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

On the evening of November 9, 1974, police in the quiet town of Carbondale, Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania, got a curious call from some scared teens. The group of friends, consisting of John Lloyd, 14, William Lloyd, 16, and Robert Gillette, 15, claimed that they had been outside playing in a park when they saw a fiery object “like a shooting star” come speeding over the nearby Salem Mountain to plummet to earth behind some trees, showering a trail of sparks behind it and emitting a “whistling noise” the whole way. When the curious boys excitedly ran over to see what had happened, they realized that the object had come down into a pond, or more accurately a large coal breaker pit filled with water. When they approached the pond’s edge, they claimed to have seen something down in the depths eerily glowing in the water about 20 feet from shore. They also claimed that there was a fizzing sound from the pond for a few minutes, as if “someone had thrown a cigarette in the water.” Police at first thought it was an obvious prank, but officers were sent to check it out anyway. This would be the beginning of one of the strangest UFO cases in Pennsylvania history.

When police arrived, they were surprised to see that there indeed was something out under the surface emanating a spooky glow, with the teens even claiming that it seemed to have changed positions since they had first called it in. The police had no idea what it could be, and they quickly cordoned off the area just to be safe. It seems as if they still sort of thought of it as a joke, though, because one policeman even apparently fired off four shots into the pond at the mysterious object, to no effect. A closer look at the glow seemed to suggest that it was coming from a circular or spherical object, perhaps 5 feet in diameter, and that this glow seemed to be pulsating with a white-yellowish light. Police speculated that it was perhaps a downed plane, but the speed with which it had hit the water and the description from the boys seemed to discount this. Another idea was that it was a meteorite, some sort of space junk or even a downed Soviet missile. However, none of these explanations can explain one police report that a boat sent to investigate had seen the light seemingly rush towards them before returning to its original resting spot. What was going on here? No one had a clue. By the next morning the glowing had stopped.

Carbondale, Pennsylvania

Before long word had gotten out about a “UFO crash” at the pond, and police had their hands full trying to keep the flow of hundreds of congregating gawkers from approaching the water. In the meantime, Dr. J. Allen Hynek’s Center for UFO Studies in Evanston, Illinois was contacted by police about the strange incident and he suggested that it was likely a meteor or a meteor fragment, as well as recommending that Geiger counter readings be taken at the site just in case. Hynek would also send a UFO field investigator to the site. Another investigator who would be called in was M.J. Graeber, ufologist and founder of UFORIC, a Philadelphia-based UFO Report and Information Center. By this time the area was flooded with thousands of curiosity seekers and UFO enthusiasts, with many more clogging up the roads leading into the city, and all sorts of rumors were heavily making the rounds. Graeber would say of the scene and the flying rumors:

It looked just like a scene from a science fiction movie and fears grew that emergency vehicles could not have got through if they were needed. To make matters worse, although we hadn’t a ghost of an idea of what was actually in the water, rumors were spreading like a brush-fire and a few very vocal UFO enthusiasts who were milling about at the site were questioning the effectiveness of the police, fire companies and UFO researchers’ retrieval efforts. There was a rumor that an alien space ship had landed – not crashed – in the silt pond and that the military had managed to recover whatever was in the water and spirit it away before anyone had an opportunity to see it. In one rumor scenario, the UFO was loaded upon a flatbed railcar that was brought to the site on a nearby (albeit, long abandoned) railroad spur – and in another account, two military helicopters were used to lift the object from the water and place it in an armored truck. Curiously, I too became linked to a rather ridiculous rumor which placed me at the scene as a government agent or high ranking Air Force officer disguised as a UFO field investigator. But the truth was that I was just a guy who had an interest in the UFO phenomenon and had been investigating sighting reports for about two years prior to the incident.

Curiously, Graeber would report that there were only police at the scene and a single Air Force officer, with no armed military men present, despite what others would later claim. While the investigation was being carried out, the local Fire Department made efforts to pump and drain the pond to find out if anything was in there, but they faced many difficulties with debris and silt, making the process extremely slow going and basically useless. Another idea was to try and use a crane fitted with a magnet to lift whatever it was out, but this proved to be impractical and there was still the fear that whatever it was could be leaking dangerous substances. They ended up calling in a diver by the name of Mark Stamey to come in and take a look, and in the meantime some of the UFO investigators were being interviewed about their thoughts on the matter. Most of them were beginning to think this was perhaps a hoax, or at most a meteor. Graeber would say:

The UFO researchers were being interviewed by the press and a TV station’s helicopter circled the pond churning up the water. Although we still hadn’t any solid information on what the object in the water might be, Dr. Hynek’s representative and I were starting to suspect that the incident might be a prank that the teens had perpetrated on a nothing else to do Saturday night whim. We thought that perhaps their hoax simply got out of control and took on a life of its own – and that the boys may have been too scared to fess up to what they had done. Of course, it may have been that the boys had witnessed a meteor or a bolide (a large and occasionally exploding meteor) streaking across the night sky and mistakenly assumed that it was the same luminous object that they discovered moments later in the pond. This seemed to be a reasonable notion, as the boys’ description of the aerial phenomenon they had observed was absolutely meteoric in character. However, my inspection of the alleged crash site revealed that there were no topographical indicators to suggest that something like a plane, a large piece of space junk or a meteor had impacted the pond or the area surrounding it. There wasn’t any obvious displacement of earth; there was no displacement of water from the pond; there were no indicators of a fire, downed tree limbs or skid marks creating a gouge in the soil.

It is quite possible that this is correct, as when Stamey finally suited up and dove in, he returned a short while later with a 12‐inch miner’s lantern. After this, the whole thing would fall apart. Robert Gillette Jr. would admit that he had thrown the lantern into the water to scare his sister, although the other two boys insisted that what they had seen was true, that an object really had come down from the sky. Nevertheless, the news soon hit that it was all a hoax, the disappointed crowds quickly dissipated, and the UFO researchers packed their bags and went home. However, there were still many who believed that a UFO, or at least something strange, had really come down, and there were many reports from people who insisted that they had seen a big flatbed truck on the road near the pond with something large on it and surrounded by the military, with the lantern planted there to make people go away and cover up the fact that they had retrieved an alien ship. This whole conspiracy would be fueled when years later Gillette would recant his confession to throwing the lantern in the pond and admitting that something larger was removed, although he shies away from aliens and thinks it was likely some Soviet tech. Gillette has said of this:

My girlfriend broke up with me, so I was in a bad mood. I just told them what they wanted to hear, that it was a lantern. It wasn’t a lantern. Something was pulled out of the pond. I don’t think it was aliens. Some people do. I never called it a UFO. The official people did.

The case has become quite the piece of lore in the area, and there are still plenty of people who thing there is more to it than meets the eye. While it seems on the surface that it must surely be just a prank that got out of control, is that really what is going on here? Did these kids just pull off a hoax that managed to pretty much shut the whole town down? If so, why are there so many other reports of something strange going on? Did something come down into that pond or not, and if so, what was it? Was this a plane, meteor, satellite, or something all together stranger? Was there someone who wanted to cover it all up by orchestrating it as a hoax? The case is so long ago now, and so written off as just a prank, even by many ufologists, that it hasn’t really been investigated any further, and so it is left up to the imagination.

Sightings of what have become known as “Black Helicopters” and “Phantom Helicopters” have been reported for decades. There’s no doubt, however, that the 1970s was the period when things really took off. In the latter part of 1973, a series of distinctly unusual events began to quietly unfold above the green fields and rolling hills of northern England that subsequently triggered a strange, and still-ongoing operation coordinated by an elite division of the British Police Force. Remarkably, that operation was (and, to an extent, still is) designed to carefully monitor the activities of certain key players within the public UFO research arena in Britain. And it all began with something known as the phantom helicopter. Of the varied elements that make up what is popularly known as the “UFO Phenomenon,”” there can be few so strange as the phantom helicopter and its close relative, the even-more-sinister black helicopter. For at least four decades, numerous people throughout the world have reported seeing helicopters, very often completely black in color and with no identifying markings, in areas that have been subjected to intense UFO activity. This has led a number of commentators to speculate that the helicopters are operated by covert groups from within the military-industrial complex and that they are involved in a surreptitious UFO monitoring program.

One of the most confounding features of numerous reports is the ability of the helicopters to operate in almost complete silence. To many, the idea of a “silent helicopter” is manifestly absurd. However, more than a decade ago the much-respected publication Aviation Week and Space Technology reported that: “…the U.S. military has been working for years on at least two helicopter projects. The more recent is development of a light, very quiet helicopter with a mast-mounted light.” (Aviation Week and Space Technology. Vol. 142, No. 6, 1995.) The magazine continued: “The program’s existence was under scored on Apr. 9, 1991, during an…interview with a former Lockheed official. When asked if he had heard of something called a ‘quiet helicopter,’ the official responded, ‘Absolutely…a very quiet helicopter. But I can’t talk [about it]; that’s getting into very sensitive [areas].” It is undoubtedly the case that the majority of phantom helicopter encounters originate in the United States, and it is worth examining the background to – and history of – this mystery before addressing the British angle.

One of the earliest episodes on record dates from 11 October 1966 and concerns a helicopter-UFO event at the Wanaque Reservoir, New Jersey. The encounter began with the sighting of a disc-shaped UFO by a number of policemen as it passed over the reservoir. Emitting a dazzling white light, the object then headed towards an area of forest where it was eventually lost from view. As soon as the UFO had vanished, however, at least ten aircraft, as well as six or seven helicopters suddenly appeared on the scene. The point of origin of the vehicles was never determined. On the night of 26 September 1974, a father and son, Walter and Dan Richley, saw a strange object hovering high above their farm at Lynchburg, Ohio. As there was a powerful searchlight mounted on the family’s pick-up truck, Walter and Dan decided – “as an experiment” – to try to get a better view of this object that was taking so much interest in their farm.

As the beam of light touched the UFO, the Richleys found themselves bathed in an equally bright beam of red light that emanated from the UFO. Frightened out of their wits, both father and son ran for the safety of their home. As they did so, the UFO began to retreat over the horizon until it finally disappeared from view. At 11.00 p.m. on the following night, Dan was sitting up in bed, reading, when he was suddenly jolted by a loud noise coming from outdoors. On running to the widow he was amazed to see a large helicopter descending. “I then got dad out of bed,” said Dan. Mr. Richley quickly assessed the meaning of the helicopter’s presence: “I think I put my light beam on something that was a military secret. That ‘copter came here to warn me.” The UFO researcher Leonard Stringfield, who conducted a personal investigation of the case, asked Walter Richley if he had received an apology or re-numeration for the damage caused by the helicopter as it blew debris around his yard. ““No, and I’m not about to press it; I’d rather forget it,” replied Richley.

Since at least 1967, the United States has been beset by a disturbing phenomenon: cattle mutilations. Exactly who, or indeed what, is responsible for the widespread killing of cattle under very bizarre circumstances is far from clear. On many occasions, farmers, police officers, and veterinarians throughout North America have come across cases where cattle have been subjected to unusual surgical procedures, such as having organs expertly removed and being completely drained of blood – and also in the exact locations where both UFO and phantom helicopter activity is prevalent, too. This has inevitably led to suspicions that extraterrestrials are engaged in a covert, and possibly sinister, program that may relate to the attempted introduction of a lethal virus of truly cosmic origins into the human food chain. The destruction of the human species in a War of the Worlds-style scenario may not be the only way to systematically wipe us out, adherents of such theories suggest.

A report from the files of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, dated 2 February 1979, lends credence to the possibility that the phantom helicopters are implicated in the cattle mutilation mystery to some degree; but suggests that the mutilators may have a far more down to earth point of origin, and may be utilizing the UFO mystery as a convenient cover for clandestine bacteriological and biological warfare activities: “For the past seven or eight years mysterious cattle mutilations have been occurring throughout the United State of New Mexico. Officer Gabe Valdez, New Mexico State Police, has been handling investigations of these mutilations within New Mexico. Information furnished to this office by Officer Valdez indicates that the animals are being shot with some type of paralyzing drug and the blood is being drawn from the animal after an injection of an anti-coagulant. It appears that in some instances the cattle’s legs have been broken and helicopters without any identifying numbers have reportedly been seen in the vicinity of the mutilations. Officer Valdez theorizes that clamps are being placed on the cow’s legs and they are being lifted by helicopter to some remote area where the mutilations are taking place and then the animal is returned to its original pasture. Officer Valdez is very adamant in his opinion that these mutilations are the work of the US Government and that it is some clandestine operation either by the CIA or the Department of Energy and in all probability is connected with some type of research into biological warfare.”

Cattle mutilations continue – albeit not on the scale that occurred in the 1970s. Black helicopters are also still seen. In other words, the mystery hasn’t gone away.

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