DATA-NET & Others: 1970 was a very bad UFO year ... or WAS it??

As I've been trudging through DATA-NET, it has been dawning on me that I am in one of the sparsest years in the UFO history annals. The era just post-Colorado is infamous for being "low-grade ore", despite having a lot of investigator interest [with MUFON just starting and Hynek rounding up his Invisible College.] So.... how bad really was this year??

Glancing at my list of cases in my files back home in Michigan, yes, the numbers do seem to be down, though not catastrophically so. Looking at the number of cases that came to John Timmerman that I used for the Grass Roots UFOs book... yep, same thing. Less numbers. Were the cases themselves of lower quality??

I don't think that you could say that. The illustration above is of the famous Haderslev, Denmark policeman encounter. [ the Maarup case]. This was one of the first cases in which the UFO community was struck by the "impossible" telescopic light [extendible/retractible] emission of some of these things. "Solid Light" some named it. Sort of the macroscopic predecessor of Darth Vader's light saber. DATA-NET had several entries about this, including a second encounter by Maarup in which he got a series of [as usual, not very helpful] pictures of another object up the road [different night]. A poor-quality filmstrip of those shots is below left.

As I wandered through DATA-NETs year, I came across five instances of what the witnesses thought was "instant vanishment". Unfortunately, these represented lighted objects at night which just seemed to turn off, which therefore might be exactly what they did, but the witnesses seemed to think that whatever it was just wasn't there any longer. These sudden disappearances took place in Lemoore, CA; Walthamstow, UK; District Huambo, Angola; Murray Hills, Ontario; and New Milton, UK. Another case from Renmark, South Australia, probably was just a fancied-up flare.

There were several other cases of very peculiar light. Arles, France emitted "spirals" of light [patently abnormal for what should be a radiant phenomenon]. Knoxville, TN emitted "streamers" of light, and several independent witnesses gave wildly different descriptions of the object. Chicoutimi, Quebec displayed a hovering machine with four "arms" [landing pods??] in the middle of which extended a telescopic light beam. These games with Light are features which immediately remove the incidents from terrestrial high-technology and put them far up on the strangeness scale.-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Several "odd" things were reported further as the DATA-NET survey went on. One was the Pell City, AL cylinders case. [The cylinder on the left isn't meant to illustrate it, but it's an entertaining artwork].

A husband and wife were driving between Pell City and Leeds when they saw a cylinder with flattened ends in the sky. It was a solid-looking white color. It moved east to west when another one appeared in the west moving towards it. That one altered its course to approach the former head-on. When they "collided" [actually it was just like a "touch"], the cylinder coming from the west just disappeared, leaving the first cylinder continuing on it's westward journey. This is one of those UFO cases where one just throws up ones hands and moves on.

A few more, not quite so strange: Kristiansand, Norway--- A chauffeur was driving when he became dazzled by a blinding light and stopped his car. Getting out, he saw a ball of fire coming at him about thirty feet from the ground. It stopped directly in front of his car. [well, I take it back; this one IS strange]. Suddenly he was hit by some projection of force and knocked down. Shortly he heard the crash of glass, his windowshield. He got up in time to see the fireball speeding away. He said that it was 60' in diameter. As he described the thing, it was clear that he was discussing a DISK of fire about 9-10 feet thick diminishing to a thin edge. It even had a tower on top and an opening in the bottom.

Cholla Bay, Mexico--- The witness was strolling on the beach when a light was seen coming across towards him. The light turned out to be a "saucer". No noise. Dead calm night and water. The thing hovered about 200-300 feet up. It then switched on a broad lightbeam which it could control to become pencil sharp at the point where it touched the surface. Then for no seeable reason a cloud formed around the craft. The beam shut off and another shot upwards from the top. It moved away slowly, being seen by a fisherman as it did so. Other green lights gave it an eerie glow as it left.

Compton, South Australia--- Witnesses saw a brightly lit object four nights in a row. On one evening the thing was surrounded by red rays all about as it hovered near the ground. On another night the thing seemed actually to land. In the night between, a neighbor of the original witness attempted to phone out to another neighbor [presumably to tell them to come out and watch]. Just as the last number would be dialed [several times], the light would mischievously go out.

Vader, WA--- mysterious big footprints. Uh oh..... On both sides of a weekend in December, a family had weird experiences. On the Friday there were large [15"] footprints through the snow all over. Gravel was pushed down by the weight. On the following Monday, they and a neighbor saw a domed disk in the sky. Later in the week the lady and her kids were spooked by a dark shape in their bedrooms and fled the house with the children. On returning the rooms looked rifled but nothing was stolen. ?What to make of any of that?

Toiyabe National Forest, CA--- One of the lead persons in the DATA-NET HQ was on a trip camping and talked with a forest ranger at his look-out station in the forest. This fellow was on record as saying that he had seen a very large cigar-shaped object discharging smaller disks. Other rangers had called in confirming this. When asked by the DATA-NET guy later, the ranger completely backed off, saying that he couldn't say anything about it. Pressed further, he seemed about to say something several times, but ended up with "I could lose my job". However, he himself pressed the UFOlogist for information about cases, especially landings. The DATA-NET guy asked him if he had seen occupants. He hesitated and said "we are under strict orders to say nothing". Shortly a voice of a buddy in another room interrupted with: "Yes, you have said too much. You always talk too much anyway". Finally, in a last private moment he said: "I know damn well they are real".

This brought back memories of the forest rangers in the Washington State forests [Yakima]. They when they were willing to talk, had countless high strangeness tales to tell. Do the UFOs spend special interests in the deep woods? If so, Why??

I decided to look at some of the other cases in 1970 as well. My own files are a bit slight of numbers there but still contain >50 cases of which I find >30 pretty interesting. One of the most outstanding, which has been mentioned in this blog earlier, and which was also mentioned briefly in DATA-NET, is the Doreen Kendall [pictured at left; the case is pictured above] encounter from Cowichan, British Columbia. This is an outstanding CE3 incident wherein a nurse at a hospital saw a domed disk with a transparent bubble and entities inside "pause and display" itself outside the facility window. This pause-for-effect business reminds me of the Moreland incident in Blenheim, NZ with approximately the same appearing craft. The fact that other staff members saw the craft as it moved away makes this a powerful and puzzling CE3; maybe one of the best.

Other 1970 cases which one might want to look up are Namdalen, Norway [with a strong OZ effect], Itataia, Brazil [a CE2electromagnetic and physiological case], Jabrielles-les-Bordes, France [a very close encounter CE2physiological/paralysis case], Wild-&-Wooly Imjarvi, Finland [skiers confronted by craft, extremely strange light phenomena, and weird entity], Helleland, Norway [with a close fly-over and partial car-lift], the Saladare, Ethiopia Marauding fireball, which we looked at not long ago here, and a handful of Spanish landings.

A case worth singling out, since we haven't before, was the Lake Anten, Sweden incident.

The Lake Anten incident is probably one of the better CE2trace cases.What we have here is a case of multiple independent witnesses seeing a maneuvering red globe of light [forward and back horizontally, up and down vertically], which seemed to drop low towards the ground as well. None of these witnesses were very close to the thing, but there were 13 of them in three different viewing angles.

The morning following the sighting several people went over to the area where the object seemed to come close to the ground, and discovered a ground trace looking like three burnt circular depressions in an equilateral triangle about ?* inches on a side. The picture above is of the area. The diagram that I saw seems screwed up. {?*}Numbers of diameters of the marks [40cm] and the side of triangle measurements don't jibe. I'm going to crudely eyeball the side dimension at about ten feet.

The investigators were on site pretty quickly and they did a good Scandinavian-quality report. They took soil samples and gave them over to an institution for nuclear chemistry to test. The test graph is on the left. The soil from the ground marks showed a weak but definite gamma radiation peak at 660kev [the graph here reads "600kev", but the UFOlogist who typed in the number seems to have blown that, as the words in the report say 660.] The nuclear tester hypothesized that this was from the decay of a Barium isotope, which was formed from a Cerium-137 unstable isotope. No chemical analysis of elements [looking for Cerium] was stated though that would have been a good thing to do. Whatever...the radiation signal here is a rare thing in UFOlogy, and makes the hoax concept a less viable solution to the case.

Just for the fun of it, I decided to look for 1970 cases in the Timmerman files from Grass-Roots UFOs. Again 1970 was down in numbers and I used very few of those 27 {?} cases in the book. The reason for the "?" is that some cases were definitely stated to be 1970, and some stated things like "1970 or 1971". In my counts of cases by year, I gave all such things "1/2" a case credit. Anyway, there was an encounter from Sterling, IL where a young boy was out playing and a small rocket about as big as he was came slowly cruising by. Naturally fascinated, he grabbed on to it trying to hold it back and wrestle it to the ground. The rocket was impervious to his efforts and continued its very slow pace [him hanging on valiantly] until he realized that he was doing no good, and he released his hands.

In Grand Island, NE area a husband and wife were driving on a road with a little elevation alongside a valley. Out in the dark valley they could see car tail-lights going across on some other road. But there was also a "shouldn't-be-there" curtain of reddish light that hung down across the valley towards which the automobile tail-lights were heading. Mystified, the couple watched the lights drive right into the Red Veil, but not come out the other side.

In Baltic, SD a woman was awakened at about two am by a whirring sound outside her window. She courageously got her dog and went out to survey the grounds. Then, from an unseeable source somewhere above her, came strange uninterpretable sounds, but like someone talking to her. This really terrified her and she brazened it out, but was walking extra fast back to her front door and inside the house. Then another voice erupted which she didn't believe was directed at her but at the first voice. "Just giving that one guy heck, probably for scaring me out of there".

Furnace Creek, CA --- the case I call "Don't make the Ball mad!"

Two young men in their twenties were walking back to the small house they roomed in while working on the staff of a desert hotel. Their shift had ended at 2:30am. They saw a cactus-like shape off the left side of the road, where nothing should have been. Then there was a green flash without sound. Then it flashed again. Then once more.

This was getting freaky. A red ball of light appeared fifteen feet behind them. It floated about at head height and was the size of a beachball. They ran.

The BALL followed. One man fell, scraped his knee, scrambled up and followed the other into their house where they slammed the door.

The BALL stopped at the boundary of their yard and waited. It pulsed. When it grew large it would be transparent and faint. When it shrank it would get to the size of a grapefruit and blaze so brightly that it lit up the mountainside behind it. This red light was so strong that it made the dust particles in the air inside their house sparkle, adding a fairy-like eeriness to the experience.

Now inside and with a closed door, macho behavior began to return. One guy said: "why don't you go out and try to communicate with them?" The other guy replied:" why don't YOU? You're bigger than me." What was going on in the second guy's mind was that the Thing was getting impatient with them staying inside.

After four minutes of waiting, the BALL backed away. Across the road, it began creating a vortex at the base of the hill.

"The rocks started rising in the air...They'd shake from side to side. There were hundreds of them, the largest being the size of melons. They started going around in a circle, like it had complete control over them. Then the thing went way up in the air and it looked kind of like a tornado and it was all red. The only noise that you could hear was this clickety clack clickety clack when the rocks hit together."

Then the light went out and everything crashed down the mountainside and onto the road. The BALL blinked back on again at the top of the mountain and meandered away.

One of the men spent a sleepless night staring out from the bedcovers. The other spent it staring out the window. The next day both of them quit their jobs and got out of there. Hard to criticize that particular reason for unemployment.

So, was 1970 a bad UFO year? Not, I guess, if you were listening in to the whole world, and not just the USA scene.

But if you were so stupid as to make the BALL mad, it could have been a VERY bad year.