From Bill to Gill to Hill: Part Three--Hill.

The Betty and Barney Hill CE4 is the most famous UFO case other than Roswell. It is also, with Roswell, the most detailed. Because of that, I'll be skipping a lot of the detail in order to keep this short of a book. If you want to read a book, you can read John Fuller's The Interrupted Journey, which still does a good job of narrating the encounter. Very little, other than the hullaballoo about the "star map", has developed since Fuller did his very good work. [The star map is mentioned in Fuller but the raft of speculations about it came later.] For our purposes, "HILL" is the third step in the ["logical"? inevitable? reasonable?] chain of experiences which constitute the backbone of mainstream UFOlogy. "If there are aerial technologies, and if there are occupants associated with them, then there might be some instances where a human was taken on board". Whereas step two is almost forced by step one, step three is not. One can readily imagine "visitations" wherein no such close contact took place, and likewise imagine reasons why it might not be desirable by the visitors. So, although evidence for step one is rather overwhelming, and therefore the lesser but still substantial pile of step two cases have a strong foundation from which to find acceptance, "on-board experiences" are in a much more readily doubtable position and require an extra dose of solidity to make them believable. Some say such evidence is all over the place and the dilemma is solved. I don't find it so. Most of the popular evidence for on-board experiences, I find, turns out to be claim rather than substance. Some people say evidence for on-board experience is non-existent. I don't find that extreme to be true either. [the mere fact that both these positions exist in the UFO community shows how unsure all this CE4 business is, and how poorly the advocates have made their case.] My view, and I am just one more puzzled onlooker, is that there are a few well-documented and well-researched CE4s to find credibility in, but not a lot. This doesn't mean that a lot have not happened; it means that the work on them is, to me, unconvincing. The case that comes as close to "convincing" as any other is the Hill case. It is in many ways the "same" as most of the modern popular claims, but since it was nearly the first and widely publicized [even in a movie] presents the possibility that later likenesses are wannabees rather than realities. It also differs from the highly restrictive story prominent today, wherein all cases have to be almost assembly line clones of one another. Hopefully I'll remember to remark on some of the [what are to me] critical differences. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
{this narrative of the case is taken as much as possible from the directly agreed upon thoughts of Betty Hill}. On the night of September 19/29, 1961, Betty and Barney Hill were returning to their home in Portsmouth, New Hampshire through the White Mountains. They saw a bright object in the sky. Barney stopped the car and got out to look at it with binoculars. [Barney is at the left returning to the scene]. It reversed path and flew erratically. [This path was upon consideration geometric in nature like a continuous drawing of three-sided boxes or a square-toothed line in the air as it went forward]. They continued driving and occasionally stopping. Then the object approached the car more closely and to the front. It was flat with wrap-around windows. Barney got out and watched intently. He saw figures within the windows dressed in shiny black uniforms. Barney felt that there was some communication which terrified him and he ran back to the car laughing hysterically and saying that they were going to capture them. He rapidly drove off to the sound of close-by beeping noises directed at the car. Thirty miles further on, after not seeing the object again, they were bombarded by the same sounds. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------They arrived home apparently without incident and Betty called her sister telling her some of the story. Her sister called a physicist who suggested that radiation be checked. She also called police who suggested the Air Force. The Pease AFB official initially thought that they're nuts, but became interested when Barney got on the phone and told details of how the object looked. ---------------------On the 21st Pease called back and said they've been working on the case. They were filing a report for Blue Book. Both Betty and Barney were pretty frightened by the experience, and, despite not being particularly interested in UFOs before--especially Barney--, became of the opinion that they have had a close UFO encounter. Barney went to the local library and checked out a book by Keyhoe. Betty, always an "action" person, wrote Keyhoe soon [the 26th] and asked him for reading suggestions. She also mentions that their fascination about this is so great now, that they want to return to the site in hopes of re-seeing the object. -----------------------Keyhoe, always the paranoid when it came to anything smelling of contact, did not immediately respond substantively. Sometime later, Dick Hall wrote to legendary field case researcher Walt Webb and asked him to look in on the incident. This was not until mid-October. Meanwhile, as of September 30th, Betty began having vivid dreams of being captured and taken on board for a physical examination. Betty wrote these down, but hid them away and did not tell Barney. And Barney remained disturbed by all this, believing that he had some kind a mental block about something that he subconsciously didn't want to remember.-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Walt Webb visited the Hills on October 21st. His interview went well, he liked them and vice versa, and his report was his usual thorough job. He mailed it back to Keyhoe with "case sounds like a humdinger". Keyhoe had Webb's report on his desk when he was visited by two IBM personnel. Robert Hohmann was a science/engineering writer working out of the New York area [Kingston], and C.D. Jackson was a senior engineer, working out of [apparently] Huntsville, Alabama, where Werner von Braun's rocket boys worked. The Huntsville facility was a hot bed of UFO interest in the 1950s with senior engineers speaking to the press favorably on the subject, and von Braun's mentor, Hermann Oberth, residing there twice, his opinions on the extraterrestrial nature of UFOs well known. Hohmann and Jackson had become interested in the early 1900s attempts to receive extraterrestrial signals [by Tesla, Marconi, and Todd---H&J felt that TMT had succeeded] and had become convinced about UFOs at the same time. Keyhoe, probably impressed by the IBM credentials, pointed to Webb's brand new report and let them read it. This led to them ultimately contacting the Hills and visiting them on November 25th. They got along well, and during the conversations it became apparent to H&J that there was a significant period of lost time in the narrative. That along with Barney's mental block, indicated that there was more information to be dug out. [Betty said that they knew from the beginning that their arrival home was way too late, but had not focussed on that as significant.] Sometime thereafter a good friend of the Hills from Pease suggested hypnosis to pry the info out. Nothing happens immediately though. -----------------------------------------------------Worried that maybe all this is due to illness of some kind causing hallucinations, the Hills see a doctor in early 1962. Nothing is recommended. In the summer, Barney sees a psychiatrist about on-going anxiety. Again nothing. Betty may have mentioned her "capture" dreams during a UFO talk during this time. Barney remains very disturbed and by the end of 1963, friends at Pease encourage them to undergo hypnosis to find the cause. That is when Benjamin Simon was contacted. Simon had been formerly in the military and had used hypnosis for trauma victims of war. He was then in private practice [and expensive]. He worked with the Hills [in separated sessions] for seven months, once a week, and ended every session with suggestions that they would not remember the content of the hypnosis until the treatments were over. From these sessions came, of course the classic "abduction" account that is iconic for the genre. ----------------------------------I'll not go through all of that. Briefly, it involved the involuntary taking of the Hills from their car, dragging Barney along, placing them in separate rooms of a round craft, examining them on tables, messing about with Barney's private parts, being friendly with Betty, showing her the star map, and, among other things, letting them go with the comment that they wouldn't remember. Tapes of at least some of these sessions exist and are often spectacularly emotional. Simon was perplexed. The responses were so genuine that they had to be true at least in the minds of the Hills. But the story was so far beyond his ken that it had to be false. Publicly he seemed to always be grasping for some exotic psychiatric solution to the case, while admitting that the Hills were good honest people. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Of course everyone wanted to know about the creatures. As the story went, there were a great many of them, about a dozen or so being seen on the road at the first capture. Many if not all of these were described as wearing black uniforms and ballcaps. They were short, greyish or pallid, with thin limbs, large skulls with relatively broad foreheads, large deep-set eyes with pupils, significant sized noses and mouths. Their chests were broad though their hips were not. Mumbling or ooooo-ing sounds issued from them. The "leader" seemed to communicate with Betty non-verbally [telepathically?]. Note that although having areas of similarity with modern ideas of "Grays" which dominate the literature [and are claimed by some researchers to be the only real "alien" type], there are several differences. Although the eyes are broad, they are deep-set and not wrap-around like some form of ET-sunglasses. This is a much more understandable evolutionary feature, as are pupils, mouths, and noses. Hills' creatures also can make sounds. Although the necks are thin, they are not pencil-thin, as if belonging to robots or stick figures rather than organic beings. One thing that makes little sense either for Hills' ETs or modern "Grays" are the ultra-thin hips. No creature of evolutionary descent would have hips so narrow that the huge heads couldn't make it through the birth canal. One rescues this by saying that a) we're only dealing with males [and females are significantly sexually dimorphic] ; b) the race has been engaged in genetic engineering on a significant scale and has altered their basic forms and reproductive methods; or c) we really are only dealing with robotic techno-creations. The only one of these which could save the modern speculation that these things are interested in messing about with human genetics for their own uses, is number one. The robots don't need anything biological, and super-genetic engineers don't need any help. And I don't buy the line about hybridization at all, as using human genes for anything is a waste of time when you're that advanced and can make anything you want for yourselves without invading the bedrooms of several million people. Note also two further major discrepancies with the common tale. This is no bedroom visitation [that begins showing up with gusto in the late 1970s in the HUMCAT reports to Ted Bloecher, and as an avalanche following Budd Hopkins' Missing Time.] The second thing is: Betty and Barney are not "repeaters". They have no on-going "abductions" over and over and stretching back through to childhood. Betty used to scoff [or worse] at this idea, which she stated very explicitly as the product of bad hypnosis techniques [more akin to stage hypnosis than the professional variety that Simon used, she said] and was in her view dangerous and leading people astray. She even went on a little crusade of sorts trying to talk "miss-led" persons out of their ET-abduction beliefs. Whatever one thinks of all that, the Hills had the benefit of a professional, highly qualified practitioner, who was not biased towards UFOlogy, and who documented everything, the contents of which are open for all to see. It's difficult to find these qualities in many CE4 situations, which reduces them to "believe it or not" in my mind. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A unique element of the case is the star map. This is a display in the room to which Betty was taken and which manifested itself sort of like a three dimensional holographic map "in" the wall. Betty asked the "leader" what this was, and it was clearly indicated as a map containing the home star system of the UFOnauts. Solid lines on the map were said to connect star systems which were commonly visited, and dashed lines were said to extend to systems only occasionally visited. Betty was told the names of none of the stars, and was not pointed out the location of the Sun on the map. All she had were her hypnotically-retrieved memories of the map's shape. This she set down during one session. People immediately began to try to figure the map out. Betty herself was fascinated and tried her hand. [It is interesting that Hohmann and Jackson, knowing nothing of any star map yet, talked to the Hills about their opinion of the likely location of ET life. Betty's "solution" contained neither of their two stars. She was an honest lady and an independent thinker]. During the 1970s, an Ohio State Master's degree student, Marjorie Fish, was creating a three dimensional map of the local star space. She heard of the Hills' map, and searched her own. She felt that she found a match and it was a non-random one. She denominated the Hill stars as all the Sun-like stars in the nearby space generally to galactic south of the Sun. It was an exciting claim [and could even be true]. "Home" was Zeta Reticuli, which is where that obscure system enters pop culture today. ----------------------------------------------------------------------Of course, astronomer skeptics yelled foul. Carl Sagan led the charge claiming that many such matches could be found in a place as big as the galaxy ["billions and billions", remember?] and that this was not a good geometrical match anyway. Well, he's right and wrong all at once [as nearly all extremist screamers turn out to be]. He's right about being able to draw a very large number of connections which would look vaguely like Betty's diagram---billions and billions it is. Marjorie Fish knows that. She felt that the connection of all the sun-like nearby stars, and only the sun-like nearby stars was intriguing. She's right, even if Carl doesn't want to give her that. It also doesn't prove that her match is true. It is intriguing. It is not proof of anything. Carl also showed that if you take away the connecting lines, the stars of the Hill map look nothing like the stars of the Fish map, as to geometry. He's right. But why would anyone want to erase those lines since they were the outstanding feature of Betty's memory? Carl has set up a straw man, just like all dishonest debaters do. What we should admit is that if Betty remembered this correctly [and that is asking a lot], she remembered a certain number of stars, in approximate positions, fortified by a clear set of connecting lines. Fish's map meets those criteria. And going to Sun-like systems makes some exploratory and even "colonial" sense. That's what we can say. That's all we can say--but it is more than Carl Sagan was willing to say. Intellectual honesty is an endangered species in all of the anomalistic studies.-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Allen Hynek ultimately went to New Hampshire [lot closer than Papua] to visit Betty and Barney, and even Benjamin Simon came to give a last hypnosis session, essentially for UFOlogy's "grand old man". Hynek was wowed [despite being, admittedly a clutz at asking questions]. Barney's terror blew him away. Hynek never knew what he should make of this [you can read his fiddling commentary in his book] but he was sure that he was witnessing the effects of something real. I'm with him on this. For me, the "All-The-Way-Fool" position is that the Hills' experience is what it seems to be: an on-board encounter. As a memorial of the great time, each one of the five members of that last session took home a card with them signed by all---a repro of it is above. A rather fine thing, methinks, and good sentiments.

Supplement to "GILL".

Here are two documents that you might find interesting. One is a letter from Bill Gill to Allen Hynek answering some questions. The second is a letter from early CUFOS board member Fred Beckman to Donald Menzel clearing him up on some things. Gill to Hynek 1973:

Beckman to Menzel, 1973:

From Bill to Gill to Hill: Part Two--Gill.

"Gill" is the second step in the [symbolical] sequence of mainline UFOlogical hypotheses. It is representative of the claim that the technological aerial manifestations are associated [at least sometimes] with occupants, and that these occupants have a humanoid form. The illustration above recreates the main scene of the second of three nights in June 1959 when Father William Gill [an Anglican missionary] and 38 of his local associates saw a hovering disk and humanoids standing atop it. Though the painting above is as of daylight, the Sun had set and the light was dimming--in fifteen minutes it was close to what we would refer to as dark. Also, this painting is, as far as I can tell, oriented towards the ENE, whereas the sighting would have been [for the main object] towards the WNW---think of the painting as being like one of those photo illustrations that you see sometimes where the printer got the negative backwards. [at least this is what I think I am looking at]. It has some small relevance because some people have tried to get rid of this case by saying it was of astronomical bodies [you can guess who]. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In the summer of 1959, Father Norman Cruttwell [also an Anglican missionary ] was becoming interested in UFOs. [Cruttwell is pictured to the left]. He had begun getting reports from all manner of people along the coast of Papua/New Guinea of things from strange lights [often called "Tilley Lamps" in imitation of a hand-carried lantern of that day] on up to discoid objects. He collected these and tried to plot them on a map [see to left] in hopes of preserving the data, and maybe finding something out. We owe Cruttwell for giving us what would probably have been lost evidence of a localized miniwave occurring in a very isolated part of the world [who knows how many others of this type there have been?] Because the cases were fascinating, Cruttwell asked his friends to watch out for them and tell him when they heard of a new one. One of those friends was Bill Gill. Gill didn't think that there was anything to these things initially, and responded skeptically to a claim of a "wrong-way sputnik" by a friend [Dr, Ken Huston] at a dinner earlier in the year. He himself saw a "Tilley Lamp" light which shouldn't have been where it was, but also wrote that off. Then his main associate at the mission, Stephen Gill Moi, told him that he had seen a disk. [Everyone remarks about the similarity of Moi's middle name with Gill's. Moi was named after a famous man in the area some many years previously, as were many Papuans. He got his middle name long before Bill Gill arrived on the scene. Gill's own name is apparently a real coincidence, as he was not related to the former individual].----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What Moi saw was a disk out over the sea in the vicinity of the mission. No one else is reported as having witnessed it. Moi's crude drawing is at the top of the left paper as seen in Norman Cruttwell's notes. It is meant to represent a hovering disk with "persons" on its top surface, and projections sticking downwards. [The next drawing down is Moi's drawing of the disk from the famous sighting with Gill and the others, and, as you can tell, Stephen feels that it was the same or an identical object]. Bill Gill, still doubtful at this time, took down Stephen's report and sent it first to another missionary, David Durie, and then to Cruttwell. He listed the Tilley Lamps reports that had come to him, and then wondered if Stephen's "disk" might be just the subconscious mind filling in details which weren't there. He signed the letter "Doubting William". --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------That mindstate didn't last long. One day after he had composed his letter, "Moi's disk" showed up over the beach to the WNW of the mission, and Gill and many others saw it for themselves. Gill's drawing of that object is the lower right object in the collage to the left. What everyone ignores about this encounter is that there was a fairly comprehensive low cloud cover this first night, and the object would go up into the clouds and come back down through. As it did so, you could see the base of the clouds illuminated by the object's glow. The thing finally dropped down low enough so that the details sketched could be seen. It looked pale yellow or orange, and the outlines of the "men" were determinable. A narrow blue beam shot up at a 45-degree angle. When that beam was turned off, the "men" went out-of-sight and the disk rose through the clouds. The thing appeared again about an hour and a half later, looking the same but with the addition of bright "light panels". The projecting "legs" were then seen to number four. Smaller UFOs seemed scattered about as well, one of which was directly overhead. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------It was the next night that "they" waved. This time Gill's medical assistant saw the object and ran to get Gill out to see. It was about in the same location. Four humanoid figures were again on top of the craft. They seemed to be working on something. Gill waved at them [he may have done this with a flashlight initially, as that was the custom to signal to a boat offshore---Gill was still of the opinion that this object somehow had to be an American flying machine with military onboard]. A figure waved back. A local named Ananias waved two hands, and two of the humanoids waved back. Then both Gill and Ananias waved, and all of the humanoids waved back. As it got darker, a flashlight was used to signal a series of dots and dashes. The craft seemed to respond to this also by wig-waggling in the air. Some coming and going went on on deck, and the blue beam flashed twice. As it seemed obvious that the occupants were not going to land, and having watched the action for an hour with nothing more happening [and remembering that Gill thought that this was probably American] Gill went inside to eat dinner and then to celebrate Evensong Services. After the church services, the UFO was gone.----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------The next evening, a UFO was seen further to the south but quite high. Three other small lights were seen as well "like tiny pretty things" which seemed to come and go. Whether these third night things were legit UFOs or not is not too relevant to the previous two evenings but they could have been a swansong.----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Gill's [and the 38 others] sightings were reported by Cruttwell to the newspapers. Gill himself had said to his friends that he had become much changed in his views after thinking over the events of those evenings, and now was seriously contemplating Cruttwell's "visitation" theory [i.e. the ETH]. The newspapers were happy to publicize the story. Australian UFO researchers went to Gill's Australian residence [he was just transferring when the events happened] and got another set of interviews. Finally the RAAF created a file on the incidents. The papers were impressed with Gill's qualities, so were the UFO researchers and the government. Most people ignored the native Papuans, although Cruttwell did not, and Gill had asked them to sign a paper briefly describing what they had seen. With all the testimony, and with the character of Gill, the only way around the case was to find some kinds of mistaken identity type alter-explanations. The RAAF tried first but, although they felt they might write off the "little UFOs" as mistaken stars or planets, the big disk with the people was far beyond that. The RAAF essentially gave up. Gill, with a fair amount of reluctance, gave several interviews and talks about the events and steadfastly refused to speculate about the ultimate nature of the objects that he and his associates had seen. He also refused to allow patently wrong debunking "explanations" to stand, feeling that neither position was an appropriately honest theory. He was always happy to answer a specific question about the encounters, even from irritating persons like Menzel. To his death, Gill remained cooperative, conservative, civilized, and intelligent. We couldn't have asked for a better guy.----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To make this a truly multi-witnessed case, one needs to really interview the local population that participated rather than just say that they did. [this happens all the time in UFO research: writers claim that a case is multi-witnessed when in fact all information comes from just one person]. Fortunately, the Papuans were interviewed by both Cruttwell and later by Allen Hynek. [This shows how impressed Hynek was by the case--a trip to Papua to interview locals is quite a commitment]. I have no direct transcripts of Cruttwell's work in my files, but I do have some of Hynek's. It's quite hilarious in a way. Hynek tries through an interpreter [Ananias] to quiz the folks about this case and others in true western professorial style---they have no idea what he's talking about. It took Hynek forever to understand that they were talking about several different cases, and that he had to be very specific. [there were people pointing in all different directions when he'd ask them where they saw the UFO.] [Also he didn't take in that with a moving UFO they would point to where they saw it first; which would differ with different witnesses]. Speed meant nothing. When Hynek tried to get a duration by trying to get them to slowly draw their finger across the sky, they just went whoosh in the air. Finally he began to get it and determined that they were all talking sense afterall, and it was him that was screwing the works up. Thankfully, the picture emerges that what they signed the original paper [for Gill] about was essentially confirmed. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Cruttwell did a longer term and better job of following up on a variety of things: talking to the main witnesses [Daisy and Annie, I think their names were, above; plus Ananias, Louie, Montaigne--and, I assume Stephen]. He took photos of the area, and tried to picture Bill Gill's method of estimating the sizes. Gill asked Ananias or someone like him to walk along the beach until he presented to Gill's eye the approximate size of the figures that they'd seen on-board. Assuming that Ananias was approximately the same height as the humanoids [yes, a guess, but not an unclever one] he could get a crude guess at the distance the UFO was away at its closest. That guesstimate was 300-500 feet away---a figure if anywhere at all in the ballpark makes for a very close astronomical body indeed. At that point, one needs to defeat the entire story practically to have any chance of debunking it. At a minimum one needs to say that no "men" existed and no "waving" happened. Menzel of course felt that he was easily up to the task. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Menzel and later Klass [in cruder "Klass-less" ways] began by slurring the witnesses. Gill had terrible vision Menzel said and spent the whole hour forgetting to put his glasses on. Yep. That surely happened. The "natives" were "children" psychologically and worshipped the "great white father" and would agree to anything he said---Gill laughed at that. Although they got along well, he said that it was far more likely that they'd agree with nothing he said on such a matter. Stephen was a Gill worshipper, as he even named himself after him---we've seen the error of that already. Gill was a whacko in that he stopped watching [after an hour] and left for dinner and church services---Klass could not imagine such a thing [I can easily imagine Klass lacking imagination, especially when it comes to a clergyman wanting to get dinner before presenting his church service.] Klass, then decided [and he stands precisely alone in this among any allegedly serious investigators] that Gill was in fact a liar. He made it all up to "please" Cruttwell. Well, one need not honor such garbage with any more commentary. The only semi-intelligent attempts to debunk the case have been Menzelian-style astro-smeared-out-mistakes. Venus is of course our object of choice, but the Menzels of the world have tried several other planets as well. As you can see from the illustration: James McDonald tried his hand at seeing if any of that could make sense, and found "no". Menzel decided that Gill must have had little discontinuities on his eyelashes which fooled him into believing that he was seeing little men waving at him. There was really no shame too great for Menzel to come up with. Weirdly Allen Hynek tried his best Menzel on this too [strongly aided by Allan Hendry, who rarely believed in anything despite being "analyst" of CUFOS] and thought that all the little UFOs could be explained, but, grudgingly, not the big one. Exactly why this was even approached this way, given sighting details and low cloud cover boggles me, but I guess if you're a scared-to-death academic you have to do even the absurd to dare to speak about it later. The bottom line is: There have been no explanations. Recently, a modern debunker has tried to resuscitate the old magnified mirage of the rump end of a brilliantly lighted squid boat as his own new idea. Pathetic bunk of a desperate mind. The disk was at thirty degrees elevation and higher. The miraged boatsmen saw the Papuans and responsively waved. What are these guys talking about? What motivates them? They are terribly afraid, but of what?------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Below is one of the covers of the IURs of CUFOS in 1977 which reviewed the Boianai case. Despite Hendry and Hynek's occasional loss of common sense, they are pretty good issues and even admit that the big disk with the guys on top is unassailable. McDonald of course saw the same thing. In his interview with Gill, during his Aussie trip, Big Mac found out that the whole outline of the disk, including the occupants, had a dark area around it, which had a glow around the outside of that--as if the object had a field of some kind separating it from the space around it. This field/glow changed shape with the movement of the humanoids, maintaining its distance outlining all the elements associated with the craft. Very high strangeness stuff, and my favorite case of our whole pile of encounters.

Supplement to "BILL".

As stated in the previous post, because the technology had a glitch, this is a repost of the three pages of Bill Nash's details of his case encounter as written to Donald Menzel. I hope that some of you will enjoy reading Bill Nash's own words.

From Bill to Gill to Hill: Part one--Bill.

The [BILL] Nash/ William Fortenberry high strangeness disks incident, and the Father William GILL close encounter of the third kind, and the Betty and Barney HILL close encounter of the third kind/on-board experience do not constitute the basis of the UFO data pile, but they DO symbolize the trajectory of the phenomenon as a logical and defensible coherent phenomenon to the majority of serious UFO researchers. "There is ample reason to believe that products of a very high technology are manifesting in our airspace"; "there is good reason to believe that humanoid occupants are associated with these technological manifestations"; and "there is good reason to believe that some humans {albeit rarely so, defensibly } have had the experience of being on-board what appears to be a technological craft occupied by such beings". THAT, no matter how "All-The-Way-Fool" it may strike one, is where mainline UFOlogy stands. The first step in that trajectory is "BILL" the Nash-Fortenberry case of 1952. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Many of you know the details of these cases already, but some brief description is required for those who do not. Both Jerry Clark [in his encyclopedia] and Tom Tulien [in a review article] have done terrific jobs narrating the incident of 1952. PAN-AM airways pilots Nash and Fortenberry were on a New York to Miami run and had reached the vicinity of Norfolk, VA and Chesapeake Bay. It was the evening and the sky was mostly clear and black, though some light may have remained to the west. Ahead they saw a red brilliance in the direction of Newport News. They had been looking in that general direction and it seemed that the brilliance had simply appeared suddenly there in place. Moments later the brilliance resolved into six bright red objects moving towards them at high speed. They were shaped like coins, red lighted top surfaces and a thin but easily noticeable width of ridge running around the "coin". They flew in a stepped up "echelon" formation in a line. Upon nearing the airliner, slightly right and below, the line of objects came to a slow stop during which the following disks seemed to mistime the slowing slightly and ride together more closely for a moment. The pilots estimated the objects to be about 100 feet in diameter and 2000 feet above the ground. The line of coins then executed a peculiar maneuver, tipping to their side and inverting their positions so that the leading disk was still leading but the group was facing the opposite direction. And off they went. This actual moment of change of direction was abrupt, like "a ball ricocheting off a wall". As they whizzed away, two more disks flew from beneath the airliner and raced after them ultimately catching up and joining the end of the line. Suddenly all the lights blinked out. A moment later all blinked on again, and eight-in-line they enacted a graceful arc which allowed them to climb out of sight. They disappeared by blinking out one by one, but not in flight sequence order. Nash and Fortenberry sat there dumbfounded, completed their flight, and reported the incident. The news story went nation-wide quickly and you can read one newsclipping above.----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Air Force did investigate this encounter and interviewed both pilots. Their stories checked. The Air Force interviewer was impressed by the credibility of the witnesses and wrote up a clean [objective-sounding] report. The summary elements of the actual USAF file are at the left and you can read them there. It is easy for anyone to see that if you take the Blue Book report as it is written, there are very few options available for explaining this case away. This was however a bad time for the case to have come to Ruppelt and his Blue Book crew, as they were beginning to become snowed under by the flow of reports of the Summer 1952 wave. With a bit of embarrassment Ruppelt later said that they had given this case short-shrift because there were reports of Air Force jets in the area. "Saint Edward" doubtless would have given this much more credence had he had any time to actually look at it. Nevertheless we can pay more attention today, and there are several characteristics of the case which make conventional explanations ...well...impossible. in my opinion. Note the controlled formation flying, the non-inertial flip turn, the tremendous speed [no matter how you estimate it], the non-flyable disk design, the intelligent behavior of reorientation and regrouping, the disappearance by accelerating to height, and possibly even sudden appearance and disappearance. [though I'll give the skeptic that one as not readily determinable]. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Nash-Fortenberry" stood as an Unexplained in the face of all assaults for about a decade, when Donald Menzel decided to take it on and dismiss it with the wave of his almighty hand. Menzel [above right in the picture] was in the early 1960s engaging in debates by furious correspondence with several people [mostly associated with NICAP]. He had a lengthy one with Defiance College physics professor, Charles Maney. [Maney is above left in the collage]. Other correspondences were with Richard Hall [Keyhoe had no time to waste with him], Wade Wellman, and Bill Nash. The correspondence with Nash came about because Maney had challenged Menzel to forego the generalities and actually apply his "reasoning" to real and tougher cases. One of the things Maney challenged him with was the Chesapeake Bay case. M&M went at it [and "furious" often described both men] until Maney decided to let Nash know that his case was being derided by the "great Harvard astronomer". Nash was a tough and intelligent man, and had plenty of testosterone. He wasn't about to back down from Menzel. [Nash, as you've guessed, is the guy in the lower right of the collage]. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This is Maney's actual letter to Bill Nash requesting that Nash write him [Maney] about his case. Nash, irritated at what Menzel had written Maney, wrote directly to Menzel himself. These correspondences are interesting to read--in each case they are exercises in barely controlled civility [Wade Wellman and Donald Menzel resorted to introducing their letters to one another with "Dear Duck" and "Dear Weedy", referencing Wellman smoking pot, after a few exchanges---Menzel started this "upmanship" by the way]. In almost every letter, the correspondent starts calmly with great culture and gradually gives way to anger at what the other guy said in his last one---in some ways, it's quite pitiful. Nash is different. He lets you know what he's thinking in sentence number one. He methodically goes right down a list of Menzelianisms about his case, and either agrees with something or, more often thrashes it. When Menzel has given he or Fortenberry one of his semi-subtle slurs, Nash blasts him and then tells him why he's obviously wrong. Gradually, Menzel began backing off several of his "hypotheses" for explaining the case away [example: a stewardess had opened the flight deck door to smoke a cigarette and the pilots had watched her cigarette's reflection on their windows---you can imagine how Nash thought about THAT one with all the stupidity and incompetence it implies?] He ultimately had to resort to trying to snow Nash with theories of multiple layers of thin ice crystals [would have had to be at least 6 of them stacked up to even begin to entertain such a thing] and a powerful ground-based beam of light reflecting through them in such a way as to mimic all the movements and the directions as seen through three separate windows. At least, with Nash's brains and testosterone facing him, Menzel was a bit more subdued than usual with his language.---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What we have here are three pages of Nash's most detailed letter to Menzel, [ hmmm...I have just noticed that the technology for this blogsite has dropped one one these pages during my blog downloading---and once these illustrations are in place, you take great risks trying to move them around----since I'm so far into the entry I'm not going to risk this---what I'll do instead is post these three pages in a supplementary blog entry immediately after this one, and you can read them in order there, but I'll leave the remnant two pages in state here] and you can read the core information about the sighting for yourself, and grasp some of Nash's thinking style and his surrounding beliefs. I'll leave you to it. Hopefully some of you will feel that this is a rare treat to get closer to one of the main cases in our literature.
Again, as mentioned earlier, you'll be able to read the "first" page of the three with the other two following in a bit when I download them together in a new "entry". ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Menzel got what he wanted out of this correspondence: it allowed him to write a better debunking book. He would have looked the fool if he had gone with the stupid ideas that he "was sure" explained the case before he wrote to and read from Bill Nash. Without intending to, Nash tempered Menzel's steel. His ultimate explanation for the case as printed in his book The World Of Flying Saucers [published within the year] was mainly accurate as to fact [there were a few errors like the fact that the pilots had clearly seen "width" to the disks and they were not two-dimensional] while being theoretically clever, confusing, and bases on no facts at all [as to atmospheric conditions]. But what did he care? For Menzel the job was not to actually do anything objective, "scientific", or even rational, but to slay a dragon which could not exist anyway. Many people have wanted to see Menzel as a stooge of the Intel community--not a chance. He was a "law unto himself" and a massive loose cannon--no intel organization would have trusted him for anything. Menzel simply loved to fight and "win". One of the most colossal egomaniacs in world history, Menzel relished embarrassing, destroying, eviscerating his opponents, and even when it was he that was the loser, he chortled his way down his megalomanic lifepath, never acknowledging a single error let alone defeat. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A few years later, Jim McDonald read the Nash/Menzel correspondence. Above is part of an interview he had with Nash, and his assessment of the letters exchange. In reality, Menzel lost every exchange of letters with people like Nash, Maney, Wellman, and Hall. This was not primarily because they were smart [they were], but because they were dealing with facts and Menzel was happy with preconceived prejudices and "creative speculation". I would like to say something good about the man. Honestly, I can't think what.

Flying Saucer Review Volume 9, Jan-Jun 1963: Nadir?

Many people feel that by 1963 the UFO desert was beginning to get some rain on its way to the explosion of life it exhibited in the mid-sixties. You can't tell it by my own files. 1963 is the low point for case numbers for me [down to about a quarter of a typical strong year.] The first three issues of FSR in 1963 simply reinforce that. FSR was, like the rest of the field, trying to grasp for direction--not so easy anymore as much of the low-hanging fruit of wild speculation was seen by most followers as rotting right on the tree. As long as Girvan was in charge, FSR would never give up on Adamski, but FSR was sounding more and more like they had given up on almost all the rest of the contactees. Without the contactees to tell us what the spacetravelers were all about, we were left on our own. Of course most sensible UFO scholars already knew that. People like Michel and Vallee, even looser thinkers like Fontes and Ribera, were trying to find a path in mathematical approaches. NICAP,APRO, the slowly-evolving Hynek, and non-US researchers like Gosta Rehn in Sweden and David Wightman [ the editor of Uranus] in England, felt that the amassing of piles of individually-strong cases was still the way [and so good case investigation was paramount]. 1963'FSR showed awareness of some of all of that.---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A somewhat novel presentation of a clever theory was presented by Austrian scholar, Luis Schoenherr. This was the speculation that UFOnauts were travelers from the future. Many times this idea has been presented as the UFOnauts being non-terrestrials, but, by itself, this concept is redundant. [If all they are is ET, then why bring in a time dimension? They can come here via super-tech and show off their stuff whether time is involved or not.] The interest in the theory is when one considers that "they" are "us" from the future. There are all sorts of problems with this, which in my mind are insurmountable, but the idea does lend itself to a few interesting "solutions" to elements in the UFO phenomenon. The most important of these for early time-travel speculators was that they felt that this got around the "problem" [theirs not mine] of the UFOnauts looking too much like us. Well, right, it would get around that element, if one thought it was a problem. [readers of this blog have read how I deal with this from earlier material]. Other early thinkers felt that this might solve the problem of how to get here from there, as there was no "there" but "just" a slip of time away. Obviously this is replacing one partially-understandable engineering problem with a completely non-understood one. The issue called forth comment in the journal from the soon-to-be greatest editor of FSR, Charles Bowen. This was his first coming-out-of-the-shadows on UFOs. Bowen speculated that the reason that we were seeing Aime Michel's Orthoteny [straight] lines of UFO exploration was that in order to time-travel the UFOs could only use certain physical routes. Bowen went on to say that the minimalist true communication by UFOnauts was to avoid "changing the future" by imparting usable information. [his variation of the "grandfather paradox"]. He worried that the non-loving nature of "recent" Italian encounters indicated that bad aliens may have conquered our descendants. With all due respect to a man who became a useful facilitator of the distribution of UFOlogical knowledge, each one of these concepts is, in its own way preposterous. [Orthoteny because it seems NOT to be defendable at final glance; non-interaction because there is plenty of interaction; and future conquerors of Earth because all UFO cases are hardly hostile, and the majority {think Father Gill} are neutral to mildly friendly]. Bowen's article is interesting because he rarely spoke out like such an uncontrolled wild idea flinger in later days. ------------- Schoenherr's views were more measured. He was concerned with why the UFOnauts looked humanoid and why they seemed so well adapted to Earth environment, but he added to that the high-strangeness phenomena of instant appearance and disappearance. Schoenherr, following in the footsteps of Edwin Abbott's Flatland concepts, described the UFOs as "four-dimensional objects" [I believe in the sense that they moved through three dimensional space "orthogonally" in time] and would suddenly manifest when entering our Now, and "dematerialize" [to our eyes] when they passed by our Now. Schoenherr's ideas were always more sensible about this than most other speculators, and Luis and I corresponded about them after I had written a piece about how the commonly described "grays" had all the gross characteristics of a neotenously-shifted human form--a shift which might have been engineered as a future form of ourselves. I also wrote a follow-up piece on the varieties of hypotheses about time travel. [The abductions people absolutely hated this, by the way]. Although I don't think that the time travel hypothesis is even possible when one weighs out all the intellectual bits, I felt that it deserved at least a clear presentation and so wrote the papers. Very few mainstream UFOlogists include the Time Traveler speculation as part of their thinking [and none as far as I know have even read and understood the Neoteny concept], but you will still see the idea pop up for a casual throw-out hypothesis now and then. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The first half of 1963 saw Aime Michel write of what was, apparently, the most impressive thing about his Orthoteny work to him. This was, as everyone always emphasizes, the BAVIC line [the line of sightings stretching from Bayonne to Vichy. {it is the blue line on the accompanying map.} BAVIC was felt by orthoteny supporters to be the foundationstone line, as it had several points of incidents in a fairly impressive linearity and time constriction. But there was more to it than that. Michel was concentrating his research on that one line [while people such as Vallee looked for larger and ultimately global patterns], and had as a colleague an astronomer [not, in this case, Vallee]. Michel had a "loose" case in his records, the town of which was so small that he couldn't locate it on any normal scale map. But its timing seemed to make it a candidate for the BAVIC line. His astronomer friend was the one to say to him: if we're going to find Vauriat, we'll find it on BAVIC. With a very detailed map, the astronomer lined up BAVIC and began tracing down from Vichy. Coming to a railway line [a clue to the case] they looked a small way further and the line went directly through a small village--Vauriat. This is the sort of experience that, rightly or wrongly, powerfully imprints upon our minds. It would be difficult for Michel to believe that there was nothing to orthoteny after that. Well, maybe I'll go along with him in just this instance. Maybe we've had occasional straight-line UFO displays on our planet. The larger claims elude me. I am sure that if we mapped all the UFO occurrences with an ink dot, the map, on almost any scale, would be black. So such alleged orthotenies must be defended by other criteria than that we can draw some straight lines through points. At a minimum they need to be a) date-restricted, b) location-restricted, and c) actually predict something. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This was the time period when the young and naive Carl Sagan made what I call "Sagan's Error". FSR blared: "SPACE BEINGS HAVE VISITED EARTH: U.S.A. astronomer's belief". [NICAP's UFO Investigator had just published this and FSR handed it on]. Reporting on Sagan's address to the American Rocket Society, Sagan was quoted as believing that highly advanced extraterrestrials flooded the universe and have been around "out there" for a very long time. Worse, "The Earth may have been visited many times by various galactic civilizations and a base may be maintained for such visits. The hidden side of the Moon, he said, would be a reasonable location." Unfortunately our boy Carl didn't realize that he was living in an unreasonable micro-culture. Sagan paid for these remarks for a very long time [you will remember that I wrote a little about this earlier in a post]. This "payment" was plenty enough to turn him to the most dangerous public debunker of UFOs in the world. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------What follows is a set of remarks which have a spiritual rather than anomalistic/UFOlogical intent. Skip on by this if such subjects irritate you--but it is my blog so I'm motivated to say something which is vaguely related to this. ------- I was told some of the story of Sagan's plight after his blunders by his boss at Cornell, Yervant Terzian. Terzian at the time was vice president of the open-minded Society for Scientific Exploration. He was very mismatched with the organization and probably only was there because he was a good friend of Peter Sturrock [one of the really good guys in the anomalies business and a preternaturally good diplomat]. Terzian himself though seemed to be ultra-right conservative establishment and believed, as far as I could tell, in nothing that you could not hit him in the face with. [he ultimately went back to Cornell, gave a horribly biased interview on UFOS {mocking them}, and finally resigned from his office in SSE]. At one meeting Terzian told me of how "Carl has made some mistakes" and has had to do a lot of work to repair his standing as a "rational" member of the scientific tribe [these last are my way of phrasing it not Terzian's]. Because the topic was of interest, I spent some time at a dinner table with him and others. Perhaps it was the wine, but he became melancholy. Someone, a female member, asked him how he felt his life was going, or some such deep question, and he said, with no joy or humor, that it was hard, as one approached ones latter years and realized that in the end nothing really mattered [i.e. that the universe was meaningless and so, thereby, in the big picture, was ones own life]. I'd heard a scientist [who also believed in nothing] speak this frankly once before, but the experience was no less chilling [and pathetic]. Terzian had given a review paper talk on the nature of Time at this symposium [Peter diplomatically awarded an unofficial "prize" for best paper to his non-believing friend] but even Terzian looked like he was embarrassed. The paper was competent, hyper-conservative, and frankly stunk. It offered no imagination, no soaring vision of the possible, no attempt to relate to anything that SSE was about. I asked him a question about a prominent physicist's concept of a black hole-assisted bending of space so as possibly to allow movement in the temporal direction, and he snickered it away with: "he's just fooling around". But he was being true to his nature of believing in nothing. Walking up a San Francisco street to a good Chinese restaurant, I asked him about Michael Papagiannis' ideas about solar system SETI. His disrespectful [of Papagiannis] remark was emotional ["what's he ever accomplished!!"]. Wow. I will tell you one thing which Michael Papagiannis accomplished: as he moved towards retirement, he began to take regular time off to visit a local [to Boston] monastery. He would sit in the garden and meditate on God's creation and the "other side" of reality: the Spiritual. He would meet a religious friend from the monastery and they would walk and discuss the larger world. Michael Papagiannis smiled when he thought of the universe. Yervant Terzian did not. Michael Papagiannis was, we know, engaged in the Big Study. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Well, back to a smaller topic: UFOs. A few cases from these numbers, just to appease your hunger for strangeness: FSR was running several articles on Italian cases. They reached back to 1950 and the Abbiate Guazzone incident of Bruno Facchini. Some people like this case even today, but I'll plead too much personal ignorance and just give you FSRs description. At about 10pm Facchini was returning home after a big storm. He is on foot. There seemed to be a "sputtering of sparks" in his field. Thinking it was storm phenomena of some kind, he went to investigate. Instead he sees a dark mass hanging in the air. He approaches. The thing is round and has a hatchway descending from it. A humanoid seemed to be engaged in something like welding on the side of the machine. It had a tight fitting overall and a helmet. Three other similarly suited humanoids then came walking around the object. Facchini, now right up to the craft, asked if he could do anything to help [obviously thinking that this was some kind of repair on a piece of military technology.] The humanoid's guttural reply startled him and he stumbled into a jet of compressed air which knocked him down. All the humanoids entered the craft and it rose rapidly and disappeared into the blackness of the night. ------- that is how FSR reported things from one reporter, but the story had more. The witness told others that he panicked and began to run, and was knocked down by a lightbeam from an object aimed at him by one of the occupants. He also said that he returned to the spot with police and found a set of four indentations in a six-foot square pattern and a circular burned area. Some metal fragments were found at the site, taken by the police, and sent to a university for analysis [an analysis of which I can find no report. That's Facchini and a metal fragment in the picture above]. Bowen apparently knew of the rest of this incident's details, as he mentioned these Italian cases as showing hostility in his time-travel article. Well, it's your call.-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------OK, here's another: January 1963 in the evening, Durban, South Africa. Four adults were enjoying a night at the beach when they saw lights coming from the east. The lights were like large bright stars and flying in formation. The formations were columns formed into squares, one much larger than the other [think of a square of 6x6 lights followed by one of 4x4---we don't have the exact numbers as the things wowed the witnesses and flew fast]. When they seemed to reach a central point over the bay, they turned and flew away towards the south. The soundless swerving course change stunned everyone.----------------------------------------------------------------------------------Last one: really Out Proctor now. A mother and her two grown children [ages 25 and 20] observed a silvery disk zig-zagging in the sky prior to retiring for bed that evening. At 3am the daughter was awakened by her room suddenly becoming extremely cold. A green light came through her window. Through the open window she saw a being which seemed transparent and fuzzily becoming corporeal. It was inside the room; big and bald and menacing. She screamed. Her mother woke and saw the thing and promptly fainted, falling on the floor. Her brother rushed into the room, saw the thing bathed in greenish light, but now dimming, fading, getting smaller and passing out of the window. Its last moment of existence was a tiny flash of light like a TV set going out. This unnerved everyone and they moved out of town. Doubtless property values fell all over Verona, Italy. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Waveney Girvan [not the guy in the picture] said something in one of his editorials that is so simply profound that it's pure Mountain William. Referring to a skeptic who "debunked" a photo case, Girvan said this: when a skeptic throws a dustbin lid into the air and photographs it, what he proves is that dustbin lids can be thrown into the air and photographed. This is a possibility which we would have thought needed no demonstration. ------ Ha! And right on, Mr. Girvan.

The Michelin UFOnauts: Extraterrestrials or Tired Ghosts?

I suppose that the pun is unforgivable but some things have an unopposable force to them. I just couldn't face FSR for a few days and rummaged through my latest mailing from home to myself, and there was my Michelin Man file, so what-the-heck? This small pile of cases is just big enough to be intriguing [rather than tossed to the side as idiosyncratic random imagery]. But, fair warning, I have never been able to get any handle on its interpretation. Why would someone report a UFOnaut looking like the Michelin Man made out of white tires? And worse, why would several people do so? The Michelin Man himself had already had a long and somewhat affectionate history in France dating back to the late 1800s. The statue above is of that early era. Known as "Bibendum" ["drinker" of nails, glass, and other tire-rending road debris], he was a friendly folk character in French culture for decades. Then, once UFOs came along, he began to shuffle right out of them and into a different folklore. A weird feature [to me] of the whacky world of UFOlogy, I can only collect my little pile of cases and leave it to you folks to explain it to me. So, here goes. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The earliest date claimed [in my set] for a Bibendum showing is 1950. This report is of a young girl and her father in Vaux-en-Dieulet, France, which was not made public until 1980. The object was a transparent disk within which was a small being looking like Bibendum. It had a round helmet with tubes and air[?] tanks attached. The girl felt paralyzed.-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Date two is 1954 from Mauberge or Auberge, France. A husband and wife were driving when they encountered a "fat shell" sitting in the road. Getting out of it was a 4-foot tall Bibendum. The couple just raced by. I have not been able to determine when this case was actually reported.------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Date three is 1955 from Dinan, France. Here a single witness on foot outside his home was paralyzed by two Bibenda exiting a large domed disk near his courtyard. They wore boxes on their chests and walked awkwardly. This case seems to have been reported in 1970. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Date four is 1960 from Jerez de la Frontera, Spain. The Bibenda here are the ones represented by the drawing that accompanies this section. Here a motorcyclist saw two beings near the road ahead, one very tall [between 6 and 7 feet] and one nearer normal size. They were colored red and walked as if injured. No craft was seen. This case was reported in 1980. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date five is 1962 or 1963. It was not reported until 2009. Here in Newbury, Berkshire, UK a single witness saw a very tall Bibendum walking up the slope of a nearby road. No craft was seen. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Date six is 1967. Here a couple was driving to Pierre Buffiere, France, when they saw a 3 foot tall Bibendum standing by the roadside. It waved at them and floated away. No craft was seen. I have not been able to find when this was reported. -------------------------------------------------------------------------Date seven is 1968. I would not be surprised if this is not the actual first reported Bibendum case [reported the same year]. The drawing accompanying this section is from the witness. On La Plaine des Cafres, Isle de Reunion, The witness saw a disk or egg-shaped craft with pedestal like formations on bottom and top, parked in his field. Within the large transparent bay window were two Bibenda about 3 1/2 feet tall. This case was reported to the gendarmerie immediately [which gives it a lot more standing in my eyes]. The site was not inspected until several days later, and showed an increase in radioactivity signature at that time [but mild]. In search of theories about this group of cases one should consider the possibility that this IS the original case, and some of the others are imitative contaminants. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Date eight is 1972, Buenos Aires, Argentina. This case was also reported within a short period of time to the witness' credit. The event was preceded by a failure in his transistor radio. A brightly lit object hung humming overhead. It was a domed disk. In the dome were two windows wherein showed the occupants. Two Bibenda of undeterminable size were at the controls. They had helmets and tubes going into a box on their backs. The description was quite elaborate and gives me pause as it was sent by the case investigator directly to Hynek to send on to the National Inquirer's board of UFO cases to see if it could win a best case award. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date nine is 1974, Saint Nizier en Moucherville, France. Once again, I have no way of knowing when the case actually was reported. This case is a teaser as the only brief description that I have says that three independent motorists were involved. The tease says that they saw a small Bibendum standing beside the road, who went up to one motorist and knocked on her window and ran into the bushes. No craft was seen.----------------------------------------------------------------------------------Date ten is 1975 and back to Reunion Island. This case was also reported right after it happened. And it was reported to the gendarmerie. Here a 20 year old male was jogging home when he encountered a round disk-like craft with a top dome. It appeared metallic. Just earlier, but some distance away, he had begun to hear "beeps" in his ears, which grew increasingly loud just before seeing the object. He felt forced to stop and a great heat enveloped him. He felt as if he were paralyzed. Then he saw the craft and from it, descending on a short set of steps, was a 3 foot tall Bibendum. It was followed by a second and a third. They had antennas on their heads and walked awkwardly. Through a porthole in the device was seen a fourth being in a helmet. The man was thrown to the ground with a flash of light and the beings hurriedly re-entered their vehicle and departed. He lay on the ground for a while and then struggled to his parents home where the story was told. His parents and the police verified the state that he was in even a couple of days later. Again the case is single witness but a bit better than usual. The alternative hypothesis would be a mental breakdown with imagery fueled by knowing of the Reunion case years previously.-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Date eleven is 1976, Liria, Spain. In this incident a couple was driving between Liria and Olocau when they approached a something-or-other standing by the roadside. It was of average height and seemed more of a silhouette than a normal entity. Its "suit" was dark, not white, but otherwise having the rolled layers of a Bibendum. It had two lights mounted on either side of the top of its head. No face could be ascertained. It did not walk about, but bobbled a bit, floating in the air. As they drove by, the couple's car's lighting system dimmed. They reported seeing a bright oval light source a few hundred yards earlier off the road, which some would count as connecting the case to a seen UFO.------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Date twelve is also 1976 and from Western Kansas. This thing is very different in a lot of ways. It is a US case, and it happens to have a huge case file. It was published in CUFOS' IUR [volume 1, #2, November 1976], and must have made Allen Hynek both very intrigued and very nervous. In the incident a young couple was driving in a rural area when they saw a group of three flying disks, then a group of four, and then one which came much lower. Betty and Barney Hill-like, they then found themselves driving 90 miles further down the road with no intervening memories. Hypnosis was used with each of the couple separately, and it was claimed that testimonies matched even in detail. Three Bibenda [about 5 1/2 foot tall] were seen on the craft during an abduction-type experience. [The illustration for this section is the witness drawing]. Later they found "needle-marks" on their bodies along with scratches and a rash. The couple think that they became "telepathically-sensitive" after this experience. Well, we're either "All-The-Way-Fool" or "out Proctor" on this one, and each of us will decide. We are extremely dependent on the quality of the case researcher on this and I have no insight on that. The researcher, Richard Sigismonde, apparently wowed Hynek with this as Hynek began speaking of the case immediately in talks he was giving at the time. Knowing Hynek's predilection for undervaluing the ETH to the advantage of the paranormal, one suspects that he thought that our Bibenda were of the "parallel psychic reality" kind. So, for Allen, perhaps the "Tired Ghosts" they were..----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date thirteen might not be a legitimate Bibendum. It is 1977, Tucson, Arizona, and a favorite case of mine. I never thought of it as a Michelin Man until I saw someone referring to it so. [Drawing at the left]. Here we have a very good pair of witnesses and a very high strangeness miniature floating capsule craft containing a smallish chubby being in an overinflated suit and helmet. Folks can find whether they are "splitters" or "lumpers" as to whether they think that this belongs in the Bibendum pile. Love the case; don't believe it's Bibendum. The picture of the middle-aged woman walking beneath the object trying to reach up and touch it, is charmingly vivid in my mind.-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Date fourteen is 1979, Schoonaarde, Belgium. Again, I have no information on when it was reported, though now that we're beyond the "image-maker" cases that isn't of great importance anymore. Here two youngish boys [10 and 13], saw a domed disk land in a field, and from it came two Bibenda. They puttered about the grounds, re-entered and took off.-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To the left is a crude table about the case pile. I find it difficult to see a dominant pattern. The large majority of incidents are from French-speaking areas, natural [?] for a French iconic figure. Almost all the entities are "small" in the 3 to 4 1/2 foot range. In three of the four cases where the Bibenda were said to be average to tall, no craft was seen. Only Goodland [Western Kansas] is "off" as to that. Almost all Bibenda prefer a disk saucer usually with a dome. The case which I guess to be foundational [Plaine des Cafres] adds spectacular pedestals to its structure but is still a disk. One must wonder, I believe, if no Bibendum case really existed until Plaine des Cafres was widely published [in Luminieres Dans La Nuit, and then FSR]. The bottom line on this for me is indistinct but must include the feeling that the description of a UFO entity wearing rolls of white puffy layers as clothing is weird indeed, and if any of the non-French cases are "imagery-unpolluted" by them, that would make a strong argument for some kind of objective reality to those cases. But the cases pile is too much of a mess for me to be able to make any judgement on "imagery independence", and so I'll remain in my ignorance as to whether this is a solid UFO-related phenomenon or not.------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Bibendum was a happy sort of chap, maybe a good candidate for a mischievous elf. He was also, by name, a heavy drinker. But I don't believe that you can get too intoxicated drinking glass shards or rusty nails---wait a minute---"rusty nails?" John Keel, are you still out there?