceeded to take her brother away. During this journey, this mysterious stranger imparted “supernatural intelligence” to Thomas, including information about a battle taking place at Worcester, a battle, incidentally, that the Scots lost. We might consider that the “fiery coach” described by Jean was, in fact, some kind of aerial object – essentially, a UFO – and this mysterious journey he embarked on was actually an alien abduction. Furthermore, the “lifetime of strange and bizarre events” could very well be an indication of repeat alien abduction. We might also consider the fact of this “supernatural intelligence” passed to Thomas. In many cases of alien abduction, many abductees speak of being given information, sometimes about future events. Could that have been the case here? Whatever the truth, the confession of Thomas and Jean would have tragic and unfortunate consequences for the siblings.

To begin with, the apparent confession of Thomas Weir was not taken seriously, not least because of Weir’s noble standing, but also because it was suspected he was suffering from senility. However, following his sister’s statements, both were arrested and eventually tried for practicing witchcraft. Both were found guilty, although Thomas’s conviction was on the much lesser charges (for the times) of incest and beastiality. Both, however, were sentenced to death.

Another bizarre encounter unfolded in October 1847 in the Saratov region of Russia when local residents witnessed “four fiery columns of light” overhead. These columns remained in sight for almost two hours and sparkled between shades of white and blue. Then, without warning, the four columns simply disappeared. The strangeness, though, was far from over. As the next few hours, days, and weeks progressed, residents of Saratov began commenting on several “bizarre-looking strangers” seen walking around the area. In fact, several people even approached these strangers and attempted to talk to them, although it was clear they didn’t understand them, and nor could residents understand the strangers.

These strange figures were described as looking similar to “elderly men” with “yellow-greenish faces” and without a beard (something that almost all male residents of the area sported). Most of the locals determined that these strangers were likely “eccentric travelers” who were friendly enough with those who encountered them. These strangers would appear regularly, each day in a different part of the region, always disappearing before nightfall. The last recorded sighting of them was on the evening of October 6th, 1848, almost a year after the strange columns of light appeared over the region. On this night, at around 9 pm, a bright light suddenly appeared overhead lighting up the entire area. At the same time, a low thunder-like rumbling sound could also be heard. This went on for around an hour before a “blood red colored spot” appeared within the light, which then morphed into an “elongated form” before finally splitting into several columns of sparkling light. These columns remained until around 11 pm when they suddenly disappeared – as had the strangers, who were never seen again.

Might we assume that these “eccentric travelers” were connected to the strange columns of light witnessed that October evening, and that they might have traveled from much further away than most would imagine?  Could it be that the columns of light transported them from the ground to an aerial craft overhead? Or might they even have been some kind of portals or gateways to another realm or part of the universe? The incident remains completely unexplained.

As we can see, then, it is clear that UFO sightings and encounters with alien entities, including apparent alien abductions, have been happening throughout human history. And the incidents we have explored here are just some of the many encounters on record from across the centuries. Indeed, to examine them all would likely take an entire volume. We can only imagine how many other sightings and encounters went undocumented and, as such, are now lost to history, buried under the sands of time. Or how many from antiquity were recorded in the records that were destroyed during such episodes as the burning of the library of Alexandria, and the wiping out of records of many of the North and South American native populations by European explorers. We might also consider how many cases have been documented but now reside in locked-away vaults in various destinations around the world. Perhaps the one certain thing is that our history is littered with these strange accounts, which should alert us to the fact that our collective reality and place in the universe are far different from what most might think.