Over the decades it has been claimed that elements of the U.S. Government may have more than a few “unacknowledged aircraft,” hidden away, so to speak. In simple terms, we’re talking about secret aircraft that, despite sightings of them, no-one in government wants to reveal them for what they are. Or, were. We’ll begin with what has become known as the Aurora. In the early 1990s, rumors began to circulate among the aviation world that a highly secret, futuristic aircraft was being flown out of Area 51 – and under distinctly covert circumstances. The reportedly large, black-colored, triangular-shaped aircraft which could fly at incredible speeds, could outmaneuver just about anything else on the planet. It was rumored to be known as the Aurora. Officially, at least, and according to the U.S. Government, the Aurora does not exist and has never existed. But, that was once said about Area 51, too. So, with that in mind, we need to tread cautiously when it comes to official proclamations of the controversial type.

An artist’s conception of the Aurora aircraft.

The story began – publicly, at least – in March 1990. That was when the well-respected magazine Aviation Week & Space Technology covered the story. They revealed that the term Aurora had appeared in the 1985 U.S. budget – and had possibly appeared by mistake, which makes sense if the program was so highly sensitive that its existence had to be denied at all costs. And talking of costs, it was rumored that around $455 million had been provided to those working out at Area 51 on secret, futuristic aircraft. AW&ST suspected that Aurora was a code-name for multiple kinds of aircraft that were both radical in design and technology. Other investigators, though, concluded that Aurora referred to just one type of aircraft. AW&ST learned that by 1987 the budget had soared to in excess of two billion dollars. Bill Sweetman is one of the leading figures in the field of aviation and someone who took a deep interest in the Aurora saga. His books include F-22 Raptor, Inside the Stealth Bomber, and Soviet Air Power. And, then there is his 1993 book, Aurora: The Pentagon’s Secret Hypersonic Spyplane. Of the Aurora, Sweetman says: “Does Aurora exist? Years of pursuit have led me to believe that, yes, Aurora is most likely in active development, spurred on by recent advances that have allowed technology to catch up with the ambition that launched the program a generation ago.”

Now, let’s have a look at the TR-3A. It was around 11:00 p.m. on September 26, 1994, when a small, twin-tailed aircraft crash-landed onto the lengthy runway at Boscombe Down, which is situated in the English county of Wiltshire. At around the time of the incident, a number of aviation enthusiasts were listening in on air-band radios and were aware that something untoward had taken place. The following day, several of those same enthusiasts drove to the installation – which is near to the A303 road and not at all far from Stonehenge – and were apprehended by local police who had set up road-blocks to keep away prying eyes. Before being ushered away, however, a number of people succeeded in catching sight of a disabled aircraft. It was situated at the end of the runway and, aside from its twin-tail fins, was completely covered over by tarpaulins. Air Force Monthly magazine was soon on the trail of the truth. In the November 1994 issue of the magazine, investigative writers noted that in the wake of the crash both a Boeing 757 and a C-5 Galaxy arrived at Boscombe Down. The story continued that the secret plane was loaded aboard the Galaxy and flown to “Air Force plant 42 at Palmdale, California.” Air Force Monthly suggested that the aircraft “”…was a TR-3A, the existence of which the U.S. Government has yet to officially acknowledge.” The subsonic, stealth TR-3A – also referred to as the Black Manta – remains an enigma, since its existence has never been officially confirmed. Now, what about the Flying Triangles? They have that specific name for a reason: they’re large, black, silent, fast-flying craft hat even have the ability to hover in silence. Some aircraft experts believe the FTs are next-generation Stealth planes. Many people in the UFO research community are of the opinion that the FTs are alien spacecraft. The debate still goes on – after more than several decades of investigation and research.

In 1989 there was a wave of Flying Triangle encounters over Belgian. Nick Pope, still in the employ of the U.K. Ministry of Defense at the time, told me in an interview, after a wave of FT encounters in the U.K. in 1993: “I approached the Belgians to get a comparison after their sightings. I phoned the Air Attaché at the British Embassy in Brussels and he spoke to one of the F-16 pilots who had been scrambled to intercept a Flying Triangle over Belgium back in 1990. Well, the Air Attaché reported back to me that the corporate view of the Belgian Defense Staff was that they did believe that they were dealing with a solid, structured craft. Apparently, the word from the Belgians was: ‘Thank God it was friendly.’ If it hadn’t been, it was made clear to me that there was very little that the Belgian Air Force could have done anyway – despite the fact that the F-16 is no slouch.” The one thing all of these aircraft have in common? I’ll tell you: They’re still undeniably secret.

Three asteroids that have been deemed as being “potentially dangerous” will pass by our planet this month of September at a fairly close distance. The space rocks will travel by us on September 9^th, 11^th, and 22^nd. With that being said, let’s take a quick look at these three asteroids.

Asteroid 2010 RJ53 is flying by our planet today (September 9^th) at a distance of about 366,000 kilometers away (227,422 miles). To put this into better perspective, our moon is located at a distance of around 384,400 kilometers (238,855 miles) which means that 2010 RJ53 will be closer to us than our moon. This asteroid, which measures 774 meters (2,539 feet), was discovered on September 10, 2010. It completes a full orbit around our sun every 402 days. At its furthest distance, it is 224 million kilometers away from the sun (139 million miles), with its closest approach measuring 95 million kilometers (59 million miles).

On September 11^th, asteroid 2021 PT will travel within 4.9 million kilometers from Earth (3 million miles). This asteroid measures approximately 137 meters in diameter (449 feet).

Then on September 22^nd, a third asteroid will closely pass by Earth. Asteroid 2021 NY1 will fly by within a distance of 1,498,113 kilometers (930,884 miles). To understand this better, it will be approximately 3.89 times further than the moon is to us. This space rock, which has been categorized as both a Potentially Hazardous Asteroid (PHA) by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) as well as a near-Earth object (NEO), is expected to measure anywhere between 130 and 300 meters in diameter (427 to 984 feet). This asteroid has an orbit of 0.01 Astronomical Units (AU) or approximately 1.5 million kilometers from our planet (932,000 miles) – one AU is the distance of Earth from our sun. Additionally, when 2021 NY1 passes by us on the 22^nd of the month, it will be the closest that it has been to our planet in nearly a century and it won’t get close to us again until about the year 2105 when it is expected to be approximately 2.65 million kilometers away (1.65 million miles).

While these three asteroids will be fairly close to Earth when they travel through space, there is no need to worry or hide in a bunker as they aren’t expected to hit our planet.

It’s the new era of UFOs, so it seems everyone is seeing flashing lights in the sky and wondering what they might be. Astronomers get paid for identifying lights in the sky beyond those Tic Tacs, flying triangles, drones and other lower atmospheric phenomenon. They recently spotted something in the middle of our own Milky Way galaxy that defies explanation, making the astronomers’ version of UFO – an unidentified ‘flashing’ object.

“We report the discovery of a highly-polarized, highly-variable, steep-spectrum radio source, ASKAP J173608.2-321635, located ∼4,deg from the Galactic center in the Galactic plane.”

“We discuss possible identifications for ASKAP J173608.2-321635 including a low-mass star/substellar object with extremely low infrared luminosity, a pulsar with scatter-broadened pulses, a transient magnetar, or a Galactic Center Radio Transient: none of these fully explains the observations, which suggests that ASKAP J173608.2-321635 may represent part of a new class of objects being discovered through radio imaging surveys.”

Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder

(Credit: CSIRO)

In a new paper accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal and available on preprint server arXiv, Ziteng Wang of the University of Sydney and a team of astronomers describe the discovery of ASKAP J173608.2-321635 using the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), a radio telescope array in Western Australia consisting of 36 identical parabolic antennas working together as a single astronomical interferometer, making it superior to other telescopes with an increased field of view, fast survey speed and high sensitivity. First seen in April 2019, the mysterious signal close to the galactic center appeared in data 13 times between then and August 2020. After that, some other telescopes confirmed its existence. However, others couldn’t detect it. So, what is the mysterious ASKAP J173608.2-321635?

“We discuss possible identifications for ASKAP J173608.2-321635 including a low-mass star/substellar object with extremely low infrared luminosity, a pulsar with scatter-broadened pulses, a transient magnetar, or a Galactic Center Radio Transient: none of these fully explains the observations, which suggests that ASKAP J173608.2-321635 may represent part of a new class of objects being discovered through radio imaging surveys.”

“A new class of objects.” Not a holy grail but certainly a significant discovery. The study points out that X-ray binaries, gamma-ray bursts and supernovae have been ruled out, but the galactic center does have some other mysterious objects, such as three Galactic Center Radio Transients (GCRT) which have also defied explanation. Since ASKAP J173608.2-321635 flashes at irregular intervals, the team suspects it will find other similar signals using this data. Hopefully, they will explain if and how they’re related to the galactic plane and “ultimately help us infer its nature.”

So many mysterious light flashes — so few explanations.

Aliens? Neither the study nor the press release or any other reports suggest there’s intelligence behind ASKAP J173608.2-321635 … but none say there isn’t either. For now, we’ll wait for more astronomers, more telescopes and more signals.

It’s certainly a great time to be interested in astronomy, isn’t it?

Mention “Places to find wreckage from crashed UFOs” to even the most casual followers of UFO news and the locations that most often come to mind are Area 51 in Nevada and Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. You know you’re talking to a real insider if they bring up Sanford University in California, where a well-known microbiologist is using something called “Multiplexed Ion Beam Imaging” to look at the individual atoms of samples from alleged UFO crashes in Colombia and Argentina. Wait … what? Stanford?

“We have developed a method that uses secondary ion mass spectrometry to image antibodies that are tagged with isotopically pure elemental metal reporters.”

At the Nolan Lab (you know you’re dealing with a “well known microbiologist” when the lab is named after him) at Stanford, Dr. Gary Nolan leads studies of “hematopoiesis, cancer and leukemia, autoimmunity and inflammation” by studying single cells using various high-tech devices. In his spare time, he uses those same devices to study alleged UFO pieces. In a recent interview with KQED, he explains it wasn’t his idea – he got one of those mysterious calls from the government.

“I was approached by some people representing the government and an aerospace corporation to help them understand the medical harm that had come to some individuals, related to supposed interactions with an anomalous craft. I had no expectation of this, but they came primarily because they were interested in the kinds of blood analysis that my lab can do.”

After that, Nolan moved to investigated pieces of the actual anomalous crafts. In addition to the latest ones from Colombia and Argentina, he’s analyzed pieces given from the alleged 1945 UFO crash in New Mexico at the same location as the Project Trinity nuclear tests. What did he find from that?

“If people are expecting a spectacular smoking gun, this is not it. But the objective is to take even some of the most blasé cases and just create a pipeline of how this should be done, to demonstrate to people that you don’t need to come up with a spectacular answer. I mean, we don’t disprove anything with this case. It’s just not a case of this being an obvious piece of technology.”

Beyond proving if the pieces are alien made, Nolan says he wants to understand why some people claim the metals show evidence of being made by changing the isotope ratios of given elements – an expensive process. If there’s a practical benefit, he wants to know about it because it would improve our own material science. You can look at his work as both finding something new and eliminating that which can be explained. When Nolan put pieces from the Colombian and Argentine UFOs in the imaging device, he was shocked to find the ratio of isotopes didn’t make any sense. Of course, all this means is that they can’t be eliminated as something we know – but they also can’t be eliminated as alien metal. While he doesn’t speculate, he does share what other scientists think of his work in the UFO field and his defense.

“A little bit the usual giggles, and some have said, “Garry, you’re going to ruin your reputation.” And my response is: I’m not making a conclusion. I’m just saying that there is data here that is anomalous and that somebody needs to explain. I’m willing to take the time to explain it. What scientist takes something off the table? If the explanation is sitting there right in front of you and you decide to throw it away before you even come to a conclusion, you can’t really claim to be a scientist — you’re a cultist.”

That sounds like a good argument for all ufologists to follow. Nolan says he can’t understand the reluctance to discuss this kind of research, especially among other scientists doing similar studies – he says he’s aware of dozens and is certain there are many more. He says we need people like himself who consider everything and we need skeptics too. His advice to both is “Keep it on the table.”

Let’s hope he shows us more of what’s on his.

Debris was obtained through on-field research of alleged UFO crashes in Colombia and Argentina

Among the most spectacular of UFO reports are those concerning these objects coming down to crash into the earth. The incident at Roswell probably springs to mind for many, but this is far from the beginning and end of such reports. Indeed, it sometimes almost seems as if these things are raining from the skies, if reports are to be believed. Many supposed UFO crashes have seemed to slip under the radar, so to speak, and here we will look at some lesser known cases of this intriguing corner of the UFO world.

Our first case is an account from a man named Arthur G. Stancil, who was originally a mechanical engineer on testing Air Force aircraft engines at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, before going on to the private sector to work for a private contractor for a nuclear site somewhere in Nevada. In 1953 he was purportedly sent to Arizona on a “special assignment,” and he claimed that the whole thing had been strange from the start. He would say that he was picked up by a bus with blacked out windows and taken out on a drive that would last 4 hours, along with other passengers who did not speak the entire time. When they arrived at their destination, they were all somewhere out in the deep desert, with military activity buzzing around them. Stancil was then led to an area of desert scrub that was brightly illuminated by floodlights, and that was when he allegedly saw something that would change his life forever.

There in the bright light and surrounded by trucks and military personnel, was a metallic disk about 30 feet in diameter jutting from the sand and dirt, half-buried and with a visible gaping gash in its side. One of the officials at the scene told him that the otherworldly object had crashed there, and that his job would be to try and deduce the speed of the craft and impact. As he was there, he learned other details of the incident, such as that there was a compartment inside the craft in which had been found a tiny dead body that was not human. Apparently this creature, which Stancil claimed to have seen himself, was about 4 feet tall, with what looked like a skull cap, and wearing a seamless silver suit. Shortly after this, the military packed up the ship and everything else, and the investigation was ended. Stancil would be told to never speak of what had gone on there, forced to sign a paper to such effect, but in 1973 he broke his silence by telling of it to the UFO researcher Raymond Fowler, who would launch his own investigation into the matter. Fowler would find that Stancil really was who he said he was, and he further uncovered witnesses from Wright Patterson AFB who claimed that on that very same evening they had received a shipment from a crash site in Arizona, including strange pieces of metal and the bodies of three 4-foot-tall humanoids with large heads and brownish skin. The story is quite interesting, but considering that there is very little evidence or corroboration for any of this, it is mostly down to whether one believes Stancil or not, and we will likely never know what really happened out in the desert that night, if anything.

In 1974, we have a strange case that supposedly took place in the area of the small remote village of Llandrillo, North Wales, in the United Kingdom. On the night of January 23 of that year, the whole village was apparently shaken by a thunderous roar and violent shuddering of the earth that rattled homes, knocked things off of shelves and scared the local populace. Startled citizens began going out into the streets wondering what had just happened, and that was when they saw blue and orange lights eerily flickering in the gloom at a mountain called Cader Bronwen, in the Berwyn mountain range. Before anyone even knew what was going on, police and military personnel had swept in the cordon off the area and order people back into their homes, permitting no one to get anywhere near where those strange lights seemed to be coming from. Considering that the area was so remote, it seemed odd that there was such a huge military presence there, and this continued for several days, with no information at all coming from authorities as to what had actually happened.

During all of this, there were numerous tales from locals that told of having seen a glowing object come down from the sky, and of being forcefully turned away whenever they tried to approach the mountain, but at least one witness claimed to have actually seen the crashed object. One local nurse who sped off in her car towards the mountain thinking that a plane had crashed and that people were possibly in need of medical assistant, but as she approached, she could see that it was no plane. She would claim that she had seen through the trees a large, circular object glowing orange, but she had been unable to get a better look before military personnel descended on her to block her view and turn her away. Whatever happened here has been lost to time and there are no answers.

In that same year another apparent UFO crash supposedly went down at the border between Texas and Mexico. The incident begins on August 25, 1974, when an American Air Defense radar installation picked up an object moving in from the Gulf of Mexico on a predicted trajectory towards the state of Texas. Whatever it was it was moving extremely fast, at an estimated speed of around 2,530 miles per hour, and it was at an altitude of around 75,000 feet. It was rather alarming, as it was headed straight towards U.S. airspace and no one had a clue what it was. It was thought that it was perhaps a meteor, but then it slowed down. Considering that it was slowing down and about to violate U.S. airspace, an alert was issued and fighters were scrambled for possible interception of an enemy craft, yet it would then surprise everyone again.

The object was tracked to the area of Corpus Christi, Texas, where is suddenly dropped to an altitude of 45,000 feet and slowed down considerably to 1,955 miles per hour, before changing course to take it towards Mexican airspace before any defense could be mounted. It then shot out over Brownsville, Texas, and gently descended once again to about 20,000 feet before suddenly and inexplicably vanishing from radar in the general vicinity of a place called Coyame, in the state of Chihuahua, Mexico, just across the U.S. border. Considering that the object had slowed down, changed course, and descended in smooth, measured steps, it was clear that this was no meteor, and it was also no equipment malfunction, because another military radar installation would report that they had tracked it as well. When the object did not appear on screens again, it was assumed that it must have come down in the desert wasteland near the town, but no one had any idea of what it could have been.

Strangely, civilian radar had apparently not picked this particular event up, but it was found that they had picked up a private aircraft that seemed to have crashed in the same area. However, the flight path of the civilian aircraft did not match that of the mystery object, making any connection between the two murky and differentiating them as two separate phenomena. The only thing anyone knew was that the object the military had tracked and the civilian aircraft seemed to have gone down in precisely the same area at just around the same time. It was all rather odd, but it was apparent that at least an aircraft had crashed, and so the Mexican authorities launched a search for the wreckage, soon finding it out among the rugged parched scrubland. That was when the weirdness would continue. In addition to the wreckage of the aircraft, it was soon reported that there was another crash site not far away, and that this one seemed to be oddly circular in shape and mostly in one piece. After that, radio silence was put into effect and there was no further word on what was going on.

The original reports and communications between the rescue crews had been intercepted by the CIA, who started putting together their own team to go and check it out, and the Mexican government was asked for permission to enter and do their own recovery mission or assist with the operation. These requests would allegedly be either ignored and met with silence or outright denied, but according to eyewitness reports the Americans didn’t really care, and went ahead anyway, mobilizing a group of helicopters at Fort Bliss, which were all painted in light brown colors and without markings. In the meantime, the CIA had apparently picked up satellite imagery showing that there had indeed been two crash sites, and furthermore there were very large flatbed trucks that had been brought in to move the wreckage, one piece very disk-like in nature, with the trucks stopping in a very remote area away from habitation and then assuming complete radio silence. Alarmed that something weird was going on, the U.S. government ordered a flyby to check it out.

A low altitude, high speed flyby purportedly showed trucks and jeeps stopped in the area and two bodies lying on the ground, and it was decided to send the helicopters in. Four military helicopters were then sent out across the border to the site, where they supposedly found the entire Mexican convoy still and the personnel all dead for reasons unknown, most of them still sitting lifelessly in their vehicles. On one of the flatbed trucks was found a large, disc-shaped craft that measured about 16 feet in diameter, and was composed of smooth silver metal, with no apparent markings, doors, windows, or visible means of propulsion anywhere on it. The disc was also surprisingly only lightly damaged, with merely a small hole and some dents to show for what was seen as an obvious collision with the civilian aircraft. In fact, the wreckage from that aircraft was also carried by the Mexican convoy, and that plane had been completely obliterated, nothing but twisted pieces.

With great caution this object was allegedly whisked away by the helicopters. According to the story, before leaving the military also made sure to destroy the remains of the convoy, the plane wreckage, and all of the bodies with high explosives, in what appears to have been some sort of nefarious attempt to get rid of the evidence. The disk was apparently taken to a secure facility in the Davis Mountains, after which it was decontaminated and moved to a covered truck and brought by back roads to an unknown location somewhere near Atlanta, Georgia. The movements of the object are unknown from there, with some reports saying it was put in an underground facility, while others say it was moved yet again. No one really knows. Other mysteries are why the entire recovery team and convoy sent by the Mexican government was dead, made even more confusing in that none of the American team reportedly had any problem or illness. Just what was going on here? The case of what has gone on to be known as “The Mexican Roswell” remains unexplained.

Moving up to 1996, there was yet another supposed UFO crash at Boyle, Ireland. In May of that year, an unidentified object described as a “spaceship” allegedly came down to crash through some trees, bounce off a lake, and go skidding across the ground. Shortly after this, the police arrived to find debris all over the place, but they were soon pushed out of the area by a contingent of military personnel, who immediately went about locking down the area. There is not much more said on the matter after that, but the locals apparently insist that “something big happened” on that evening. No further news seems to have ever been released on this case, whether that is because it was thoroughly covered-up or because it never happened at all. We’ll probably never know for sure.

Our next case here reportedly occurred at Värmland, Sweden, at Lake Backsjön, where at least four separate eyewitnesses saw a mysterious oblong object about 15 feet long and about 4-5 feet wide and with “small wings” crash down into the lake on July 27, 1999, sending a huge plume of water into the air as it did. Local police were notified, and before long there was a search being carried out on the lake that would strangely involve both the police and military forces, utilizing teams of divers and advanced sonar equipment to scour the roughly 2 mile-long, and half-mile wide lake. Oddly, locals were told varying stories for what was going on, such as that it was variously an aircraft crash, a satellite, or stolen goods dropped from a plane. When the operation was done, they claimed they had found nothing of importance, but if that were the case, it seems odd that it would turn out that much of the police report on the search was labelled as classified. Why should this be if there was nothing there?

Finally, we come to a report from as recently as 2008, from the town of Needles, California. According to witnesses, a bright, fiery object reported as turquois in color plummeted down to apparently crash into the earth near the Colorado River on May 14 of that year. Although no one saw an actual impact, they were convinced that the object must have crashed and that it was no meteorite, and that it had at one point slowed down and then sped up again. One local ex-cop named Frank Costigan would say of what he saw, “It was bright, bright enough that it illuminated the ground. It went behind a hill, and I waited to see if I could hear it crash because as big as it was, it was bound to make noise.” Despite this, there was no sound of a crash or explosion, and as witnesses wondered what was going on, there was reported a mysterious caravan of military-style vehicles approaching on the road towards the estimated impact site. One witness to the convoy was David Hayes, the owner of the local KTOX Radio in Needles, would say that one of the vehicles had some kind of strange dome on it that reminded him of a stealth fighter. He would say of what he saw on an interview with investigative reporter George Knapp:

It seemed like it was some kind of surveillance vehicle — four-wheel drive. It had government plates, U.S. government plates and behind it were a couple of vans that looked like support vehicles.

He also claimed that riding in the truck were “men-in-black types” who looked “serious as a heart attack.” In the meantime, other witnesses reported seeing a formation of black, unmarked helicopters in the area carrying what appeared to be a crane, and some even claimed that they had seen the helicopters use this crane to pick up a glowing, oval-shape object and carry it off into the night. Hayes would claim that he would get a call from a friend in the Laughlin area in Nevada who said that at the time all of this was going on, Laughlin Airport had been actively running the flights known to carry workers to and from Area 51. After this, the military activity in the area ceased. Some curiosity seekers went off to examine where they estimated the object had come down and claimed to have found scorch marks in the earth and some mysteriously burned trees, but nothing else. There has been no word from the police or military confirming that any of this happened at all, so it is all very curious. Knapp has said of his investigation into the matter:

The fact that there were people here the next day, it was almost like they were doing some sort of cleanup or whatever. The point is, something definitely happened. The I-Team phoned nearly every agency we could think of to see if they had received any report or knew anything. We were not surprised to learn that no one knew anything. A military watchdog group found a public record showing there was at least one army helicopter in the air in that area at that time. The helicopter, oddly enough, is listed as being attached to a U.S. base in Europe. We are filing freedom of information requests and will report back when we get responses.

What was going on in these cases and why are these things falling from the sky? Where is the evidence for such things? For now we exist in a void of answers. All we can really know is that from time to time, strange things are being reported as falling from the skies. What those might be or what they entail remain mysterious, clouded by conspiracies and tales of government cover-ups, leaving us to merely speculate and wonder as to what it all means.

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There are plenty of supposed UFO encounters out there. Those between people on the ground, planes, and everything in between. The phenomenon ranges across a wide range of scenarios, but one very strange corner of all of this are those weird encounters that have been logged between trains and UFOs, and these are both more interesting and more bizarre than one might think.

On October 3, 1958, diesel freight train No. 91 was moving through north central Indiana on its way from Monon to Indianapolis along with a crew composed of engineer Harry Eckman, Cecil Bridge, the fireman, and Morris Ott, the head brakeman, as well as the conductor Ed Robinson, and Paul Sosbey, the flagman. At approximately 3:20 a.m., they went past a remote crossroads called Owasco when they saw “four big, soft white lights” in the sky up ahead. The fireman, Bridge, would say of what transpired:

They (the lights) crossed the tracks ahead of the train – about a half a mile ahead of us, we estimated. They were moving pretty slowly, too, at no more than about 50 miles an hour, four big, white, soft lights. Just the three of us in the engine saw the lights at this time. We were pulling 56 cars – that’s a little more than half a mile of cars – and because of the angle at which these things were approaching and because they were so low right then, the boys in the caboose probably couldn’t see them. I talked to Robinson, (the conductor), and told him what we had seen. During the time we watched these things, from Ewasco to Kirklin, we did a lot of talking on that radio. The dispatcher in Lafayette could hear us, of course, but he never cut in. Conductor Robinson continues the story. I was sitting in the cupola, looking forward over the train, when Bridge called me on the radio. I had already noticed the four gobs of light but I couldn’t make out what they were. They were half a mile ahead of the caboose – the whole length of the train. A little bit after he called me the things went away and we didn’t see them for a few minutes… then all of a sudden they came back.

I’d say they were only a couple of hundred feet above the train as they came toward the caboose. And they weren’t moving very fast – maybe 30 or 40 miles an hour. It was hard to tell – a fellow just doesn’t notice details like that under the circumstances. The freight train is pretty noisy, of course, but I didn’t hear any other noise, like the roar an airplane would have made. I think they were silent, or nearly silent, at least. They flew over us one after the other – big, round white things that looked about the colour of fluorescent lights, kind of fuzzy around the edges. They didn’t glare and they didn’t light up things as they went over. They just came back toward us, over the top of the cars, one after the other. Then they went on down the tracks maybe another half a mile and seemed to stop. When these things shot back over to the east of us, they lit up much brighter than they were before. They turned in line, going north or northeast and we noticed that they lit up in sequence – the front one first, then number two, three and four. They changed course and came back past the train. They were going in the opposite direction to us when they made this pass. I guess they were at least a mile or two east of us when they did it.

We had flashlights in the engine and in the caboose. Up on the head end of the train – in the engine where I was –we blinked our flashlights at the things and we waved the lights. We thought we might get them to come in closer. They did come down over the train a few minutes later, as Robinson related, but of course, I can’t say they did it because we flashed the lights at them. At any rate they didn’t flash any lights back at us. In the caboose we had a five-cell sealed beam flashlight that throws a pretty good beam a long ways. When the things came down and flew right up the tracks behind the caboose, I grabbed that sealed beam flashlight and shined it on them. As soon as the light hit them, they jumped sideways out of the beam. When they got back over the tracks I did it again and they scattered. They acted like they didn’t care for that light at all. While we were switching at Frankfort they stayed away back up the tracks, just hovered there, until we moved on. Then they followed us again. When they finally went away at Kirklin, they just zipped off to the northeast and kept on going and we didn’t see them anymore.

What was going on here? It would turn out that all of the crew had seen the mysterious light show from different angles depending on whether they were on the bridge or in the caboose, and they could all see that the lights seemed to be following them. From the caboose, Ed Robinson observed the phenomenon and would say of it:

We didn’t see them from the back end of the train for several minutes after they went away to the east and turned. But the boys in the engine were still seeing them. I got back on the radio with Bridge. He was watching them right then. They must have circled the train and gone north of us, real low, because the next time we saw them they came rushing up the tracks right in back of us. They were coming a lot faster this time – a lot faster than they had come back over the train the first time.

They were just above the tree-tops along the right of way, and they had changed their way of flying — their formation. This time they were sort of flying on edge. Two of them were on edge – the two in the middle. The two on the outside were tilted at an angle both in the same direction. The four of them flew like that up the tracks behind the train – a tilted one on the east, two of them straight up and down, then the one on the west tilted just like the one on the east. When they first came back over the train we could see that they were round things – circular shaped on the bottom. Then when they flew up the tracks in back of us we could see – Sosbey and I – that they were about 40 feet in diameter and maybe 10 feet thick. The two flying straight up and down were approximately over the edges of the right of way and about 200 yards in back of the caboose. If they had been flying flat down instead of edgewise. They would have just about have touched edges so they must have seen somewhere around 40 feet across the bottom.

This case has no real answers in sight. Another rather harrowing report comes from October 20, 1973, from the near Mt. Vernon and Evansville, Indiana. On this morning, a train crew on a L&N train near Upton, in the Mt. Vernon area, began experiencing engine trouble at around 6:50 a.m. but they kept on going towards their destination, and at one point observed a mysterious light in the distance that was pulsating from really bright to dim, and back to bright. It did not look like an aircraft, and they watched it head out of sight, yet this would not be the end of their ordeal. UFO researcher Francis Ridge, an investigator for National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) would say of what happened next:

When they neared Caborn (6-7 miles east of Mt. Vernon), the lead conductor told the rear conductors by intercom that they had seen a real bright light. When they got near St. Phillips, the rear conductor reported that there now was a train following them, on the same track. By then they had gotten up on Belknap hill (at Peerlsess Crossing), “a pretty good pull on a train”, and had gotten hung up. One of the rear men suggested that they should get the train behind them, which he said had been following them for awhile, to push them. The lead conductor replied, “Well, I haven’t heard him on the radio.

After a short while the rear man suggested the same solution to the problem, again: “Well, he’s been following us and I can see his light back there and the ‘board’ is red!” The object following them had given them a “red board” on their blocking system. The signal referred to here is a series of lights, similar in color to regular traffic lights, situated on a pole on the side of the tracks. This shows either red, amber, or green, indicating “danger” , “caution”, or “all clear”, respectively. (This signal is a part of the Automatic Blocking System which tells of other traffic on the same track). The “red board” normally meant that something was on the track behind them. The rear conductor again suggested that the crew call the “tower” (Howell Round House at Evansville) and see if there was a train behind them.

A quick check with the yardmaster showed that there was no train behind them at all. Upon receiving the news, the rear conductor replied, “There is a headlight behind us. I can see it. It’s real bright. After the train had gotten hung up and had stopped on Belknap Hill, they got out and looked around. The conductor, after backing the train down the hill, got out, walked down to the rear unit and pressed the restart button. To his surprise the unit “kicked right off, ran real good. The light or the object was now moving off, back from where it had come from. According to the conductor, whatever had given them a “red board”, now was giving them a “green board.” As he, himself, stated, “The board went green. The light cleared up the board”. The train, previously hampered with a bad rear unit and way over-tonnage, was now fully able to climb the steep, hill and made it in to Howell without further mishap.

Interestingly, this happened during a major UFO sighting wave in the area at the time, and we are left to wonder just what was going on here. A few years later, there was another very odd account investigated by Ridge as well, this time from the region of Columbus, Ohio. In late October of 1977, a freight train headed out to the Fostoria Distribution Company warehouse just north of Fostoria, Ohio in order to pick up a food shipment. They reached their destination without incident and began loading up the train when things began to get strange, starting with a sighting made by the engineer, Howard J. Albert. Ridge would say in his report on the incident:

At about 3:20 AM, Howard saw what looked to be a shooting star to the west; it curved down out of the northwest. He was sitting in his cab facing southbound. The first box car blocked his view in this direction. The light came down in the field toward Route 23 between him and the church. Slowly, at about the speed of a walking man, it came toward him across the field. It was approximately 16 feet off the ground and stopped on the other side of the tracks between four and five box car lengths away – 180 to 270 feet.Howard picked up his radio and called out to his conductor who was about seven or eight car lengths down the track, “Donald… come up to the engine.” Donald replied by radio and asked what was happening. Howard answered, “Hey, we got a g- d— UFO up here.” By this time the UFO had moved to within two car lengths of the track.

The object was “birthday cake” or disk shaped, about 90 feet in diameter, and 45 feet high. It was brightly lit, with banks of nine vertical “tubes” separated by a dark void space that reflected no light. Short horizonal tubes ran over the top and bottom of these voids. The bottom of the disk could be seen; it appeared like ceramic and was “the color of a common kind of knife sharpening stone… gray with a trace of lavender.” No windows, ladders, antenna, or markings of any sort were observed. There was no sound associated with the disk. The disk was slightly tilted and rotating counter clockwise. Both Howard and Donald used their railroad stop watches twice to time the speed of rotation. The speed was 9 rpm. They could not say what was used as a reference point for the timing, but are sure their estimate was accurate. The object glowed yellow. Electric-like energy arcs ran around the disk in a clockwise direction. They were blue in color. As the arc touched the tubes, the tubes lit up. When the center of the tubes were touched, the ends lit up. When the ends of the tubes were touched by the arcs, the centers lit up.

At one point the tower operator In Fostoria, hearing radio conversation between the three men, called and asked, “Hey, Howard, you got a UFO out there?” Howard replied, “Yes, Merv, we got a UFO up here. He’s damn close.” Merv then asked, “Do you want the cops up there?” The reply was, “Nol They can’t drive up to where we’re at. And if they do get here, they’ll probably shoot at It. It isn’t hurting anybody. We’re playing games with it. When the object was close across the tracks something told them that they should stay on the train and not cross the tracks. They also seemed to know that if they blew the train whistle the object would leave. Howard thought that the object’s occupants were observing their engine, a relatively uncommon model, and in turn were allowing them to observe their craft.

Howard then began turning the train cab headlight on and off in an effort to somehow signal the mysterious object, and when the light went on, the object grew brighter and dimmed again, as if responding. It was at around this time that he realized that the engine was no longer working, and that the radio and walkie-talkies were also oddly out of operation. The object then began spinning at a rapid pace and grew almost blindingly bright, before shooting straight up and then speeding off to the northwest, completely silent the entire time. More recently still is a case from January 14, 2002, in the area of Paintsville, Kentucky, which allegedly involves an actual collision between a train and a UFO. At approximately 2:50 AM in the early morning hours, a coal train was lumbering along its course when the electronic systems on the train starting going haywire. As the crew tried to figure out just what was going on, they turned a bend at a stretch called “Milepost 42” and that was when they noticed lights headed in their direction. It was assumed that this was an oncoming train, and so they killed their own lights so as not to blind the incoming conductor. However, this was no train. The witness describes what happens next in his official report with the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC) as follows:

As we rounded the corner our onboard computer began to flash in and out, speed recorder went nuts, and both locomotives died. Alarm bells began to ring and that’s when we saw the objects. Apparently scanning the river for something, the objects, (at least 3) had several “search” lights trained there, the first object hovered about 10 to 12 feet above the track. Metallic silver in color with multiple-colored lights near the bottom and in the middle, no windows or openings of any kind that we could see. Approximately 18 to 20 feet in length and probably ten feet high. With both engines dead as we rounded the corner, we made little noise and the first object did not respond in time, I estimate that we hit the object at 30 mph with 16,000 trailing tons behind us. It clipped the top of our lead unit then skipped back slicing a chunk out of our trailing unit and first two coal cars. The other objects vanished into thin air.

After this, the train came to a stop around 2 miles past the impact, screeching slowly to a grinding halt after the emergency brakes had kicked in, and the power to their systems jumped back to life. They notified their dispatcher and then surveyed the damage, finding the cab of the rear locomotive to be “demolished and smoking” and the second two cars looking as if they “had been hit with a giant hammer.” Despite the extensive damage, the train was deemed track worthy, and was able to limp along the rail back to the yard, and this is where things would get perhaps even stranger than they already were. The witness explains:

We pulled into Paintsville yard at approximately 5:15 am. The huge overhead lights lining the yard were noticeably dark and the only lights came from what we assumed were railroad officials’ vehicles parked near the end of the track. We pulled to a stop and began unloading our grips off the wounded train. We could hear what sounded like an army of workers immediately tending to our train. Vehicle doors slamming, guys running by in weird outfits and lights glaring from all directions, the one thing missing was railroad officials. A guy named Ferguson shook my hand and asked me to follow him into the old yard office. We did, once inside they, and by they I mean I have no idea who these people were, began to ask us hundreds of questions, they then told us for our own protection we’d be medically tested before we could leave.

I asked repeatedly to talk to my road foreman or trainmaster and not only were these requests denied but they confiscated my conductors’ cellular phone. Hours later we were led outside the old yard office and the strange things continued to happen, the 2 locomotives and two cars were removed from the rest of the train we had brought in and my only guess was parked 4 tracks over under a huge tent like structure buzzing with activity. We were led off property and told due to national security our silence on this matter would be appreciated. We were then put in a Railroad vehicle and taken to Martin Kentucky were we went through questioning again with railroad officials and were then drug tested.

What exactly happened here? Was this an actual collision with a UFO and how did a slow-moving coal train manage to hit it? Who were those officials they were interrogated by? or is this all some sort of hoax? It is hard to say, but a train crashing into a UFO is not something you see every day. That can probably be said about all of the cases we have looked at here, and they occupy a very strange little corner of the UFO phenomenon. What was going on here and what were these objects? The answers remain unclear.

A few days ago I wrote an article here at Mysterious Universe on an alleged UFO crash somewhere in the U.K. during the Second World War. It was a story given to American journalist Dorothy Kilgallen in 1955. It was, of course, the usual kind of such tales: strange, little dead bodies, studies of the craft and dead crew by government agencies, and cover-ups and conspiracies. You can find the article at this link. There is, however, another angle to this whole story that I’ll share with you today. Depending on your opinion on the whole affair, you’ll either think “Wow!” or “Meh.” With that  said, on with today’s article. It all revolves around an entertaining BBC show that hit televisions in the U.K. back in the 1990s. Its title: Invasion: Earth. Before we get to the matter of the story, here’s some background information itself. First and foremost, it’s obvious that the creators of the show dug deep into the world of Ufology. And, the writers and producers were very familiar with that Second World War crashed UFO story, too – as it appears in the show itself.

tvdb say of the show: “A six-part mini series produced by the BBC & the American channel, Sci Fi. The mini series went out in 1998. The plot was simple but effective. A team of military and scientists discover that a hostile alien force is planning to turn Earth into a breeding farm. Another alien race, the echos, tried to warn the Earth about the aliens (ND’s) during the Second World War. However, only one person listened and he went off with the Echo’s. In the late 1990’s a UFO is shot down with the returning man. Suddenly the small team is left to defend the Earth. However, the ND’s had been poisioning the Earth for over 50 years and men are dying out while women could become hybrid creatures. Nothing seems able to stop the ND’s.”

Here’s how the story begins: “England 1944, during the height of the V-2 rocket blitz on England, an unidentified and notably non-German object crashes, devastating the suburb in which it falls. A bomb disposal team arrive on the scene, led by Lieutenant Charles Tyrell (Anton Lesser), a Cambridge Don and anthropologist, but while searching the scene the soldiers discover two of the crashed craft’s occupants; one is shot dead by a soldier while attempting to flee the scene (much to Tyrell’s dismay), while the other occupant falls out of the craft, badly injured by the crash. It soon becomes apparent that the occupants are not human, with their domed heads and speckled pale skin. Tyrell establishes a rapport with the survivor, just as Military Intelligence arrives.

Now, we get to the “Hmm” part of the story. At the same time that Nick Pope was writing his Operation Thunder Child novel, back in the 1990s, the British Ministry of Defense gave a large amount of assistance and support to the BBC’s Invasion: Earth team’s show that dealt with an attack on the planet by hostile alien entities. Inevitably, this led to rumors – within the U.K. UFO research community, if nowhere else –  that it was all part of a less-than-subtle attempt on the part of certain elements of the British Government to get the general public thinking about the possibility of humankind waging outright war against an alien species. Does the MoD know something that the rest of us don’t? A Ministry of Defense employee – referred to me by Nick Pope – had something to say about this at the time. The MoD man said:

Nick Pope

“It’s extremely strange that on the one hand the MoD is publicly so dismissive about UFOs; and yet on the other they bent over backwards to provide assistance to a TV company producing a science-fiction drama which starts with the Royal Air Force shooting down a UFO. Normally, the Ministry of Defense only helps film and TV companies where it believes that significant benefits will fall to the MoD in terms of recruiting, training or public relations. This was the case, for example, with our participation in the James Bond film, Tomorrow Never Dies. What, one wonders, did the MoD think it had to gain from helping to perpetuate a view that the Royal Air Force were virtually at war with extra-terrestrials? Questions about our participation in this project were raised at the highest level within the Ministry of Defense.”

Just a case of the Ministry of Defense giving a bit of help to the BBC? Or, did the MoD have other reasons for wanting to help with the production of the show? Perhaps someone should dig deeper into all of this, even though the strange story is now more than twenty years old.