Every May and October, a curious phenomenon occurs along a 160-mile-long stretch of the Mekong River in the Isaan region in northeast Thailand. For a few nights during these two months, one can see the eerie sight of numerous glowing balls that seem to erupt from the very river itself to fly high into the air and vanish. Descriptions for these luminous orbs vary, ranging from the size of tiny bubbles or sparklers to larger ones said to be around the size of a basketball, usually a reddish color, but sometimes a bluish or yellowish hue and sometimes white. These balls typically will launch themselves upwards several hundred meters into the air before suddenly blinking out of existence, never making a sound and emanating no smoke or plume. They will continue for a time before stopping just as suddenly as they appeared, and there can be tens to thousands of these lights seen throughout a given night, rain or shine, with the most intense activity occurring during the night of Wan Ok Phansa at the end of Buddhist Lent in late-October and the most lights seen in the vicinity of a small village called Phon Phisai. Formerly called simply the “ghost lights,” they are now officially called bung fai phaya nak, and more commonly referred to by outsiders as the “Naga fireballs,” and no one is quite sure just what they are.

According to local tradition, the Naga fireballs have their origins in a type of giant river serpent prevalent in Buddhist folklore, called a Naga, in this case specifically a Naga called the Phaya Nak, or “the king of nagas.” These are said to be enormous semi-divine serpents and servants of Buddha with supernatural powers that lurk within the Mekong river or its estuaries, and are not only responsible for strange wave formations and other phenomena, but also are known from time to time shoot blazing fireballs into the air. Far from merely myth and folklore, a great many people in the rural areas of Thailand sincerely believe the Phaya Nak exist. There have been numerous sightings of them, and there are even supposed bones, teeth, and the egg of a Naga kept at a temple in Phon Phisai, and so it therefore goes without saying that for the locals the fireballs are coming from these beasts, as a display of celebration for the end of Buddhist Lent. However, of course there are plenty of other theories from scientists skeptical that the fireballs are coming from magical giant river serpents.

One theory that has been thrown around is that it is merely people firing tracer rounds, flares, or even just fireworks, the sound deadened by the distance and the often very noisy crowds of people who pour into the region to see the lights every year. Indeed, the annual 4-day Phayanak Festival in October attracts tens of thousands of people, who come to see the lights and enjoy the many festivities and events, including food stalls, Naga legend information, fireball exhibitions, a night bazaar, light and sound shows, and long-boat races prior to the main event of the fireballs themselves. With all of this activity it would seem that many of the lights might just be a show put on to draw in visitors, as the festival brings in huge amounts of revenue for the tiny rural local economy. However, while some of the Naga fireballs might be this, it does not explain the fireballs that originally began the festival, why they seem to come directly out of the water, or why they will often pop out in various different areas along the river. There are also frequent Thai boat patrols through the area to deter people from doing dangerous things like firing into the air. There is also the fact that the fireballs have been seen at other times of the year, and are only really paid attention to at the end of Buddhist Lent. They are also frequently reported as coming from smaller tributaries of the Mekong and even ponds in other areas, as well as some claims that these things have been seen for centuries. One reporter Andrew Biggs has said of the hoax angle in an article in the Bangkok Post:

First of all, the lights have been around a long time. Fishermen have reported seeing what locals still call “ghost lights” in the darkness of the Mekong River way before local governments attached the myth of Phayanak to them. Also, these lights apparently don’t just appear on the end of Buddhist Lent. It’s just that we pay attention to them on that night, which isn’t the same as saying they only pop up once a year. The biggest quandary of all is that we are living in the era of digital record. Everything is filmed, photographed and uploaded onto Instagram. People photograph their morning coffee, for god’s sake — what happens when it’s an event like weird coloured balls in the river? And yet despite all this, nobody has captured any hoax perpetrators.

It is also the scale of the operation. Just say I wanted to play a prank on Northeast believers and shoot a couple of coloured lights off the Mekong River. Who knows the specifics of the operation, but let’s say I do indeed do that. Last Sunday night, starting at 6.28pm, the first fireballs were spotted by those 300,000 visitors camped along the banks of the river at Ban Tha Muang, Rattanawapee district. Then, another one was spotted in a different district. And another. And another. All in all, a total of seventy fireballs shot up throughout the night, and that was in Rattanawapee alone. There were more in the districts of Sangkhom and Pone-pisai. By the end of the night, there were more than 300 fireballs. That’s a really big, expensive hoax!

For these reasons, it seems that surely not all of them could be caused by hoaxes or partiers, so what else could they be? Another possibility put forward is that the fireballs are caused by plasma orbs formed by the release of surface electricity, or even the old standby for UFO sightings called swamp gas. This is basically methane gas produced by the decomposition of organic material igniting when exposed to oxygen, and it has been used by skeptics to explain away a variety of ghost light and UFO phenomena, but this would not explain why it only happens most prominently at specific times of the year like clockwork, and it has also been called out as an unsuitable explanation for this phenomenon in other ways. Skeptic Brian Dunning has given a thorough and amusing skeptical debunking of the typical skeptical argument of swamp gas causing the Naga fireballs, saying:

There are two fatal flaws with this hypothesis. First, methane can only burn in an oxygen environment within a specific range of concentrations. It can only spontaneously ignite within an even narrower range, and requires the presence of phosphine combined with phosphorous tetrahydride. The needed proportions of these gases are unlikely to be found in nature. Second, in laboratory experiments designed to replicate the conditions needed for spontaneous ignition, the combination of oxygen, methane, and phosphorus compounds burns bright bluish-green with a sudden pop, producing black smoke. Under no conditions does it burn slowly, or red, or rise up in the air as a fireball. So even if the improbable conditions did exist in the Mekong river, the resulting display would not look like the Naga Fireballs.

Whatever is shooting up into the air, you’ve got to figure that it has some solid mass. When you watch the videos you can see that the red-orange lights go up very fast, consistent with fireworks, small rockets, or even tracer rounds (very much like a 12-gauge shotgun tracer round, which is comparatively slow). How is it possible for any flaming object to move that quickly through the air without blowing out? That’s not a problem for something like a firework or a tracer round, things designed for exactly such a purpose. But it’s a major problem for a burning ball of gas, which has an insufficient mass to drag ratio to move that quickly through the air. Even a pyrotechnic explosion that billows into the sky rises at a slow rate consistent with hot air rising through cold air; it does not and cannot streak like a bullet at hundreds of feet per second. For the Naga Fireballs to move as they do, they must enclose an object significantly more massive than the air they’re moving through. This necessarily means they’re heavier than air. And since they’re rocketing skyward, this means they must have been physically propelled.

So, from what we can observe, it’s actually more plausible that a river dragon is spitting flaming balls of dragon-mucus skyward, than it is for the Naga Fireballs to be naturally produced burning gas bubbles.

The Naga Fireballs have as of yet remained unidentified. What are we looking at here? Is this some rational, explainable phenomenon? Is it gases, atmospheric phenomena, or merely fireworks and people firing tracers into the air? Or is it perhaps something else altogether? The festival at the river still goes on every year, and if you talk to any local they will say it is the doing of the mysterious Naga, with perhaps even some spite thrown your way if you should say otherwise. Whatever the explanation may be, the Naga fireballs continue on, and have evaded understanding to this day.

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There have been plenty of strange flaps of mysterious lights and luminous phenomena in the skies of our world. Such spates of sightings often come in a wave, only to just fade away leaving no explanations and plenty of awe and debate. One such case happened in Northern Europe in the region of Scandinavia back in 1946. During this one year period there would be thousands of sightings of something very odd going on up in the sky, which have never really been explained and have come to be known as the Ghost Rockets.

Beginning in 1946, mysterious objects in the sky began to appear frequently over a variety of Scandinavian countries, in particular Sweden and Finland. These objects were typically described as tubular or cigar or spindle-shaped objects, sometimes with visible wings and sometimes without, that typically streaked fast across the sky but also displayed all manner of erratic behavior. These objects were reported as speeding up or slowing down, doing aerial maneuvers, and even flying in formation, typically leaving no exhaust trail and almost always described as being completely silent, although a few reports described a hissing or rumbling sound. They were seen at all hours of the day and night, and were so bright they could even be seen in broad daylight. The first real recorded sighting of what would go on to be called “Ghost Rockets” was made in Finland on February 26, 1946, but soon the entire region would experience a surge of sightings of these things in the sky, with around 2,000 sightings reports made between May and December of that year alone, often with radar signatures to back them up.

Alleged photo of one of the lights

At times, there were even reported crashes of Ghost Rockets, usually with the rockets coming down into large bodies of water such as lakes or the sea. There were quite a few such crashes that allegedly happened, and on more than one occasion Swedish authorities moved in to investigate, even sending divers in to look for evidence of any mysterious objects on the bottom. One of the most well-known of these investigations was carried out at Sweden’s Lake Kölmjärv, where on July 19, 1946 a gray, rocket-shaped object with wings reportedly came down after an earsplitting boom, to go skidding over the surface and sink. The Swedish Air Force quickly moved in and spent around 3 weeks scouring the bottom of the lake, but they would officially find nothing but a large patch of lake bottom that had been disturbed and looked like something very big had impacted there. No fragments or reason why this crater was there could be found, and one Swedish Air Force officer would state:

There are many indications that the Kölmjärv object disintegrated itself. The object was probably manufactured in a lightweight material, possibly a kind of magnesium alloy that would disintegrate easily, and not give indications on our instruments.

Several more military investigations were carried out at other similar crash sites, but on every occasion it was claimed that nothing was found. In the meantime, sightings of the Ghost Rockets were pouring in from all over Scandinavia, and although Sweden tried to keep a lid on it all, there were simply too many reports to keep it all a secret, with headlines around the world covering the strange phenomenon. When pressed for answers as to what was going on, Sweden projected a skeptical stance that anything truly unexplainable was happening, largely writing it off as a mixture of atmospheric phenomena, meteors, aircraft, and overactive imaginations. However, they did concede that not all of the reports of Ghost Rockets were so easy to dismiss, and in October of 1946 the Swedish Defense Staff would tell a press conference:

Most observations are vague and must be treated very skeptically. In some cases, however, clear, unambiguous observations have been made that cannot be explained as natural phenomena, Swedish aircraft, or imagination on the part of the observer. Echo, radar, and other equipment registered readings but gave no clue as to the nature of the objects.

Most in the scientific community wrote it off as meteors, as several alleged fragments from the Ghost Rockets that had been examined turned out to be either pieces of meteorites or just plain old coke or slag, in other words, rocks. However, not everyone was so sure all of the phenomena could be attributed to meteorites, due to the fact that the objects often were seen doing acrobatics, flying horizontally, flying in formation, or accelerating and decelerating, none of which are things meteorites are known to do, and they also did not typically leave trails behind them.

The phenomenon also attracted the interest of the United States, and two U.S. experts on aerial warfare, a General Jimmy Doolittle and General David Sarnoff, went to Sweden in August of 1946, ostensibly on other unrelated business, but who also asked around to the Swedish military about the Ghost Rockets. In fact, they were given briefings on the phenomenon and able to interview many senior officers with the Swedish Air Force. The two generals went away convinced that the Ghost Rockets were a real thing and not a myth. When they brought their findings back to the United States, the Americans came to the conclusion that these were actual missiles being seen, likely top-secret V-1 or V-2 missiles being fired by the Germans from a rocket facility at the German seaside town of Peenemünde. Lt. Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg, who was the director of the Central Intelligence Group (CIG), would write a Top Secret memo to President Truman explaining this theory, saying:

The weight of evidence pointed to Peenemünde as origin of the missiles, that a US MA [military attaché] in Moscow had been told by a ‘key Swedish Air Officer’ that radar course-plotting had led to conclusion that Peenemünde was the launch site. CIG speculates that the missiles are extended-range developments of V-1 being aimed for the Gulf of Bothnia for test purposes and do not overfly Swedish territory specifically for intimidation; self-destruct by small demolition charge or burning.

The problem with this is that not only had there been no reported launches of any sort of missile or rocket from Peenemünde at the time, but missiles don’t speed up and slow down or do the extreme aerial acrobatics seen with the Ghost Rockets any more than meteorites do. Despite the widespread belief that these Ghost Rockets must have been meteorites, rockets, or both, the U.S. government seemed to remain open to the idea that they could have been something more outlandish and mysterious. In a top secret document by USAFE (United States Air Force Europe) from 1948 that was declassified in 1997, the Swedish Ghost Rockets are mentioned, as is a supposed crash of one of them that left a crater at the bottom of the lake, and the document says:

They (UFOs) have been reported by so many sources and from such a variety of places that we are convinced that they cannot be disregarded and must be explained on some basis which is perhaps slightly beyond the scope of our present intelligence thinking. When officers of this Directorate recently visited the Swedish Air Intelligence Service, this question was put to the Swedes. Their answer was that some reliable and fully technically qualified people have reached the conclusion that ‘these phenomena are obviously the result of a high technical skill which cannot be credited to any presently known culture on earth’. They are therefore assuming that these objects originate from some previously unknown or unidentified technology, possibly outside the earth. We are inclined not to discredit entirely this somewhat spectacular theory [extraterrestrial origins], meantime keeping an open mind on the subject.

The lights would disappear just as suddenly as they started, reports would dry up, and we would be left to wonder just what was going on here. To this day there has been no clear explanation for what caused the Ghost Rockets flap of 1946, despite much discussion and debate. Were these meteorites, rockets, some weird atmospheric phenomena, or all of the above? Or was it perhaps something altogether stranger and more otherworldly? Why did it all congregate in this region in 1946 and what is it that the governments involved might not be telling us? No one really knows, and the Scandinavian Ghost Rockets remain a curious unsolved mystery.

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A great number of UFO reports that have been logged over the years have resulted in attempts at providing rational explanations which, perhaps more often than not, have drawn from weather-related phenomena as possible sources.

Naturally occurring atmospheric phenomena actually do often spark claims of UFO sightings, with sources as varied as “sundogs” or parhelion, to saucer-shaped lenticular clouds, and even more curious natural phenomena like ball lightning which, though confirmed and widely recognized, remains somewhat mysterious.

However, there are other instances where peculiar natural occurrences may point to weather-related phenomena which might account for unusual UFO-like observations. Some of these, as is the case with ball lighting, may leave us with more questions than they do answers.

Such an account was described in 1992 in an entry published in the U.K. Journal of Meteorology. The author, a Mr. Brian Hayes, wrote to the journal with additional details about a bizarre sighting that occurred in September of the previous year.

“I follow up my telephone call to you with further details of Mr. Barrie Brumpton’s unusual sighting which he related to me in October 1991,” wrote Hayes, who stated that his interview with the witness had occurred just days after the observation took place.

“Having read The Circles Effect and its Mysteries and The Goddess of the Stones I was able to pounce upon a chance remark made by Mr. Brumpton, and this led to my interviewing him closely. I hope that this will help with your investigations.”

Hayes stated that Brumpton’s sighing occurred near Colden Common, Winchester in Hampshire. The time had been approximately 2230 BST, having taken place on Saturday evening. The date was September 29, 1991.

“The weather was generally very wet and stormy,” Hayes said the witness had described to him, “but a lull had occurred during which the rain stopped and the wind dropped.” What Brumpton described as a light breeze had been blowing from the east, in the direction of New Road. The witness had been approximately 30 yards from the western end of the road, when he first noticed an “object” that was roughly 150 yard away, prompting him to think he had been “seeing things.”

Hayes then provides the following account:

“The object ‘filled the highway’, so this suggests a width of eight metres or so. It was ‘on the ground’ and ’round-topped’, suggesting to me a [hemisphere]. The ‘object’ was a ‘mass of mist’ and ‘looked very wet’. It seemed to ‘roll’ toward the subject at a speed that he estimated at 30 m.p.h. However, his estimate of half-a-minute for travelling 150 yards gives a speed of 20 m.p.h.”

“Let us not forget,” Hayes added in his report, “that time is difficult to estimate after an event.”

According to Brumpton’s description, the mysterious “mass of mist” appeared to be producing a noise that sounded almost identical to heavy rain pounding against asphalt. The observer noted, however, that there had been no precipitation at the time of the sighting, although he had considered whether a hard rain was about to fall, and that he might run the risk of “getting soaked” where he stood.

Another peculiar aspect of the incident had been that Brumpton was able to see the object very clearl at all times, despite the time of night that the observation occurred. “This suggests the possibility that the ‘object’ was luminous,” Hayes speculated.

“The observer moved into a driveway on the south side of the road, but when a few yards away ‘the object moved over’ to the north side and ‘just vanished’.”

What had the unusual object been that Brumpton observed in September 1991? Although certain aspects of the incident do appear reminiscent of UFO-type observations from over the years, the seemingly weather-related aspects of the events described appear to point to the possibility of a natural explanation.

Cases such as these cause us to wonder about the varieties of natural occurrences that might have led to at least a few UFO sightings over the years. Regardless, they are occurrences that may represent genuine mysteries in their own right, despite their apparent natural origin.

After writing articles in the last few days on UFO researchers being the subjects of government files, getting knocks on the door from “The Man,” and strange phone calls, there’s one more aspect to this particularly sinister part of Ufology: namely, those mysterious black cars that the mysterious M.I.B. drive. The number of reports that fall in this category are huge, and I don’t exaggerate. Indeed, I could write an entire series of articles on the “Cars in Black” phenomenon. One of the people whose M.I.B. experiences feature in my 2015 Men in Black book is a friend of mine, Steve Ray. After reading the book, and just a few days after it was published, Steve experienced something unusual. In his very own words to me: “I read the whole Kindle version of the book Sunday and Monday. Monday night I came home and found two black cars parked – headlights out – in non-assigned spaces directly facing my assigned parking space. When I came upstairs, I found my living-room lamp had been switched from its normal setting to the spookier black-light setting – which I have no memory of doing, and I was the last one here.” I told Steve I was not surprised. He was not comforted by my words; not at all. He wasn’t meant to be. I tell it as it is: good, bad, or worse still. Now, let’s take a look at some more cases.

Nick Redfern and one of those black cars

Dr. Josef Allen Hynek, a well-renowned UFO authority who died in 1986, was provided with the details of a fantastically-strange MIB encounter that occurred in a small Minnesota town in late 1975, and that falls firmly into just such a category. Ironically, no UFO was seen on this particular occasion, but the chief witness was harassed by the driver of a large, black Cadillac on a particular stretch of highway, and who nearly forced the man into an adjacent ditch. The irate man quickly righted his vehicle and headed off in hot-pursuit, only to see the black Cadillac lift into the air and, quite literally, disappear in the blink of any eye. Moving on: Gareth Medway has put together an excellent document on M.I.B. cases, some of which involve those black cars. As Gareth notes: “George Smyth of Elizabeth, New Jersey, went to visit two teenagers who had seen a mysterious green entity [in 1966]. The boys were surrounded by a crowd. He noticed two men emerging from a large black car, leaving a third behind the wheel. They had a slight slant to their eyes. Later, when Saucer News investigators went to visit one of the lads, Smyth noticed the same black car parked nearby, and the same two men get out and watch the house while the interview was going on. Two weeks later he received a phone call telling him to give up UFO investigation.”

Now, onto a story given to me in September 2016 at the annual Mothman Festival: one of the people who came to chat with me, as I sat at my vending table, was Irene, a woman who related a very bizarre story; one with clear M.I.B. / Women in Black overtones attached to it. As Irene revealed, she is now-retired and had a very strange experience while living in Pasadena, California in the late 1970s – in either 1978 or 1979. In the early hours of the particular morning in question she inexplicably woke up and felt compelled to go to the bedroom window. On doing so, she was shocked to see a car-sized, oval-shaped UFO – of a bright blue color – that hung in the air for a few seconds, before vanishing into the dark sky above. She raced back to the bed, terrified by what she had just seen. On the following evening, however, something even stranger occurred.

There was a knock at the door. It was a very pale-faced woman in black who claimed to work for a company that offered aerial photographs of peoples’ homes – taken by an expert photographer, then framed, and that would look very nice on the living-room wall. There was, however, something that made Irene think things were just not quite right, not at all. Her instinct proved to be right on the money. When the woman, somewhat oddly, offered to show Irene one of the cameras that the company used, she agreed to see it – although why she would need to see it at all makes very little sense. If any sense at all. The woman proceeded down the drive and got in the backseat of the black car she had arrived in. In a few seconds, however, she was back out of the car. Irene could see the camera, but was very surprised by what happened next: the woman quickly took a photograph of the front of Irene’s house, jumped back into the car, and in seconds was out of sight.

Now, onto another Irene. This one being Irene Bott, who, in the 1990s, ran the U.K.-base Staffordshire UFO Group. Shortly after establishing her group in 1995, Irene found herself plunged into a situation involving a witness to a UFO encounter – a witness who believed they had a period of so-called “missing time.” Expressing a desire to learn more about what occurred, the witness contacted Irene and related the details that surrounded his viewing in the early hours of a 1995 morning, a brightly lit aerial object. The witness was certain that there was far more to the case than he could consciously recollect, and expressed a keen desire for help in unraveling what had taken place. As a result, Irene referred the witness to a colleague in her group and the two discussed the details over the telephone. Crucial to the issues under discussion, however: shortly after returning home from work on one particular day, the witness found that a note had been pushed through his letterbox warning him not to proceed any further with his investigation.

Naturally concerned, the man asked his neighbors if they had seen anyone lurking in the vicinity of his house that might have conceivably been responsible for the strange and somewhat unsettling note. Fortunately, one such neighbor had seen something unusual on that very day. Shortly after the witness had set off for work, a black car had pulled up outside his house. A man dressed entirely in black and carrying a briefcase exited the vehicle, marched up the driveway, shoved a piece of paper through the letterbox, returned to the car and drove off at speed. One of our mysterious characters had struck again. And, no doubt, those mysterious drivers will be with us as long as the UFO phenomenon is around.

In 1992, in a privately-published paper titled: Have You Checked Your File Lately? Robert Durant, a UFO researcher and pilot, discussed the theme of an all-encompassing, Government-sanctioned-and-controlled operation designed to covertly monitor the activities of the public UFO research community: “You, the reader, are among the approximately 4,000 Americans who subscribe to ufological journals or newsletters, buy UFO books through the mail, attend conferences, or spend time with others who engage in such activities. Not a large group. We are only 3% of the total number of citizens the government admits to watching with intense care. A very easy group to track. Building your file is so much easier than compiling one on a Russian spy or a Mafioso. There is a file on you at the Internal Revenue Service, the Social Security Administration, the driver’s license bureau of the state in which you are licensed, the commercial credit card companies that do business with your bank and your lenders, your doctor’s office, and so forth and so on. Is it really unreasonable to suspect that a UFO file would be created?” With that said, read on:

My previous article here at Mysterious Universe was titled “In the U.K. Government, it’s not just the Ministry of Defense that is tied to UFOs.” In part, I revealed how, in the mid-1990s, English ufologist Robin Cole was visited by government agents because he dug a bit too deep into the UFO connection to the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the U.K.’s equivalent of the United States’ National Security Agency. With that in mind, I thought I would share with you other examples of UFO researchers getting knocks on the front-door from “the man.” Back in the early 1950s, the FBI opened a file on “Contactee” George Van Tassel, who created the Integratron and ran an outdoor UFO event for years – an event that attracted thousands of people. Van Tassel’s file runs to 319 pages and has now been declassified. But, what about Mrs. Van Tassel? It wasn’t just George who got a visit. His wife did, too. In a face-to-face meeting at the Van Tassel home, the FBI recorded the following:

“Relative to her husband and herself, Mrs. Van Tassel claims that she and her husband practice a metaphysical religion. She declared this religion is based on an occult principle in that she and her husband sit in a room in dead silence and receive thought transfers from one another and from other individuals who are not psychically present in the room. She declared that it was through this type of practice that her husband has learned or prophesied the coming of World War III and a gigantic explosion on the East Coast. She mentioned that at the present time she and her husband have undertaken a special project. This project is the founding and organizing of the College of Universal Wisdom. The purpose of the college is to promote and carry out interplanetary communication and the dissemination of Universal Wisdom gained through the median of space beings.” The two agents thanked Mrs. Van Tassel and left, satisfied with what they heard.

As the CIA note, in a very amusing fashion, in 1955, two elderly sisters in Chicago, Mildred and Marie Maier, reported in the Journal of Space Flight their experiences with UFOs, including the recording of a radio program in which an unidentified code was allegedly heard. The sisters taped the program; and other ham radio operators also claimed to have heard the “space message.” The CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence duly became interested and asked its Scientific Contact Branch to obtain a copy of the recording. Field officers from the Contact Division, one of who was a man named Dewelt Walker, made contact with the Maier sisters at their home, who were “thrilled that the government was interested,” and set up a time to meet with them. In trying to secure the tape recording, the Agency officers reported that they had stumbled upon a scene from Arsenic and Old Lace. “The only thing lacking was the elderberry wine,” Walker told Headquarters. After reviewing the sisters’ scrapbook of clippings from their days as entertainers on the stage, the bemused and amused officers secured a copy of the recording. OSI analyzed the tape and found it was nothing more than Morse code from a US radio station.

Moving on: In 1977, the late Graham Birdsall – editor of the now-defunct British-based UFO Magazine – and his brother, Mark, investigated a major UFO sighting near to Harrogate, North Yorkshire, England, that involved a number of witnesses who had viewed strange, aerial objects in the vicinity of Menwith Hill – a vast “listening-post” controlled by the American National Security Agency. The Birdsall brothers duly approached the staff at Menwith Hill for comment and, at one point, were actually allowed on base. This led to a curious series of events. Soon after visiting the base, Graham received a telephone call from a Mr. Mills, the senior NSA security officer at the base, who had just taken up his post at Menwith Hill and was keen to cement good, local relations. Graham engaged the NSA official in conversation for approximately one hour – something that few civilians can claim. Not only that, Graham was visited by an NSA employee who asked him more than a few questions about “motivations” when to came to UFOs – as well as Graham’s beliefs in the UFO phenomenon. The man soon left.

One of my own particularly memorable experiences occurred in 2001. After writing an article on MI5 whistleblower, David Shayler, for Mark Birdsall’s Eye-Spy magazine, I received a telephone call from a highly concerned and nervous Birdsall. He informed me that he had been visited – at his home – in North Yorkshire by “two lads from the Metropolitan Police.” Mark advised me that the two officers informed him that while publication of the article was not deemed to have harmed the national security of the country, there was a pressing need on their part to obtain the tape-recording of the interview I had conducted with Shayler. For a while I mused upon this and did nothing. Not long after, however, I was contacted by a representative of Special Branch, who advised me, in no uncertain term}s that I would hand over the tape, like it or not. Based upon what I was told, I was left with little choice, and I did indeed hand over the original recording. I should stress, though, MI5 were fine with the text of the interview being included in the pages of Eye-Spy. It was a surreal situation.

In light of all the above, the day may come when you, too, get that ominous, slow knock on the door.

The Vietnam War, also known as the Second Indochina War, was fought between the years of 1955 and 1975, officially between North Vietnam and South Vietnam, but as most know America was pulled into it starting from 1964. The catalyst for America’s entry into the war revolves around a mysterious and disputed incident that happened in early August 1964 in the Gulf of Tonkin, also known as the USS Maddox Incident, in which a U.S. destroyer was said to have been put under attack by with North Vietnamese fast attack craft. It would help serve to force the U.S. Congress to pass the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and give President Lyndon B. Johnson great authority to increase American military presence in Vietnam. This would result in a horrific trial of attrition in the jungles of Vietnam that would see an estimated 58,220 U.S. service members killed in the conflict and a further 1,626 remain missing in action by the time they pulled out in 1973, but what really happened during this initial incident has long been wrapped in mystery and controversy, and one of the weirder ideas is that this might have been the doing of underwater UFOs, also called USO (Underwater Submersible Objects) or even mysterious sea beasts.

The official version of the Gulf of Tonkin incident is that on August 2, 1964, the American destroyer the USS Maddox had been out  performing a signals intelligence patrol as part of DESOTO operations when they were aggressively approached by three North Vietnamese Navy torpedo boats. In the ensuing melee, the USS Maddox was assailed by machine gun fire and torpedoes, and when the smoke cleared one U.S. aircraft was damaged, three North Vietnamese torpedo boats were damaged, and four North Vietnamese sailors were killed. This first attack is not in dispute, but there would then be an alleged second incident on August 4, 1964 that would really rile the Americans up, this time involving the USS Maddox and another destroyer called the USS Turner Joy, which furthered the U.S. resolve to enter the conflict, but there has long been some amount of doubt that the US forces had ever been under fire at all, or whether this had just been an excuse to escalate the efforts to enter the war.

USS Maddox

The North Vietnamese immediately denied that a second attack had ever happened, and in later years former United States Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara also admitted that there was never any second attack. Indeed, it was found that there were not even any North Vietnamese vessels in the area during the August 4 incident, but personnel aboard both the USS Turner Joy and USS Maddox begged to differ, insisting that it had happened, so what was going on here? According to some testimony from aboard the vessels involved, some pretty weird stuff.

In 1966, a Navy sonar engineer assigned to the destroyer USS Turner Joy came forward with a rather odd version of the events of that day. He claimed that on the day of that supposed second Gulf of Tonkin attack, he had picked up signatures on his radar that appeared to be enemy torpedoes, but which behaved erratically and as if under intelligent control, approaching the ship, even going under it, only to dart off. Both vessels reported detecting small, fast-moving objects on radar, both above and below the surface, which they took to be torpedoes and torpedo boats, but visibility was low due to a storm that had brought heavy clouds and fog. There would apparently by over 20 signatures of torpedoes on sonar, but they did not behave like torpedoes, seeming to move about at will rather than a straight line, and none of them actually hit. Some frightened crew members reported that the torpedoes seemed to be illuminated, while others swore they had seen the cockpit lights of the enemy vessels out in the gloom. Others saw what they took to be the wakes of torpedoes and there were even strange sounds heard that sounded a lot like the propellers of torpedoes, yet no impacts ever occurred.

Taking no chances at all, the two American destroyers allegedly performed evasive maneuvers and unloaded almost 650 cannon shells and several depth charges, blowing the area to absolute hell, yet when the smoke cleared there were found to be no enemy vessels, no wreckage or debris, nothing. This was despite the accounts of crew aboard the destroyers who were adamant that there had definitely been something out there and that they had been under attack. At the time it was convincing enough to propel America full on into the war, only in later years being found to have been perhaps a phantom attack that had no evidence of ever having happened at all. In 2005, the National Security Agency would declassify a trove of documents that revealed there was no second Gulf of Tonkin attack, and the at the time U.S. Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara himself would concede that there had been no enemy attack on that day. Even then president Johnson would say “For all I know, our navy was shooting at whales out there.”

Despite this, crew members aboard the two destroyers have continued to insist that there was something out there menacing them, leading to all sorts of theories. One of the main ideas is that a combination of weather, schools of fish near the surface, birds, or sensor problems had all conspired to make them misidentify phantom targets as actual ones. Another idea is that these ships were being circled by USOs, or underwater UFOs, and just as strange is the idea that the signatures and sightings were caused by underwater creatures. Todd Newberry, a professor emeritus of marine biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, believes that this can be blamed on bioluminescent cousins of sea squirts called giant pyrosomes, which are basically massive colonies of filter-feeding organisms that form long blunt-ended tubes that can propel themselves along and reach up to 60 feet in length. They also tend to light up when disturbed, and the idea here is that the crews of these ships were freaked by these giant, decidedly torpedo shaped colonies of organisms shooting about. Newberry has said of this:

These things are the size of torpedoes, so they produce the same sonar image. It all fit together, as far as the character of the colony and its behavior. They could certainly have shown up on sonar. I can totally see that if you didn’t know that something like them exist and you were looking at them in the water, your imagination could go pretty crazy with what you were seeing. Imagine telling your commander who thinks you’re being attacked by torpedoes, ‘No sir, those are Pyrosoma!’ You’d be put in the brig immediately. Here’s an angle that was never picked up at the time. It could be a perfectly natural phenomenon. It was a misunderstanding by people who had never heard of pyrosomes. It’s an irresistible story to bring up.

Whatever the case may be, this alleged second Gulf of Tonkin attack is undeniably one of the reasons America entered the Vietnam conflict. Was this just propaganda spun by a government eager to staunch the spread of communism? Or was it something else? What happened to those men out there? What were they picking up and even seeing zipping around out there in those dark waters? Was this all just a misunderstanding, USOs, sea creatures, or something even more mysterious still? Whatever the answers to these questions, it all had heavy weight on the history of war, and remains a curious historical oddity that has never seen any real concrete answers, leaving it to the realm of speculation.

There can be few people reading this who have not at least heard of the legendary Mothman of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, who so terrorized the town and the surrounding area between November 1966 and December 1967, and whose diabolical exploits were chronicled in the 2002 hit Hollywood movie starring Richard Gere: The Mothman Prophecies, so named after the book of the same title written by Mothman authority John Keel. A devil-like, winged monster with glowing, red eyes, Mothman’s appearance came quite literally out of nowhere and, some say, culminated in high tragedy and death. But what was the Mothman of Point Pleasant? And how did the legend begin?  To answer those questions we have to go back to the dark night of November 12, 1966, when five grave-diggers working in a cemetery in the nearby town of Clendenin were shocked to see what they described as a “brown human shape with wings” rise out of the thick, surrounding trees and soar off into the distance.

Three days later, the unearthly beast surfaced once again. It was at the highly appropriate time of the witching-hour when Roger and Linda Scarberry and Steve and Mary Mallette – two young, married couples from Point Pleasant – were passing the time away by cruising around town in the Scarberrys’ car. As they drove around the old factory, the four were puzzled to see in the shadows what looked like two red lights pointing in their direction. These were no normal lights, however. Rather, all four were shocked and horrified to discover that, in reality, the “lights” were the glowing, self-illuminating red eyes of a huge animal that, as Roger Scarberry would later recall, was “…shaped like a Mothman, but bigger, maybe six and a half or seven feet tall, with big wings folded against its back.”

Nick Redfern at Point Pleasant

Not surprisingly, they fled the area at high speed. Unfortunately for the Scarberry’s and the Mallette’s, however, the beast seemingly decided to follow them: as they sped off for the safety of Point Pleasant, the winged monster took to the skies and shadowed their vehicle’s every movement until it reached the city limits. The four raced to the sheriff’s office and told their astounding story to Deputy Millard Halstead, who later stated that: “I’ve known these kids all their lives. They’d never been in any trouble and they were really scared that night. I took them seriously.” And even though a search of the area by Halstead did not result in an answer to the mystery, the Mothman would soon return. Early on the morning of November 25, yet another remarkable encounter with the mysterious beast took place, as John Keel noted:  “Thomas Ury was driving along Route 62 just north of the TNT area when he noticed a tall, grey manlike figure standing in a field by the road. ‘Suddenly it spread a pair of wings,’ Ury said, ‘and took off straight up, like a helicopter. It veered over my convertible and began going in circles three telephone poles high.'”

Keel reported that Ury quickly hit the accelerator. Nevertheless, Ury added: “It kept flying right over my car even though I was doing about seventy-five.” Over the next few days more sightings surfaced, including that of Ruth Foster of nearby Charleston – who saw the winged monster late at night in her garden, and who said: “It was tall with big red eyes that popped out of its face. My husband is six feet one and this bird looked about the same height or a little shorter, maybe.” Needless to say, the local media had a field day with the story. Tales of what were referred to as the “Bird-Monster” hit the headlines; while both the skeptics and the police ensured that their views and opinions on the matter were widely known. Dr. Robert L. Smith, Associate Professor of Wildlife Biology in the West Virginia University’s Division of Forestry, expressed his firm opinion that Mothman was nothing stranger than a large sandhill crane. This hardly satisfied the witnesses, however. In response to Dr. Smith’s assertion, Thomas Ury said: “I’ve seen big birds, but I’ve never seen anything like this.”

As for the local police, they offered stern warnings to any and all would-be monster hunters contemplating seeking out the mysterious creature, as the Herald Dispatch newspaper noted: “Sheriff [George] Johnson said he would arrest anybody caught with a loaded gun in the area after dark [and] warned that the scores of persons searching the abandoned powerhouse in the TNT area after dark risked possible serious injury.” In the weeks and months that followed, further encounters with the bizarre beast were reported; however, they were overshadowed by a tragic event that occurred on December 15, 1967. It was on that day that Point Pleasant’s Silver Bridge (so named after its aluminum paint) that spanned the Ohio River and connected Point Pleasant to Gallipolis, Ohio, collapsed into the river, tragically claiming forty-six lives. Interestingly, after the disaster at the Silver Bridge, encounters with the Mothman largely came to a grinding halt.

And while a down-to-earth explanation most certainly circulated – namely, that a fatal flaw in a single eye-bar in a suspension chain was the chief culprit – many saw, and still continue to see to this very day, the cause as being directly linked with the ominous and brooding presence of the accursed Mothman. Finally, John Keel titled his book, The Mothman Prophecies, for a reason. Keel himself foresaw a terrible disaster enveloping the city and the result being terrible carnage and death.

Located within the Chihuahuan Desert in northeastern Presidio County of far West Texas is the dusty desert city of Marfa. Founded as a water stop in the early 1880s, Marfa sits like an oasis surrounded by sprawling desolate desert, but despite its inhospitable location it has become a sort of center for minimalist art, and is known for its galleries, artisan shops, and historical architecture. Yet the town has become famous for something else as well, and here out in the desert badlands there has long been a mysterious, possibly paranormal light show that has never really been explained.

Marfa, Texas

What have come to be known as the Marfa Lights typically appear as orbs of light about the size of a basketball, that materialize out in the desert wasteland of Mitchell Flat looking towards the Chinati Mountains, to hover, fly, and dance about in the night before vanishing. They come in many colors, including white, yellow, pink, blue, and red, and can be very bright or faint, steadily illuminated or twinkling or flickering. The lights feature a wide range of movement and behaviors, either flying in a straight line or conversely bobbing up and down, darting about erratically, doing aerial acrobatics, accelerating or decelerating, or even merging together into larger orbs or disappearing and reappearing. They sometimes move slowly, at other times hovering stationary, or on other occasions travelling at great speed, often all of the above. One local by the name of James Bunnell has said of the Marfa Lights:

You might just see mysterious orbs of light suddenly appear above desert foliage. These balls of light may remain stationary as they pulse on and off with intensity varying from dim to almost blinding brilliance. Then again, these ghostly lights may dart across the desert or perform splits and mergers. Light colors are usually yellow-orange but other hues, including green, blue and red are also seen. Marfa Mystery Lights usually fly above desert vegetation but below background mesas.

The lights also don’t seem to follow any rhyme or reason to their appearances, emerging at all times of the year and in all kinds of weather, and they have been baffling those who see them for a very long time. Although the Native Americans had long known of the lights, perhaps the first historical record of the Marfa lights by settlers was in 1883, when a rancher named Robert Reed Ellison reported seeing a group of glowing orbs as he drove his cattle through Paisano Pass. He assumed that they were Apache campfires, but no evidence of any fires or campsites could be found the following day. After that, more and more people began reporting the mysterious lights, and over the decades there would be so many sightings that during World War II there was even an air search conducted by pilots from nearby Midland Army Air Field to find the source of the lights, but they came back empty-handed and puzzled. On some occasions there have been reports that the lights seem to show some sort of intelligence, sometimes coming closer as if out of curiosity or seeming to investigate certain areas, or to react to sound, and there are even stories of people lost in the desert being led to safety by the lights. But what are they and where do they come from? That depends a lot on who you ask.

There have been numerous theories as to what the lights may be. One is that they are some sort of atmospheric phenomenon, in particular one called a Fata Morgana, which is an optical illusion that causes far away objects to appear closer and distorted through light passing through air layers of different temperatures in a steep thermal inversion, in which a defined layer of warm air is resting on a layer of much cooler air. Another idea is that these are the similarly distorted lights car headlights on the nearby Highway 67, made to look fuzzy and wavering by light scattering due to the air being unevenly heated by the ground, but this would not explain why they are most often seen well away from the highway, why they display such erratic and aberrant movements, why they have so many different appearances, or how they would have been seen so much back in 1883. Other ideas include static electricity produced by geological activity, ball lighting, illuminated gases from the natural gas and other petroleum hydrocarbons in the area, and of course alien UFOs and even ghosts, perhaps even all of the above. No one really knows for sure.

In the meantime, Marfa has embraced the lights and sought to turn them into a tourist attraction. There is a roadside parking area nine miles east of Marfa on U.S. Highway 90 specifically built for passing motorists to view the curious phenomenon, complete with a Marfa Lights viewing platform, and there is even an annual Marfa Lights Festival that features live music, food and a parade. What is going on with these lights? What are they? Are they just distant car headlights morphed into something more mysterious by atmospheric phenomena or are at least some of them something stranger? For now the Marfa lights still occasionally come out to do their dance, and no one is entirely sure of what they truly are.

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Over the decades, numerous people in the UFO field have become the subjects of government files. And no, that’s not a case of being paranoid. Dozens upon dozens of well-known people in the UFO scene really have had their lives scrutinized, and all in the name of little green men. Well, not quite. Yes, the files do exist. But, the reasons for why such dossiers have been put together might surprise you. Indeed, most of the people in the subject have been watched because of something far more inflammatory than aliens: politics. Take the most controversial Contactee of all, George Adamski. He claimed to have had meetings out in the wilds of California with peace-loving ETs. He even claimed flights in Flying Saucers. Yeah, right. And, his FBI file runs to hundreds of pages. And I’m not kidding. The FBI, however, wasn’t particularly bothered about Adamski’s claims of extraterrestrial contact. What the Bureau was concerned about , however, was his politics. In the early 1950s, in his usually packed lectures, Adamski said that communism was the way of the future and that Russia could destroy the West, if it chose to. The fact that all of this was influencing the minds of hundreds upon hundreds of gullible people was of deep concern to the FBI. Hence, the reason why the “Adamski file” was opened.

Likewise, fellow Contactee George Van Tassel had a lengthy file opened on him. It ran to 319 pages. Again, the Bureau cared not a bit about Van Tassel’s alleged alien contacts. They were very interested, though, in Van Tassel’s words on American politics, religion, the U.S. government, the economy and more. For years, literally thousands upon thousands of people headed out to Giant Rock, California to hear Van Tassel talk. And the FBI listened carefully. Now, onto George Hunt Williamson. Certainly, he was a well-known figure in the world of the Contactees and the Space Brothers. And, an FBI file was opened on the man. The reason? Nothing to do with aliens. The primary reason why Williamson had a file on him was because he was suspected of smuggling ancient artifacts over the Mexico border and into the United States. Something like that is all but guaranteed to ensure a file will be opened on you. For a while the FBI deeply pondered on whether or not they should get further involved in the pursuit of a potential crime that had occurred outside of its jurisdiction and in another country – Mexico – but finally dropped the matter; rather fortunately, it must be said, for Williamson.

Now, let’s jump forward almost half a century after the antics of the “Three Georges.” Certain people in Ufology laughed and were highly skeptical when, in 2006, I wrote a book called On the Trail of the Saucer Spies, in which I mentioned how a retired British police source told me that, back in the 1990s, the British Police Force’s Special Branch opened files on two UFO researchers in the UK, namely Matthew Williams and Robin Cole. Those same certain people should have kept their mouths firmly shut. The files on Cole and Williams (or, rather, some of the files; others still remain classified to this day) were finally officially released in 2012, showing that Special Branch was indeed watching both men, demonstrating that the data provided to me years ago was accurate. When, in 2012, the documents were declassified, the National Archives prepared the following statement concerning their contents:

“File DEFE 24/1984/1 (p294) contains a 1996 Parliamentary Question from Martin Redmond MP asking on how many occasions MI6 and GCHQ have monitored UFO investigations. This was interpreted to mean ‘have the agencies been keeping watch on UFOlogists.’ A background briefing says ‘neither agency in fact undertakes such activity, though GCHQ cannot rule out the possibility’ they had monitored ‘in other contexts individuals who have made a study of UFOs’. The MP was told the government do not comment on the intelligence and security agencies (p298). File DEFE 24/1987/1 (p262-65) reveals that in 1997 Special Branch took an interest in a UFOlogist who became obsessed with rumours of a secret UFO facility beneath RAF Rudloe Manor in Wiltshire. The base had become known as the British equivalent of the secret US military airbase ‘Area 51’ among conspiracy theorists. An internal note said ‘Special Branch…do not believe he poses a specific threat to security, but they are alert to the risk that others may use him as a conduit for their activities.'”

Well, since the summary failed to note the names of the people in question, I will. They were, of course, Cole and Williams – as I had been told during the course of writing On the Trail of the Saucer Spies. Back in 1997, Robin Cole, of Cheltenham, England – the home to GCHQ (the Government Communications Headquarters) – wrote a fascinating report on the agency’s involvement in the UFO phenomenon. And, for those who may not be aware, GCHQ is the UK equivalent of the US National Security Agency. After Cole’s report was published, he was visited by two representatives of the UK’s Special Branch. And since the pair announced their visit in advance (via a phone-call), Robin had the good sense to clandestinely and quickly set up his tape-recorder in his living-room and taped the entire conversation, much of which revolved around Special Branch’s interest in a UFO researcher and Crop Circle maker named Matthew Williams – who just happens to be the “UFOlogist who became obsessed” with RAF Rudloe Manor, as referenced by National Archives staff above. Special Branch’s concerns that both the UFO controversy and the people that investigate it could be used as tools of manipulation by hostile groups with controversial, political agendas.

Since the 1950s, files have been opened on Ufologists. On every occasion, though, UFOs were shown not to have been the primary cause for concern on the part of government agencies. But, politics, in particular, was. In all likelihood, it still is.

It was in the summer of 1947 that something crashed on the Foster Ranch, Lincoln County, New Mexico. Whatever it was, it left huge amounts of strange debris across the ranch. There was talk of strange, small bodies also having been found in the area, thrown out of the craft that exploded on impact. Within no time at all, personnel from the Roswell Army Air Field were on the scene, preventing anyone outside of the military from getting anywhere near the crash site.  Cordons were created and people were warned never to talk about what they had seen. The problem (in fact, a very big problem) for the military, though, is that the rancher who found the materials, William Brazel, had told fellow ranchers in the area, and friends, about his find before the military was informed – which meant that at least parts of the story were out there before the military’s cover-up began. That was not a good thing. There was even confusion at the Roswell Army Air Field: before orders were put into place to prevent anyone talking, the press-office at the base issued a statement saying that a flying disc (as UFOs were known back then) had been recovered and was due to be inspected.

One such statement, from Associated Press, read as follows:

“The many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday when the intelligence office of the 509^th Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force, Roswell Army Air Field, was fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc through the cooperation of one of the local ranchers and the sheriff’s office of Chavez County. The flying object landed on a ranch near Roswell sometime last week. Not having phone facilities, the rancher stored the disc until such time as he was able to contact the sheriff’s office, who in turn notified Major Jesse A. Marcel of the 509^th Bomb Group Intelligence Office. Action was immediately taken and the disc was picked up at the rancher’s home. It was inspected at the Roswell Army Air Field and subsequently loaned by Major Marcel to higher headquarters.”

The military quickly knocked that statement down, claiming that what had been recovered was nothing stranger than a weather-balloon. As for the bodies, the Air Force would not even address that matter until 1997, when they claimed that the bodies were, in fact, crash-test dummies used in high-altitude parachute experiments. It was also in the nineties that the Air Force changed its mind again on what came down on William Braazel’s ranch. It was no longer a weather-balloon, but a Mogul balloon, designed to monitor for Soviet atomic bomb tests. In 1993, all of this chopping and changing caught the attention of the late Steven Schiff, at the time the Congressman of New Mexico – the state in which the Roswell event occurred. Far from happy by what he saw as some kind of cover-up, Schiff approached the Government Accountability Office (at the time, it was known as the General Accounting Office) and asked them to look into the Roswell affair and see what might be found. The GAO was enthused about the idea of looking into Roswell. It was, however, not so much what the GAO found that intrigued them, but what they couldn’t find.

As the GAO dug deeper and deeper, they learned to their amazement and concern that every single outgoing message from the old Roswell Army Air Field, from 1945 to 1951, could not be located. The files were gone. All of them. The GAO approached the Air Force and the National Archives for answers. There were no answers. Only puzzles. The National Archives checked their files: no luck. The Air Force came up blank, too. Rumors began to surface that when Steven Schiff approached the GAO in 1993, someone who was sitting on the Roswell story quickly realized that the truth of the 1947 incident was now in danger of being compromised, so a decision was quickly taken to have the original papers – wherever they were stored – destroyed. There is a very good reason for that: the GAO is an extremely powerful office of the U.S. Government and certainly had the power and ability to demand access to just about anything it wanted access to. Shredding the old Roswell Army Air Field papers may have been the only way to have ensured that the GAO didn’t get what it and Congressman Schiff wanted. It was just another layer of conspiracy in the quest to understand what really happened at Roswell. The outcome: the GAO concluded the files had been destroyed. Congressman Schiff was irate. The cover-up remained in place. It still does.

It was in the summer of 1947 that something crashed on the Foster Ranch, Lincoln County, New Mexico. Whatever it was, it left huge amounts of strange debris across the ranch. There was talk of strange, small bodies also having been found in the area, thrown out of the craft that exploded on impact. Within no time at all, personnel from the Roswell Army Air Field were on the scene, preventing anyone outside of the military from getting anywhere near the crash site.  Cordons were created and people were warned never to talk about what they had seen. The problem (in fact, a very big problem) for the military, though, is that the rancher who found the materials, William Brazel, had told fellow ranchers in the area, and friends, about his find before the military was informed – which meant that at least parts of the story were out there before the military’s cover-up began. That was not a good thing. There was even confusion at the Roswell Army Air Field: before orders were put into place to prevent anyone talking, the press-office at the base issued a statement saying that a flying disc (as UFOs were known back then) had been recovered and was due to be inspected.

One such statement, from Associated Press, read as follows:

“The many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday when the intelligence office of the 509^th Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force, Roswell Army Air Field, was fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc through the cooperation of one of the local ranchers and the sheriff’s office of Chavez County. The flying object landed on a ranch near Roswell sometime last week. Not having phone facilities, the rancher stored the disc until such time as he was able to contact the sheriff’s office, who in turn notified Major Jesse A. Marcel of the 509^th Bomb Group Intelligence Office. Action was immediately taken and the disc was picked up at the rancher’s home. It was inspected at the Roswell Army Air Field and subsequently loaned by Major Marcel to higher headquarters.”

The military quickly knocked that statement down, claiming that what had been recovered was nothing stranger than a weather-balloon. As for the bodies, the Air Force would not even address that matter until 1997, when they claimed that the bodies were, in fact, crash-test dummies used in high-altitude parachute experiments. It was also in the nineties that the Air Force changed its mind again on what came down on William Braazel’s ranch. It was no longer a weather-balloon, but a Mogul balloon, designed to monitor for Soviet atomic bomb tests. In 1993, all of this chopping and changing caught the attention of the late Steven Schiff, at the time the Congressman of New Mexico – the state in which the Roswell event occurred. Far from happy by what he saw as some kind of cover-up, Schiff approached the Government Accountability Office (at the time, it was known as the General Accounting Office) and asked them to look into the Roswell affair and see what might be found. The GAO was enthused about the idea of looking into Roswell. It was, however, not so much what the GAO found that intrigued them, but what they couldn’t find.

As the GAO dug deeper and deeper, they learned to their amazement and concern that every single outgoing message from the old Roswell Army Air Field, from 1945 to 1951, could not be located. The files were gone. All of them. The GAO approached the Air Force and the National Archives for answers. There were no answers. Only puzzles. The National Archives checked their files: no luck. The Air Force came up blank, too. Rumors began to surface that when Steven Schiff approached the GAO in 1993, someone who was sitting on the Roswell story quickly realized that the truth of the 1947 incident was now in danger of being compromised, so a decision was quickly taken to have the original papers – wherever they were stored – destroyed. There is a very good reason for that: the GAO is an extremely powerful office of the U.S. Government and certainly had the power and ability to demand access to just about anything it wanted access to. Shredding the old Roswell Army Air Field papers may have been the only way to have ensured that the GAO didn’t get what it and Congressman Schiff wanted. It was just another layer of conspiracy in the quest to understand what really happened at Roswell. The outcome: the GAO concluded the files had been destroyed. Congressman Schiff was irate. The cover-up remained in place. It still does.