GLASSBORO, NJ UFO Event {?} 9/4/1964: What a Mess!

How to fall into a morass: I'm sitting here with low energy, low incentive to really "get at" anything, but don't want to completely "old man" the day and just take a nap. Solution? I think that I'll just do something semi-mindless, not quite the boredom of simple filing, but close. Why not grab a bunch of case files, go through them sort-of-rapidly, and log whether they're any good or not? Great plan. I gather up 50 or so of the "CE2-everything else" files [my designator for CE2s which are not primarily landing marks/traces, nor electromagnetic affects, not physiological effects, but have something pretty physical about them nevertheless --- most of these are claimed crashes, leftover debris, angelhair et al, mass displacement like the lifting of something, etc.]

So, I'm merrily about 25-30 cases into it when up comes a file with an FSR article claiming "little white spheroids" left in piles in two cases. Really? One case is the famous Mother-of-All-Solid-Light-Cases from Trancas, Argentina, and the other is Glassboro, NJ September 4, 1964. Trancas I know a great deal about and it has become controversial. I knew really nothing about Glassboro. That, for good or ill, has changed. The Glassboro part of the FSR article was written by a Frenchman, Jean Bastide, about whom I know little. Bastide describes a meeting of two kids with hippie-like "Nordic-style" persons who lead them to a landing site {no craft there} where golfball sized powder balls are found. These balls "shrunk" over time, but were so cold to the touch that a policeman had to drop the thing immediately upon his investigation the following day. Hmmmm..... sounds pretty unlikely, but what's this all about?

So I made the mistake of reading the available source material {It took about four hours to beat the bushes to accumulate it}. At first reading, the case looks like this:

a]. kids report meeting with two guys who show them a landing site claim;
b]. kids tell Dad, who is a NICAP member, and he and they go out there the next day;
c]. Dad's fired up; gets local police out there by afternoon;
d]. Police are interested; get group out there in evening to measure site, which turns out to be a centerhole, three podmarks at distance, and eleven diskmarks surrounding the centerhole; some claims regarding metal fragments, fused sand, burnt surface, broken treelimbs are made.

e]. word gets out and tourists pour in trampling most of area;
f]. local USAF notified after trampling; they send six persons down; NICAP investigator and other UFO-interested people arrive within day of Air Force;
g]. USAF debunks; UFOlogists don't; samples allegedly being tested; two other sightings in area reported;
h]. high school kids get on the case and do a science project on it; declare it anomalous;
i].young college kid tries to sell local paper a story of how he hoaxed whole thing;
j]. police not amused; kid taken to court; pleads guilty; fined; case closed;
k]. civilian study comes in, claiming kid could not have produced tree damages;
l]. UFOlogists split on case: negative to lukewarm to positive;
m]. long time later Berthold Schwarz interviews Dad of kids; writes it up with new divergent details;
n]. Bastide reads Schwarz and buys new details and thus the FSR article;
o]. confusion reigns as to what really is documented etc.

Ouch!! What the heck is going on? Well, ready or not, I'm going to pound at this thing a little.

  The above picture is of the three local patrolmen assigned to measure "the scene of the crime" on the evening of the 5th, almost exactly 24 hours after the two kids were shown the site by the mysterious never-identified two older guys. These policemen might be the three names we know: Chief Everett Watson, Patrolman Robert Toughill, and Patrolman John Schulde of Glassboro PD. Watson came out to the site earlier with Ward Campbell, the father of the two kids, and after his initial inspection got his team to survey the situation. Their information, measurements, mapping are the only {literally} untrampled data that we have as to the ground effects. You can see the size of the center hole pretty clearly in this photo. Although NOT clear enough for US to be sure, this hole was described as a perfect circle of about 28" in diameter with relatively smooth conical sides extending 18' deep to a floor slightly less in diameter. Around this hole is a raised donut of earth about 5" high and also quite regular.  Some blackening of the sandy/clay soil can be seen scattered over the light surface, as if ejected from the middle.

Above: two slightly closer-in photos of the center hole. {I darkened the top one to try to get the detail a little clearer}. The police felt that there was evidence that sand had been fused inside the "crater", and that there were puzzling fragments of metal in there as well. Some samples of both substances were collected, both by the police and Mr. Campbell.

Patrolman Schulde made this map of his survey of the area. As you can see, situated around the center hole were eleven disk-like marks [Schulde says that these are "in the raised mound"] which stand out due to having a burnt appearance. Further away are the three "podmarks" These are at distances not quite regular, as you can read [of course, functional pod=landing devices would rarely encounter the ground at precision linear distances as their adjustment to the terrain is precisely why they are used]. Schulde says that the pod holes are about eight inches deep and formed by "depressing" the grassy area beneath. That thought needs some reflection when evaluating the hoax hypothesis.

All of that was done without any interference from public, civilian ufo, or military intrusion, since no one else knew yet. It was subsequently found that a nearby resident, Mrs. Freda DuFala, had seen a red glowing "moon" in that area on the evening of the fourth, and upon hearing of the case reported her sighting. There was another sighting in the area on the 5th, by a Mrs. Trautz. A third report was made by two girls about a sighting on the 7th. And, the press published the incident on the 6th, and spectators began, literally, trampling in on the evening of the 6th. By the 8th, about an estimated 4000 persons had visited the area.

On the 9th, the Associated Press calls McGuire AFB to inform them what's happening. McGuire sends six men down to Glassboro, a major, a captain, three sergeants, and a geology professor from Southern Connecticut College, Dr. Robert L. Brown. This is the same Robert L. Brown who was involved in that strange business of the odd spacefall in Hartford, CT, which passed through Fred Whipple's hands into the possession of T Townsend Brown, and somehow involved the NSA and anti-gravity theories. {we posted several entries on this strange affair much earlier on the blog}. Who knows what conspiracies one may wish to spin out of that. The military from McGuire were out of the base's Ground, Air Safety, and Disaster Control Office.

Once there, they went out to the site with police escort twice on the 10th. They took samples and copies of the police report. Samples were sent to Wright-Patterson for analysis, as was the report, parts of which ended up in the BlueBook microfilm. They also "discovered" bubblegum wrappers and the remains of firecrackers at the site, along with footprints of people in sneakers. Now why they thought these things significant after four days of thousands of sightseers, I'll leave for readers to speculate upon. We can only say that Robert L. Brown returned to the police station the following day to assert that "unofficially" the case was a hoax for precisely these reasons. Stranger yet, the Air Force spokesperson said that they had sent samples including "fused sand" to Wright-Patterson, apparently seeing no disconnect between supposed teen hoaxers and generating temperature to fuse the sand to a glass. Patrolman Robert Toughill, upon hearing the hoax claim, skeptically asked how then did "they" do it?

NICAP got wind of the case on the 10th and their local guy, chiropractic doctor John Pagano, went to the site on the 11th. Pagano is the same NICAP investigator who did the work on phase two of the Wanaque phenomenon as we've blogged earlier. Pagano interviewed Chief Watson, land owner Frank Sergi [who had accompanied Watson and Ward Campbell on the second earliest site visit], and Campbell himself. Sergi said that he was greatly impressed with the "perfect formation of the conical crater, AND ITS GLAZED APPEARANCE". [caps are mine]. This seemed to ensure the "fused sand" aspect of this. As Campbell was a NICAP member himself, he and Pagano went to the site for a hands-on investigation --- it's possible that that is who the people are pictured above. Chief Watson supplied Pagano/NICAP with copies of the photos of the police report, and Pagano learned of Mrs. DuFala's sighting of a red glowing object that same evening. Damages to some surrounding tree limbs were noted, and Pagano's report to NICAP was highly positive about the case.

Coincidental with the NICAP investigation was that of Alphonse Zulli. Also hearing of the case on the 10th, Zulli was very interested. And he had an unusual skill. Zulli was an expert on trees and the health and damages sustained by vegetation. He and two other people got in their car and drove to Glassboro on the 11th. They spent the whole day "in the field". Upon arriving at the scene, the three tree experts took a few ground photos {such as that at top}, but realized that the ground trampling made most investigation there fruitless. The standing trees however were above that tourist action and spoke their own story.

One of the first things that they noticed was that leaves hung charred off limbs 40 feet off the ground. A climber harvested some of these specimens and two things were found, either by immediate inspection [selective charring of some leaves rather than others] or labwork [no signs of tree disease nor insect damage]. In places tree bark was selectively charred and occasionally looked to have been blown off. No drying nor other exposure in the lab made healthy leaves turn the way these charred leaves appeared. One small pine seedling seemed to have been forcefully uprooted and the soil blown from the roots. The most damaged tree, a sassafras, had been forced partially out of the ground, its roots "sprung" from the soil. Inspecting these roots, these men estimated that about the strength of ten men [or machine equivalent] would have been necessary to haul away at this tree to spring the roots.

All of these discoveries were in their area of expertise. Getting away from that, they blew it by thinking that they'd perhaps found a fourth podmark --- this mark was later found to be an error or a hoaxed addition by someone. Back in their wheelhouse, however, they were able to measure the canopy area of the charred leaves, and estimate that it was about 30 feet in circular diameter. Zulli and associates of course hypothesized that a heated object of about 30-foot diameter had risen through this canopy causing the burn marks. NICAP saw their report ultimately, and, of course, liked it. Doubtless the Air Force did not.

Then something really unusual: high school science kids got involved ... and impressively. They, being local highschoolers, had heard about the brouhaha early in the game, but decided to wait until the crowds cleared to do their own investigation. This, they admitted, upon getting to the site on the 12th and seeing the crowd damage, was a mistake. Still, their effort was beyond admirable.

To begin with, there were lots of indications upon close unhurried inspection, to do disciplined measurements, and their survey seems to be the best that anyone took. Even the Air Force wanted a copy of their report and included the map above in their file. The kids had no hang-ups, calling the numbers as they saw them, even if they showed that there were no absolute symmetries in the array. But the most impressive thing about these kids is that they refused to stop thinking until the thinking trail dried up. They got the local soil records and compared the observations of the holes with the expected known pattern. They sampled the site in relationship with this known soil geology. They got expert geological opinion upon what they were seeing. They stated uncontrovertibly that their soil tests and observations conflicted directly with the statements by the USAF consultant Robert L. Brown. They were polite, but it amounted to: Brown was wrong. {Brown had stated that the hole contained Potassium Nitrate, a constituent of gunpowder, and therefore some hoaxer had just blown it open. The kids' nitrate tests were negative at several layers of the hole, and the only nitrate which showed was surface soil elsewhere}.

They also went at the tree phenomenon. They researched the Sassafras tree {The Air Force didn't even know what the tree was, stating it was an oak}. They consulted an expert botanist in the species and he gave them specific data for the forces needed to break such a tree in the manner it was. The estimation was a 1500 pound concentrated force load. They also noticed something no others had: one foot from the main hole's edge was a patch of moss. This moss has NO SINGED AREAS at all. Thus, whatever caused the other charring in the case was highly controlled and directional.

When they had finished their report, everyone else, Air Force, NICAP, Zulli even, should have bowed their heads in shame. THIS WAS REALLY APPLYING SCIENCE TO A CASE. Oh, and one last thing: the kids noticed that the podmarks were pressed downwards into the soil by a smooth powerful force which had a slightly rounded bottom. Roots of the surface plants had not been sheared off, but were pressed against the sides of the inner walls as the pressure came down. "Digging" these holes DID NOT happen.

Well, BRAVO --- every adult should have been kicked off the planet for their lack of performance.

So all seems going well, you say? Wrong again.....

The Air Force put out its opinion "officially" on September 30th. It said that the hole was crudely dug [false], that nitrate had been found in the center hole showing gunpowder was used [false], and that the metal fragments sent to them were nothing more than tinfoil folded up [who knows? but one wonders how Chief Watson et al were so thrilled by folded up tinfoil to suggest the USAF look into that]. The top record card shows the Air Force official conclusion of "HOAX".

All those reasons were wrong, but then the USAF lucked out. ... and the case takes a ridiculous right angle turn. Some young college clown, pictured above middle at his trial, now tried to sell a story [anonymously] to a local newspaper as to how he'd fooled everybody and faked the whole affair. He and one or two buddies had been the men who told the two kids of the UFO landing and showed them the site. They'd dug out the holes, placed a burning gob of gunpowder hanging over the center hole to produce charring and blackening of the soil, and then scattered Radium Dioxide around to make the site radioactive to clinch the UFO deal. .... great. Nothing like a complete jerk to sully a case.

Lloyd Mallan heard about this character [the local police pressured the newspaper into giving his name up and he was prosecuted for a misdemeanor], and immediately bailed on the case, writing it up as a caution to UFOlogists about clever hoaxing. Moseley and Saucer News, of course, bailed. NICAP didn't bail, but didn't peep too loudly as you can see from their mini-protest above. Dick Hall became scared of the case and didn't use it in his publications. Gordon Lore did, but barely mentions it.

IF the UFO community would have taken the original policework, the work of Zulli, and particularly that of the highschool kids into serious consideration, they would easily see that our young college idiot has A LOT of explaining to do. MUCH of his claim is obviously at odds with the facts [as another aspect: no radioactivity was measured by anybody including the Air Force]. The plant science stuff particularly gives his tale real troubles. But if HE is the hoax himself, then why would he do it?

He told the judge that he saw an opportunity to make some money the easy way for college. Well, interesting. I actually buy that. But with two add-ons: having a "plan" which includes a faked landing site, and a hope that it would grow into a local sensation allowing publication-for-profit a month or more later, is quite the stretch of my imagination. Secondly, his two anonymous friends were going to share this windfall profit? BIG BUCKS, I guess, from the local newspaper. AND --- his profit motive works just as well for a guy sitting around listening to a hullaballoo that he had nothing to do with, presenting the same opportunity.

It's tough for me to get behind this character without a lot more convincing of how he could pull it off.

So... just when I'm getting slightly comfortable with a possible understanding of this case, along comes the too-often incredible Dr. Berthold Schwarz. He rolls into a MUFON symposium in 1974 and says some pretty weird things. He says that in all the publications about Glassboro "to my knowledge some odd features were omitted". Really? And he goes on to say that the young kids didn't meet regular young men but long-haired, blonde, tall, thin, beautifully-faced men {we're in Adamski Nordic ET land here} who walked barefoot on surfaces containing gravel and broken glass. ... sheez, really?

And, there at the landing site were piles of whitish powder rolled up into golfball sized spheres. When these spheres were picked up 24 hours later by a policeman, they had to be dropped quickly for they were too cold to hold. ... good grief, I wonder how the oft-interviewed patrolmen forgot to mention THAT?

AND... it gets worse ... Schwarz knows these things because several years after the events, he, for reasons unstated, decided to look up Mr. Ward Campbell, the father of the original kids, and have a heart-to-heart about this case. Campbell then told him of blonde men and persistently cold golfballs. And one more thing: Campbell said that he had been stalked by someone. Someone would call him in his hotel rooms when he was on business travels, and quizzed about his "interests" in UFOs. This stranger would know things about him that no one should have known. Campbell was "flabbergasted and frightened". John Keel's MIBs strike again {Schwarz was, by the way a friendly associate of Keel}.

Good grief!! NOW what have I got?

Is this case a college goon's hoax? Is it a semi-normal landing trace case? Is it a Keelian Disneyland-of-the-gods case? I lean where you already know I lean. The college goon's thing doesn't match facts. The USAF's beliefs even worse. The Schwarz thing isn't in good contact with anything else in the resources. Can I subscribe it to Schwarz just being nuts?, or the Campbell guy gradually going nuts with too many UFOs to cope with?

And, on the good ole landing trace theory.... well, I don't even have a UFO.

Yeh... YOU did it, didn't you?

Peace, my friends.

Pot-Pourri: Just a Disorganized Jumble

This post is characterized by mediocrity. Mental energy is low here in Kzoo at the moment, and the infinitely-creative person, I am not. "Pace" for the blog is a bit slow [this thing averages around 80+ posts per year, and we're only at about 25 a third of the way through --- maybe there is something to Old Age]. But let's try something, and maybe there will be a light or a wonder here and there.

Grinding my way down through the last Sanderson/SITU chaotic boxes [this grind is one big reason for low energy], occasionally something pops up. One such recent popping was a handful of nine UFO case reports not seen by me, and maybe not seen by hardly any living human being for all I know. They were single report investigation sheets sent to Ivan Sanderson by John Lutz. I have a vague memory of Mr. Lutz being an active investigator in the 60s and/or 70s, but to my knowledge never knew him. He seems to have organized something called the "Odyssey Investigations Club of Baltimore", and they were doing field investigations there in the early 70s.

Here's an example of a case sheet {I've blocked the witnesses' names, as that is appropriate courtesy if one has no clear go-ahead to publicize personal information}. The "violet" writing on the sheet is my own; my quick reminder of how to ultimately folder and file the case, and whether any intirguing information is included herein. This particular case is what Hynek would have called a "daylight disk", even though it's not daylight, or a "nocturnal light", even though it's not a light. This was Allen's main classification error, and such things, day or night, should just be called "lights" or "objects". This particular "object" has decent "Credibility" in that it has two witnesses and a well-balanced interviewer, and interesting "strangeness" in that the yo-yo-shaped thing stuck around a good time, hovered, had associated lighting, AND THEN VANISHED AS IF SOMEONE TURNED OFF A LIGHT BULB.

Pretty good case, actually. The others are: one LITS; one BOLs [this could be meteoric fireball break-up]; 4 more "objects"{ one has non-inertial motion and a searchlight beam shining to ground; another blinks out when a plane approaches, but comes back on when it leaves}; and two cases hovering just at the 500-foot distance edge of what we call "close encounters". One of the near CEs seems to show non-inertial motion, and the other is a nice "double soupbowl" with portholes.

All-in-all, a nice double handful of cases from the Baltimore area between September 1971 and March 1972. One wonders: how many handfuls of investigated cases happened, were written up/ logged, and slipped into the obscurity of the complicated gloaming never to reach any UFO researcher or analyst? Hynek always worried about the 90% of UFO cases which were never reported by the observers. There is probably another significant cut out of the "10%" which WERE reported which never saw the eyes of the serious UFO community.

But, pot-pourri it is today, so onto to something else .... maybe.

I was sitting around like a wimp feeling sorry for myself [all grind and no play], and decided to buy myself a couple of presents. This is an immoral act on my part, I admit, but I'm weak, and I wrote two big checks to charities to try to make up for it. One of the presents was a short run of The FOLK-LORE Journal of the British Folklore Society way back in 1883. They were, romantically, the very first seven volumes, 1883-1889. As you see in the picture, some misguided English librarian decided to discard these treasures, but some saintly old curiosity bookseller rescued them. To him I am very grateful.

So, let's pick up Volume one, 1883. There seem to be many things of interest in here, and I've not read the whole volume "by a long chalk" as the earlier Brits would say. But one article initially caught my imagination, so that I did. The article, "Kelpie Stories", by Reverend W. Gregor. The tales were surprising to me the non-expert. All the Kelpies pictured in them were horses {Predominantly} or wrinkled old men. None were Loch Ness type creatures despite modern people using "water kelpie" as a possible paranormal solution to the Nessie mess. The horses DID frequent the waters or return to them at the end of the tales, and the alternate shape of the wrinkled man gives them shape-shifting possibilities, but I expected to see some hint of a more Nessie like manifestation {like Mhorag was said to manifest at Loch Morar in the 1880s}.

Also, gremlins are at work here in Kzoo: I swear that I read a kelpie tale of the 1800s wherein the "horse" was completely helpful, even kind... BUT when I re-read the volume one tales, no such episode was there. Hmmmm..... I DID mess briefly about in one or two others of these volumes, so....

Anyway, this incident was a little more like a reality encounter so {from memory} here it is. A family had gotten down to its last shreds of food and for some reason hadn't replenished { maybe waiting for tradable crop or money from somewhere --- I don't remember if the reason was stated}. With wife and children essentially starving, the father was finally ready for his last moment trip, got the old horse out of the barn, and began the long walk to the place where he could purchase the necessary meal. This supply was very heavy, and the horse was vital.

The man goes into the building to purchase the meal. The horse, no longer seeing him, is confused, acts upon instincts, turns about and walks back home. The man emerges later with the meal sacks, can't find the horse anywhere, knows he can't get these supplies to his wife and kids, and breaks down crying.

After his sobbing lessens a bit, he looks up to see a fine horse standing nearby. It is fully accoutered to carry his load. The man walks over to it, and the horse affectionately nuzzles him. no owner ever appears. After a while, the man loads the meal sacks on the uncomplaining horse, and, uneventfully, they walk home. The man unloads his vital food supplies to the delight of his family and returns outside to the noble helper horse.

It is gone. The man hears it splashing in the nearby lake never to be seen again.

This tale interests me. It is much more an encounter tale than a moral story [although you can write anything in there that you want to}. There is a simple slice-of-life aspect about this that the other kelpie stories didn't have, emphasizing as they did killing humans in lochs or rivers by treacherous drownings, or attempts to "keep" women, or knocking people on the head "just for the fun of it". So... who knows?

By other present was a 1901 copy of Jules Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth. I'd recently seen the modern movie of this theme [bears almost zero connection to Verne's novel] and had seen the older James Mason/ Pat Boone simple/joyful/low special effects version as well.

In the modern version, there was a major plot feature that claimed that there were people who were "Vernians". These were allegedly people who believed that Verne wrote his book from actual knowledge. My first impression of that was"yeh, right", but then I remembered George Hunt Williamson, and he is exactly the sort of person incapable of distinguishing fiction from fact [remember our long excursion with GHW trying to locate Shangri-La]. If one GHW existed there must be thousands. But Vernians....?

Well, I'm about 100 pages in and it's great fun. Professor Hardwigg [not Lindenbrook] has taken inspiration from the "legendary" Icelandic scholar, Arne Saknussem, and followed his lead to an Icelandic volcano, whereupon a passage far downwards is discovered. I'll not bore you with the difficulty that putting this shaft right on the mid-Atlantic rift causes.

But Vernians....?

Vernians it appears must believe that Arne Saknussem really existed and really knew about this Icelandic passage, and somehow Verne got hold of the secret. That was when a memory gong went off. Someone DID believe that. He was a writer who published in Ivan's PURSUIT. The guy's name was Lorenzoni. In 1980 he published a short thing trying to rationalize how Saknussem could have existed, despite everyone else saying that no evidence for such a person was known. He, through arcane sources, said that someone named Gerard Heym was the leading source for Saknussem's existence and that he had told Serge Hutin that Saknussem was a prominent scientist/alchemist of the 16th century, who fell upon bad times with the protestant church and was hung in Copenhagen while all his works were publicly burned in 1573.

Well.... quite the story. Sort of like The Bermuda Triangle where all the evidence disappears. Lorenzoni then informed SITUs readers that somehow some of this information was preserved in Iceland and was used as the basis for a rare 1723 book published in France, anonymously, entitled Relation D'un Voyage Du Pole Arctique Au Pole Antarctique Par Le Centre Du Monde. It is from this book that Verne, allegedly, may have gotten "real" knowledge. Actually the above work was written by Charles T. Garnier in 1721, and published in one of several volumes under the general title of Voyages Imaginaires, Songes, Visions et Roman Cabalistiques.

Hmmm.... THAT I think was just a nice sidetrip for me on the path exploring mysteries. I can't honestly find any data to encourage the hypothesis that Arne Saknussem existed, nor that Jules Verne knew about "inside" information --- ouch! Terrible pun. I'll have to be content just to read Verne.... and that's plenty good enough.

Last in this smorgasbord: sitting outside for prayer time this morning, I saw one of the neighbors' dogs being let out of the house "to do the necessary". The dog was SO HAPPY just to run a while... just to be joyfully alive. Then shortly came the master's call and the opening of the door back inside.

The little dog went unprotestingly back... back to safety... back to warmth ... back to company and food and no fear.

We're like that little dog. If we're lucky, we let our minds run free and joyfully "outside the restricting box"... a little. Then we run back inside --- to the normal, the safe, the undebated constellation of accepted beliefs.

I have a friend who comes over regularly, running free outside his box, and wants to talk about [mainly UFOs} anomalies. But the "box" is always right there nearby. It's the fear of being fooled. When a new thought or possibility arises, he is immediately thinking of all the ways it cannot be true. He runs back inside. Occasionally we see folks even here on the Big Study who are like that --- "no fool I" --- running back to the constricting box.

We always need to critique and analyze, and when things don't add up {like Arne Saknussem}, put the failed idea to the side. But we need to do something counter-culture even more. Before the criticisms, before the absolutisms, before even the nit-picking, we need to give the ideas some air. We need, without being the fool, to try to see how something just MIGHT BE TRUE afterall. Novel ideas are fragile. They cannot survive blind aggressive assault. They must be given space. They must be allowed to fly joyfully.

It is in the Language of the Birds.

.... and who knows? In that "dark and scary" world of new thinking, YOU might even receive a Bolt of Lightning.

Peace and Joy ... spend some time outside your box.

THE SPACE GEOMETRICIANS

Suppose a very credible witness came to us and reported that a light-in-the-sky was seen behaving most peculiarly. This light at one time moved a great deal of distance, but then stopped and with sharp motions "drew" a perfectly square "flight pattern" in the air. What would a honest person think?

Perhaps the witness was screwed up in some way. But the witness was a very credible person; no hoax, no lies, no drugs likely. What explains this LITS behavior? A plane? No. There are almost no planes anywhere which could even approximate that. A balloon? The flight was so "crisp" though, and the simpler part and the geometric part so unlike. Some real fine control had to be involved. Balloon-in-the-wind is very difficult to believe, even if the balloon could somehow be controlled. Atmospheric refraction tricks Donald Menzel would say: THAT at least we KNOW is complete poppycock for a case like this, if the linear distances are significant. Menzel would keep hollering it, but that is what lunatics do. Ah, it must be Ball Lightning. Disregard the fact that it neither looks nor behaves like any reported ball lightning; somehow, despite the 4-directions geometry of the flight, this must be it. How about luminous birds? The only thing stupider that these sorts of ideas is, obviously, the person who feels that it is sensible to make a sentence incorporating them. The BEST we could do is say, we have a mystery for which it is very difficult to say anything about. Fortunately, there is no such UFO case.

But of course, there is. In fact, there ARE. Above are most of the cases in my personal files for which the title SPACE GEOMETRICIANS could be utilized. There are a few more, but that's close to the lot. If one decided to loosen up a bit on criteria for putting cases in this category, there could be many more even in my pathetically small listings here in Kalamazoo.

What does that little list above indicate? It's saying, to me anyway, that sometimes a UFO will "park" itself in midair and do something quite unexpected. It will "draw" a square in the sky, or a triangle, or a cross. It will pick something and play "ring-around-the-rosy" with it. It will make angular moves when normal flying would have smooth curves which were quite efficient for getting from one spot to the next. It would perform in linear back-and-forth bursts right before our eyes.

"Right before our eyes".......................................................

If one looks carefully at what some of the UFO case witnesses are saying, even on "uninteresting" LITS cases, peculiar elements sometimes arise. Hynek got letters like the one above, describing a 1961 incident in Millville, NJ [note that I didn't even include it in the list above], where the witness is saying stunning things in a very measured way. He seems to be describing an object which moved "normally" for a while, then went bananas: it had nearly instant acceleration bursts, seemingly right angle flightpaths, exact reversal of course, coming "to a star" [apparent line-of-sight] and drawing a right-angled "box path" around it so as to not [in apparent vision] pass over it.

As John Lennon would say: "Most peculiar, Momma". I don't believe that Allen paid too much attention at all. He DID read the report though, and included the case in The UFO Experience as a type case for "nocturnal lights". Weirdly, in his book, he cut out all the strangest motions from the witness testimony.

Hynek was aware of odd doings in the sky of this nature though. He very much liked the Deadwood, SD 1966 "Box Drawer". It too was featured in the famous book. Strangely Hynek butchers the report there. He confuses it with the Bangor, ME case of 1970, and this causes him to make a foolish statement about the case being too late for the Colorado Project, when in fact it should have been right on time. The commentary by Hynek is mixed up enough that one suspects a colossal editorial blunder of some kind --- and for this reason, the only source which is close to primary is the description in the Page/Sagan book, UFOs: A Scientific Debate where Thornton Page gives good condensed versions of cases [probably recommended to him by Hynek].

The case reports two policemen witnessing high-strangeness "flight characteristics" of three objects, the larger of which at one point draws a square in the sky. The credibility of the witnesses was considered top notch, and the report finely detailed. It was a good Sky Geometrician. .... and you can see from the diagrams from the list above that there are at least a handful+ more. John Timmerman got two of these in his "Grass Roots" years, and another comes from Amish country in NEOhio. John also got a triangle drawer, but I have fewer of the other geometric forms than I do square-makers. Cross-drawers are also a reasonable bunch, including two by John and another from Amish country. The early cases from Belgium [1931 & 1949] add another odd element, but my file on those is marginal.

Angular Flight: Many of our UFOs seem to "like" to make angular flight moves rather than just cruise along normally. Oftimes these strange moves are just one "instant darting away" or one "right angled turn", but some UFO operators seem more high-on-life and just like the Geometric Jig. In the upper witness drawing, the UFO makes at least ten moves that could be called right-angled turns, where so far as we can tell, a nice straight line would suffice. [This case is the "Ottawa River, Ontario 1960 incident" for those who have Time Travel facilities and wish to see for themselves]. This case was reported to Blue Book by two members of the Canadian military establishment.

The middle case is from Butler, PA 1953. [I've redrawn it here from the witness' black and white line drawing.] The witness was a WWII veteran. This object, which the witness felt to be only a sharply defined ball of blue-green "fire", made several stops, shifts, stops, jumps as he watched. It, unusually, also made a noise, which the witness compared to a diesel train.

The third drawing is from the report by an ex-Marine, which occurred at Camp Pendleton, CA in 1957 [this one isn't in the "master list" either]. The marine, in the company of several others, witnessed a light go across the sky in darts and stops, the stops seemingly selected to "accompany" [in apparent line of sight] any handy bright star along the way. The Marine apologized to CUFOS for not having a better sighting, like a close encounter. Hah! A UFO which "stops" at each star in its flightpath isn't interesting enough, eh? Well, I guess I'm looking at this like a neanderthal, but this sort of thing says more to me than the majority of case reports.

Do We Really Have To Hit You Right In The Face With This?: The agency behind the phenomenon must lead the Universe in face-palming frustration, or raucous mockery. Almost no strange flight characteristic is missing from the UFO case files. We have objects which individually or in groups will dance a ring around a central point or central object, will come together from disparate locations to form a geometric figure, will make rapid linear left/right sweeps right in front of a plane, will jump up and down and then pendulum swing several times, fly in show-off geometry changing formations [just as Dewey Fournet knew they did way back in 1952, but couldn't get the Robertson Panel to even discuss his findings honestly]. And.... you name it. I'll bet it's there.

The above is Dewey's "handout" that he used at the Robertson Panel to support his view that high-credibility cases describing firmly geometric flight formations and behaviors were a strong indicator of human-level intelligence [or, of course, higher]. Hurrah, Dewey!! Smart, insightful man.

And we have seen all this sort of thing before, haven't we?? We've seen what are for me the stunning astro-alignments, ... the cases which demonstrate that who/what is operating the UFO flights knows EXACTLY where the observer is in order to create a privileged viewing-point display. "They Know Where We Live" --- not necessarily the most relaxing thought.

I want to add one further thought about the space geometricians: sometimes, in their high flying, they seem to .... what to say? .... "follow" something about the space, which .... hmmmm, this is hard to phrase "softly" enough .... we cannot see, but they possibly "use" in their movement. { If so, I think that it would be something that they, or their "drive" does to normal space, and which without the presence of their influence is not "naturally" there. Maybe it even involves some dimensional mixing together to produce a "half-here/ half not here" situation in their flight. This is raw BS but the aspects that I'll mention below have some feel of this }.

There are at least a handful of cases in my files wherein the UFO not only makes a right-angled turn but shortly disappears entirely. The Ayr case on the list does this, as does [more elaborately] the Lorain case. There are others I've seen, but the one which stuck with me was a case from John Timmerman. {This is VERY POORLY drawn by me as the Torpo case on the list}. Here were two LITS moving in the same straight line across the sky for some distance. They were separated by a significant gap, but one was definitely following the leader's path. Then, the leader hit a point in the sky and its motion went right angled with no slowing. The trailer did not flinch but continued its original path UNTIL IT HIT THE SAME POINT. Then it too was suddenly moving at the same right angle following the leader. The leader went on until it hit another point, whereupon it vanished. The trailer kept coming on until it hit the same point whereupon it too vanished.

Could it be that something about how these things "fly" creates a geometry in the sky? A geometry which facilitates an unexpected least path of resistance? .... Yeh, Out Proctor definitely..... but as long as you know how Out Proctor it is, there is no harm in mentioning it. In the Nash-Fortenberry case, the train of UFOs stopped and reversed as if hitting some spot in space and "bouncing" directly away. A case called "Nahant Coast Guard Station, MA 1952" has the same characteristic.

What the aggregate of these cases show me with no remaining doubt is that the UFO phenomenon is unexplainable by mundane current-knowledge AND that the agency behind it is highly intelligent and aware of its surroundings [including we the observers].

... AND they're definitely mathematicians.

ET or Little People?? I doubt that The Magonians want to bother learning math, so my All-The-Way-Fool guess is with the guys from Tau Ceti.

Pythagoras: It's all in the Triangles.

Blessings and Peace, folks.

Another Small Matter; and The Air Force not on the Job Again

It's May 1952, and one of my favorite guys, Captain Edward Ruppelt, is on the job at Project Blue Book at Wright-Patterson AFB --- or IS he? Whatever went on with the following case, it seems to have slipped by him. It also seems to have slipped by J. Allen Hynek, who HAD to know better than what Blue Book ultimately said about the case.

Above are three of the primary documents in the case file. To me they make interesting reading. They tell of independent observations [in the San Diego area] [This is called the "National City, CA" case] by aeronautical engineers who had formed a network among themselves to try to observe UFOs and if possible triangulate one. And, in this case, this is exactly what happened.

So what exactly DID happen?

The engineers [two of the "club" members] witnessed an object, looking like a white ball of comparable starlike proportions, appear in the center of the bowl of the Big Dipper. [I could fairly easily rationalize this case as being an "astro-alignment" display incident of the "We Know Where You Live" sort.] When the ball began to move, it produced a red trail briefly. This action gave the two distantly-separated engineers a focus point to map their observations for the later triangulation.

After the trail, the object cruised in what would be a direction to the lower left corner of the Big Dipper picture above on its way to leveling off and flying over National City and southern San Diego. The triangulation measurements had an inescapable error bar considering how the measurements were made, but it wasn't terrible for these purposes. The initial observation height was 117-140 miles high. The time of descent to its approximate 10,000+ ft cruising altitude was only ten seconds until it leveled off. The rate of descent therefore was in the range of 36,000 miles per hour. This is on the low side but within thinkable range for a meteor. ... and not much else one could imagine.

Well fine.

But not fine. The "meteor" leveled off and flew a nice arcing path over National City and on to San Diego Bay. It also created no shock wave whatever, and made no sound of any kind. The engineer making the original report continued to look for the object, which he had managed to see in his telescope, and is of the belief that the same object returned from its previous course about a half hour later, making this time a full 360-degree pass over the city, and back out to the Bay.

Someone at Blue Book didn't like any of this. Despite a rather good height, speed, and deceleration estimate, and despite the lack of a shock wave, and despite the extremely low [for a meteor] leveling off and arced path, Blue Book said "meteor".

This is tough for me to understand given the sociology of the Ruppelt era. If it was George Gregory's era, this would have been standard, and the same actually for Robert Friend. But Ruppelt...? The only things that occur to me are: Saint Edward was away from his seat a lot due to all the Washington DC demands and he handed the Project over to his often clown-like non-serious underlings [If Andy Flues didn't handle a task, you couldn't count on the others, who were more like goofy frat boys a good bit of the time]. Secondly, the witnesses were not military. There was a large prejudice against civilian cases imbedded in this business.

But where was Hynek on this? Out to lunch, drinking wine, listening to classical music, and not looking at all the case files apparently.

So, was it a conspiracy? Nah, don't think so. Just our usual incompetence.

But, somewhat weirdly, something "conspiratorial" passed in front of my eyes unsought, which linked the Big Dipper/ Ursa Major to UFOs and conspiracies --- so what-the-heck, here it is.

There's apparently some guy out there who thinks that for thirty years he has been watching a constant stream of UFO Motherships entering our Solar System from the direction of Ursa Major and the Big Dipper. These persons are The Marcabian Federation [have no idea how one finds out their name --- contactee channeling?] and have basically bad intentions [conquest of Earth and all that]. Perhaps our San Diego engineer witnessed one of their earliest most overt excursions of a Marcabian Scoutship ---- I probably shouldn't say things like that, as there is bound to be some on-the-edge lunatic who will take it seriously.

Anyway ... this guy says that there is a Stargate out there pouring aliens in for the attack. The END is apparently near.

By the way, if anyone feels that there is no further reason to maintain their cash supplies, I can arrange for you to mail me a check.

.... thought not. [couldn't get any Mayan Apocalyptics to do it either.]

If I thought that there was evidence that Major Carter was on the job [unlike Blue Book], defending us from alien monstrosities, I'd begin giving the Stargate hypothesis a little credence --- interesting though as to how nowadays it is impossible for some people to maintain any separation between fact and science fiction.


Our little adventure seems to indicate that even in the best of UFO times [Ruppelt's], there were major foul-ups. And I believe that it shows us how rare a dedicated non-prejudicial military investigator like Ruppelt was. I have little doubt that if he wasn't swamped by the 1952 wave's massive proportions, stuff like what we saw today wouldn't have happened. As Dr. Frankenstein said looking at Fritz: It's hard to find good help nowadays.

Well, onwards. Upwards? I don't know .... it seems the Big Bear is coming to get us.

Peace and have some fun.

A Little Procession in the Sky

A short one here, folks, so you won't be starving for strangeness.

I was unEarthing SITU paper as usual, and the above painting showed up. I recognized it as referring to a case which had appeared in PURSUIT but this was the witness' original art and much more vivid. So, you have the pleasure of joining me as the only ones who have seen it [maybe].

The artwork represents a witnessing of a "fireball" procession in 1983 from the deck of a boat 150 miles due east of Cape May, NJ. A VERY blue ball-of-light came directly from the west and passed not quite overhead. Its path was a straight line as near as determinable. The BOL or fireball had a lightblue inner core and a darker blue outer layer. There was a long train, also blue, and what seemed to be a noticeable "wake" within that train, which also manifested a production of light colored blobs. The passage was about 8 seconds.

Well, OK. Pretty, dramatic, but "just an unusual fireball".

As the TV football guy says: " not so fast, my friend!" About 15 seconds later another one crossed the sky, this time passing directly overhead. And.... "at least a dozen more of the things flew by during a period of some ten to 15 minutes."

Hmmmm......... maybe fireballs, maybe not.

Here's a map for the case. The "fireballs" seemed to the two witnesses to be pretty identical and "flying" at about the same height. To get a rough estimate of what that height was, they noted that after they had moved one mile in the boat, the last blue BOL cruised by at a 45degree sighting angle. That makes a neat equilateral triangle and would indicate that the procession of the Blue Fireballs had taken place at about one mile high.

And given the whole observational scenario, that seems like not a bad guesstimate. ... at least for talking purposes, let's give them the grace of a pretty honest approximation here.

All this makes for a very odd group of fireballs to say the least. What are the awkward points for the hypothesis?

1). There aren't a lot of purely blue fireballs. The pretty picture above is a blue-green fireball which is much more common. Some so-called "blue" fireballs are bright white of the sort that many stargazers call "blue-white" but not a blue of the richness as this. Still, there ARE elements which COULD give you a fairly rich blue if their emission spectra were not interfered with by other burning elements [particularly emitters at the red-orange end, or any very bright emission line elsewhere]. Two such elements might be Potassium and Mercury. I'm no expert on emission spectra, but this is my understanding.

2). If there were a bunch of, say, mercury-loaded pieces of spacerock traveling together, it still beats the odds further for them to nicely space out in a straight line and cruise over New Jersey west-to-east in a remarkably ordered behavior.

3). This third thing is something I know nothing about, so I'm trusting Internet Astronomy sites for the claimed fact: fireballs are stated to burn out at about ten to twenty miles up. At that time they, in whatever fragmented form they still exist as solids, hurtle to crashes on the planet. But our witnesses got a pretty good estimate of only ONE mile. That's a big error bar to overcome.

So what did The Universe serve up to us this time? A statistics trouncing Blue Fireball procession? A set of flying BOLs threatening to crowd into the UFO file cabinets? Some Faerie Merpeople heading for Atlantis? { I like that one, but will not bet you money on it }. .... or did The Universe just shudder a little, and "stuff" slipped through from Outer You-never-see-it in the eleventh dimension?

Mystery .... what's not to love?

.... and much better than doing taxes.

Till next time... Happiness and Wonder; unEarthing the unEarthly.