Coincidence? Yep, that's the explanation.

Well, the above may be even beyond Out Proctor, but the following isn't.

Mr. Leo Chaput was a pulp mill worker and also owned a farm on Allumette Island near the town of Chapeau, Quebec. A full-time job AND a farm was plenty for anyone and all that he and his wife wanted that evening was to get some sleep. Nope. UFOs had different plans.

At 2am the family dog began a terrific racket. The barking made the Chaputs wake up and go to the window to observe the cause. Outside in their field was an intense light-broadcasting object. It was hard to see due to the blindingly bright white light which it shown on the ground from what they estimated to be no more than 15 feet from the surface. The impression of the object, as best as could be seen given the light's brilliance, was of a disk with a flat bottom from which the light emerged. Chapeau went outside then and noted that the light was casting shadows everywhere, including his own. He heard a soft "purring" sound similar to that of a quiet outdoor motor. When he averted his eyes briefly, to get some relief from the light, the UFO was gone. He heard the soft purring as if receding in the distance.

The next morning, Chaput and two of his children went into the field. What they found, approximately 600 feet from the house, were three circles of scorched/singed plants. [by the way, folks, the reporting on this case seems to have been roundly bolixed by the informant who wrote to Duplantier at Saucers, Space, & Science and even Hynek seems not to have gotten it quite right. Thankfully NICAP got direct intelligence from Canadian researcher Henry McKay, a pretty respected guy, so I'm going with their specifics.]

So... three circular burnt areas. Each of the circles was of approximately 27' in diameter. Within one circle were two small damaged trees. These were sent to the Ontario Dept. of Lands and Forests, but their report said that they could find nothing unusual about the damaged plants. I'm now going to shift to Ted Phillips as he apparently later contacted McKay and another respected Canadian UFOlogist, Brian Cannon, for more detail.

Phillips reports that the three circles were 32', 28', and 28 1/2' in diameters. The two smaller circles had [additional?] outer [annular] rings of approximately 2 1/2' --- this would make all three footprints about the same size if there was a one foot separator between the scorch mark and the annular rings, but we need a field report with drawings. Inside ring #1 were three round depression marks set in a 15'-on-a-side triangle. Inside circle #2 was the same array, but closer to 14' apart. Inside circle #3 was a 2' pile of rocks aligned 18' long. Cannon and McKay reported a small 4-5' circle with no scorching and no additional features.

All of this makes things that much weirder but I've found that this slight screwing around with patterns is so universal as to appear deliberate. This took place on May 11, 1969.

June first, 1969: The McLaren family was going about their normal business at their farm near Meath Hill near Petawawa, Quebec. The farm is a rolling property and the hilly section to the northside of Highway 17 is clearly visible from the house. When the McLaren children went out towards the road on July 2nd to catch their schoolbus, they saw a circle on the hillside which was not there the previous evening. This marking had occurred the previous night between 1am and that morning. This ring, as reported to Phillips by McKay, was an annular barren-of-plantlife circle, "embossed" into the ground. The outer diameter of the ring was 33'. The annular ring width was between 2' & 3'. Three years later that barren area was still without plant growth.

All of this is, of course, extremely peculiar. The Chaput experience seems directly caused by a "UFO" even if only one such "thing" was observed and four traces were ultimately found. No UFO was seen at Meath, but coincidence? Doesn't seem legit. Again, we are treated to four ring traces of about the same diameter, each of which is different, while two are only minorly different while two others quite changed. .... teasing. Everything about such behavior shouts "teasing" to me. But it is there that I find myself roaming Out Proctor.

Well, what the heck? With enough wandering maybe we'll get on the right track.

Peace, my friends.

Coincidence Again, and Again, and....

Off into the Out Proctor Ozone we go again. We seek new life, new civilizations, new stuff to boggle our already boggled minds. Maybe we'll be able to answer the age old question: would you rather be a mathematician or eat pie? The answer to that probably says volumes about human history.

But, on to serious matters....

It's December 10th, 1982. Weir, Lancashire, England. A husband and wife with their four-year-old son were traveling near the small village of Weir near Deerplay Moor. They saw an odd fast flashing light and stopped their car to see. It, however quickly disappeared. But now the wife saw a bright white light  directly in front of them in the distance but approaching,

As it grew nearer, the light resolved into two lights with a red rectangle between them. It's motion was peculiar. It would zig-zag but more than that it seemed to do so "in steps"--- sudden changes in direction, side-to-side and even backwards sometimes. Despite these motion peculiarities, the thing was ultimately to pass directly over their heads. It was always slow, and dead quiet. As it approached, the couple felt that they were seeing more of the object, from the "frontal" lights and red strip, to part of the arc of lights extending backwards, and finally to the whole object of two red strips connected by semi-circular bands of white lights [these were either lights packed very close together or an actual band of light]. 

While directly overhead, two white lights raced rapidly to the horizon in the direction that their slower moving visitor was heading. The lighted array seemed all one object, which they presumed to be shaped like "a rugby ball". Strangely also, the streaking small lights scared the wife and child while the big closer one did not. The family re-entered their car and left for home. The whole encounter took 8-10 minutes, and the object must have been fairly large as it seemed well below the cloud cover. 

Hmmmm.... strange days indeed.

March 22, 1983. The local [Armagh, Ireland Observatory] Astronomer skeptic was doing his preferred hobby of smearing UFOs in the papers. He was smirking about a recent case which happened at nearby Lurgan/Craigavon. 

Several witnesses had reported odd lights in the sky. Two of those witnesses decided to drive home puzzling over what they'd seen [ten red lights "swarming like bees"]. But it wasn't a completely peaceful drive. As they proceeded down this country lane, their car was "buzzed" itself and followed by an odd object. This thing didn't stop stalking them until they reached a larger road. 

What was it like? A large object [twice the size of a helicopter], with two red rectangular lights connected by semicircles of closely packed white lights. Uh oh.... 

Asked what was the object's whole shape, the guys said: it was shaped like a "rugby ball." 

No one unfortunately knew both cases so as to be able to ask the smirking anti-scientist from the observatory what he thought about that. 

I find these two more interesting than most "coincidences" because these UFO descriptions are just about unique in the literature, and they are not "simple", such that some random mental invention would be likely to come up with this sort of thing twice. 

So what have we got here? True duplicate UFO craft? Some really odd witness information deciding to use the Weir case in a hoax? Trickster working overtime for a good laugh [this was Ireland and Britain, afterall]? 

Anyway... I like the two of them. At a minimum great fun. And, probably a better than average data point that weird stuff of some sort is really going on Out Proctor. 

Peace, friends. 

Coincidence in Barbados

Yep, this one really is about Barbados. ... admit it, you always wanted to know something about Barbados.

It's October of 1980 and Allen Hynek is sitting at his desk at the Center for UFO Studies in Evanston trying to figure out the Universe. His peaceful reveries are broken by the arrival of the mail. One envelope bears a nice-looking stamp from Barbados --- doubtless some Center employee will swipe that for their stamp collection he thinks.

The letter is from a fellow astronomer, Philip A. Stahl, who resides in the division of Barbados called St. Michael [in the south central of the island.] His small observatory makes him a focus point for what is called The Barbados Astronomical Society. He has a major puzzlement that he wants Allen to solve.

Stahl had received a report that he thought remarkable enough to publish in the Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. On December 7th, 1978, a pair of adult witnesses had observed, on a well-overcast evening [no stars or Moon visible], a "large green luminous object." The thing was a very bright "ordinary" green [i.e. not lime green like the famous US Southwest Green Fireballs of 1949.] It appeared from behind one cloud bank, brightly illuminating all the clouds around it, Its size and hard-defined circularity made it just as if the Moon had turned green and was moving horizontally through the clouds. It disappeared behind another cloud bank, not to be seen again.

Well, how foolish, eh? The lady and her adult son were obviously seriously mistaken. The object surely WAS the Moon, and something about the atmosphere must have made it look green.

Nope. This lady was a founding member of the Barbados Astronomical Society, and she knew EXACTLY where the Moon would have been if you could have seen it that night. Whatever she saw, she and her Engineer son were sure that it was no Moon nor anything else they could think of.

Stahl was equally puzzled. His observatory was out observing that night and saw no Green Fireball. If there had been one, they too should have seen it. No reports anywhere in the island reached him. This was a locally limited phenomenon. Unless it was some kind of UFO, the only remaining hypothesis was a form of kugelblitz [ball lightning]. Kugelblitz usually isn't reported as brilliantly green, and especially isn't usually claimed to be that big [this would have had to be quite large to be going in and out of cloud banks looking like the apparent size of the Moon at the horizon.]

Stahl, in his paper, shook his head and punted. He said that kugelblitz was the favored hypothesis [he couldn't say "UFO" now could he?] and the distance must have been seriously misjudged --- though how excellent astronomical observers get going in and out of cloud banks wrong is "awkward".

So, the Universe punished him.

In late September 1980, he received another report.

On the 27th of September, 1980, a Queens College school teacher was picnicking on the veranda of her home. The sky was dark and overcast. That overcast blotted out the Moon and stars. [there were a few stars visible in the line of sight.] As she was staring in the direction of an old windmill on the southern end of the property, a spherical object "like a bright green headlight" descended from great height and disappeared beneath the trees standing to the windmill's left.

Ah! Another fireball no doubt. But there's a bit of a problem. She estimated the apparent size as equivalent to a 9 to 10" diameter ball held at arm's length --- try it, it's huge. It's particularly huge when you add in that the trees it disappeared behind were 100-150 meters away. At a minimum the thing would have to be wider than two+ ordinary houses. ... one heck of a fireball or a ball lightning.

So, Hynek, what's the answer?

Allen did what he always did when the going got tough....

He went to lunch.

Clearly there is one leading hypothesis...

The Moon is angry and is throwing pieces at us.

I have good Out Proctor evidence: I've seen Green Cheese --- obviously the explanation.

Peace, friends.

p.s. Marjorie Johnson's Faerie book is starting out to be very interesting reading.

Coincidence ... again.

Once more into the Once Again.

"On the night of 25 August, 1951, at my home at 2158 hours I observed for about thirty seconds an unfamiliar aircraft traveling from 10 degrees west of north in the direction of 10 degrees east of south. The rate of speed of the aircraft might have been 350 miles per hour.

"The aircraft was low enough for the neon and car lights of East Central Avenue {this is Albuquerque, NM} to be reflected from it. The altitude of the aircraft was difficult to judge.

"The type of aircraft was that of one with wings swept back 15 degrees approximately. No fuselage was visible. The wings did not appear to taper at the outer ends. At the rear edge of each of the wings at least six and possibly eight, soft, white lights were visible. These lights were round, not trailing as in jet aircraft exhausts seen at night. These lights were grouped in twos with a larger distance between the pairs than between each one in a pair. No red or green lights were visible. As the object moved further south the lights were not visible.

"The underneath surface of the wings of the aircraft appeared to have stripes running from the leading edge to the rear edge of the wings between each pair of lights. These stripes reflected the light whereas the areas between the lights did not reflect light well.

"The most outstanding feature of this observation was the fact that there was no audible sound from motors or jets. In fact the aircraft made no noise that I could hear."

Thus the formal letter to the Air Force command. Her husband wrote a letter which agreed with his wife on essentially all details.

Hmmmm...... Flying Wing or Boomerang-shaped UFO.... fall 1951....

"Can you say Lubbock??"

Despite keeping absolutely quiet about this "coincidence" {The first recorded observation of the Lubbock Lights happened four days later, and the famous pictures [above, the USAFs own copies lifted by J Allen Hynek, by the way] were taken by Carl Hart eight days later --- sightings of these lights went on all through September at least}, the USAF was VERY intrigued by the case.

The Air Force's photo of the photographer Carl Hart. He was thoroughly grilled and his pictures doubted [mainly due to believing that he couldn't have snapped them that fast and gotten a couple fairly jiggle-free.] Carl Hart maintained into his old age that he photographed exactly what appears in the pictures.

The Albuquerque witnesses of their Flying Wing basically agreed with him. When the Air Force called them back in to look at Hart's photos a week or two later [remember that the Lubbock witnesses nor Hart knew anything about the Albuquerque incident, and the Albuquerque witnesses knew nothing about Hart or his photos], they said that yes, that is very much like what they had seen, only theirs in slightly more lighted/reflected conditions.

While Texas Tech faculty deliberated over the mystery for weeks [finally going full-coward and deciding upon a howlingly stupid "natural" conclusion], the Air Force was, again in secret, being far more serious. The immediate thing which seemed as though it MIGHT explain these cases was the possibility that the Northrup Flying Wing was cruising about.

Very sensible hypothesis [if one disregards the lack of sound associated with these reports], but try as we have, there is no evidence whatever that a flying wing was any longer intact and taking some swan-song like voyages in the fall of 1951.

I'm having a hard time NOT believing this one. The "coincidence" of the earlier Albuquerque encounter is pretty powerful for me. The USAF still listed it as "unidentified" till the end of Blue Book.

As to the foolish TTech faculty: I've reported this before, but a TTech math professor, not involved with the guys in the famous picture, managed to get a crude triangulation on one overflight [he and his father-in-law from different positions] and [even with a generous error bar] was able to show that the things were high and very fast --- WAY out of the league of birds and moths who somehow could fly at supernormal speeds in tight geometric formation.

So... I'm "In" on this one.

Till next time.

Coincidence

Let's look at another coincidence....

Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, 1974.
This seems to be a fairly good case. Like the last blog's coincidence case, the witnesses are young boys, but this case is buttressed by not only instant telling of the story to their various parents, but the next day visit to the alleged landing site and the discovery there [by an independent neighbor lady] of a strange trace. The trace was ultimately tested by scientists at Simon Fraser University and the UFO fieldwork done by a veteran UFOlogist, and published in an unsung excellent UFO journal, The Canadian UFO Report. Bondarchuk, who in my mind is a pretty discriminating author, also chose to include it in his book, UFO Canada. So, credibility seems OK.

Three young boys [oldest 10] were walking with a pet cat through woods nearby their homes. The cat suddenly went bonkers, ran a few feet and then dropped down as if dead. [it wasn't; perhaps it was employing some survival instinct, or maybe it was KO'd somehow.] At this same instant the boys heard  an irritating buzzing sound.

Just above the nearby trees was a metallic circular object with red, green, and white lights flashing. As it descended, the noise was so loud that they had to cover their ears. The cat recovered about then, ran back to the boys and clawed one of them until he picked it up. [this clawing was still visible on the kid when the fieldworker investigated.] The disk wobbled as it descended and extended three "landing pods". The sand in the pit beneath it swirled violently even reaching the boys and covering them with fine debris. [this despite them being more than 100 feet away.] The kids reported seeing "blue sparks" [static electric discharge??] emerging from the ground as the thing touched down.

The kids then bolted and ran to their homes, crashing in to hysterically tell their parents what had happened. None of the parents took them seriously enough, despite the emotions, to do anything, but the next day a more supportive neighbor lady did. She went with the boys to the site and found a set of tripod indentations plus three circular deposits of chalky white, smooth-to-the-touch powdery material which, when rubbed by the fingers, numbed them. [Hip UFO researchers take note.]

As time proceeded, both Simon Fraser University and the UFO researchers were brought in. Conway [above] nailed down the various stories and witness descriptions/drawings, while the SFU scientists tested the trace soil. Bennett [above], a nuclear technician at SFU, could not explain how carbonized debris could have gotten dispersed throughout the "chalky" sample without very intensely focussed heat --- his own attempts to use similar soils and heat treatments to mimic the result failed.

The coincidence here is of course Delphos Kansas 1971. The Delphos ring trace was composed of white chalky material, smooth-to-the-touch, which was initially numbing to the fingers/skin. This effect was temporary in both cases, i.e. if you touched the material a week or so later, its ability to affect the skin had gone. But if you had touched it while "fresh", it took about a week and a half for the irritation to stop. {the lady in BC said "more than a week", while Mrs. Johnson of Delphos said "about two weeks."}

So what's up?? The Port Coquitlam has helped me take Delphos more seriously. Despite having made quite an effort to study Delphos, I've always had more reluctancy about it than most of my buddies. Why? The only real Delphos percipient, Ronnie Johnson, was not [in my opinion] at all an ideal witness {his parents only saw a distant light in the sky when he called them outside.} Because the trace testing --- the most testing done on any UFO case in history --- never seemed to definitively anchor on a solid hypothesis, I never got comfortable with what had happened.

I'd fought the Delphos thing hammer and tong to try to get a little illumination out of it. My intuitions concentrated on the mysterious numbing trace --- what chemical compound might be labile enough to be formed by odd intense radiations of some sort, then persist temporarily as an acid or caustic irritant, but, owing to its lability, disintegrate fairly rapidly in normal environmental conditions? You can see above one of my old scratch sheets with me speculating, amateurishly, on the possible formation of Oxalic Acid from amounts of CO2 and H2O under confined intense forces and "dropping" [dusting downward] from the undersurface of the Delphos craft.

I'm not goose enough to think that Port Coquitlam helps my Oxalic Acid theory, but it may well move Delphos itself closer to full believability. So, possibly, is the value of noticing "coincidence."

Till next one. Peace.

A Quick Notice of a Coincidence, plus a little news.

Hello after a while. I thought I'd drop back in here and post a small something.

But first some near-trivial news: a]. The City of Kalamazoo has deigned to approve the building permit for my "new digs" extension to the big old house I've purchased, and the excavator has dug an impressive hole. Foundation settings and concrete pouring are next. The relevance of this to this blog is that I, frankly, needed to start feeling a little more upbeat about something to regain the energy to bother to background check things for posting --- as I don't want to inflict shallow crap on you if I can avoid it. Well, as you know, psychology is an element in "feeling good" and a simple hole in the ground can paradoxically lift one's spirit. I'm a bit more likely to read-and-write now that life seems to be moving again.

b]. A good British colleague, "Dr. Beachcombing", has sent me one electronic book on Faerie [a mutual interest], and has arranged for a publisher to send me another one as a review copy. As the existence or not of "folkloric entities" seems to be one of the things that continues to interest me, these two books might result in blog postings in the future. I'm hoping so.

Now on to a small bit of Anomalia....

What I might do for a little while is post a few short bloggings about coincidences that I stumbled across during the big scanning project. These posts are going to be "short subjects" but hopefully mildly amusing. Depending how one responds to coincidences, some might even be thought-provoking.

This first foray involves a case from Bangor, WA [at a Naval Submarine Base] in 1989. The case is OK. Although it involved two young boys, it was reported quickly to Bob Gribble and a very good researcher, Don Johnson, did the casework. Don did the first contact just one day after the encounter.

The kids were playing at the Base's playground swings equipment, when they saw "a big circular object" hovering over the nearby house, shine a beam down towards it, then move over their own heads [altitude only around 20-40 feet over the house; a little higher for them.] The thing then shown a beam directly down at them. The "craft" had windows/doors in which the boys saw two beings quite clearly and in detail. It stayed there a few minutes and then moved away. The boys then broke their fascination and ran frightened back inside one of their homes.

The mother had the boys draw what they had seen immediately, both craft and beings. When the other boy went to his home, his Mom did the same there. Details continued to match. Johnson's investigation uncovered the additional item that the downward beam seemed to be applying some lift to the swing set upon which the boys were sitting. It seems to have been a "solid light" beam.

Above is the composite sketch of what the boys said that the occupants looked like. Hip followers of UFO cases probably know what I thought of when I looked at this drawing. 

These are the earliest sketches of The famous Kelly-Hopkinsville beings from the 1955 encounter in Kentucky. Kelly-Hopkinsville has always stood as an outlier to me due to the quite different appearance of the beings reported at the time [and there's no UFO]. "They don't fit." But they are quite a bit like the Bangor WA incident. ... and that is, of course, the coincidence.

The meaning? Too much to ask. But for me it slightly disturbed my UFO Universe, because I have never considered Kelly-Hopkinsville a UFO case. I've for years thought of it as a Folkloric Entity case, and in my own reveries refer to it as "Kelly-Hobgoblinsville."

But now this darned Bangor thing with a very UFO looking craft hanging around.

The boys described the beings in what seems to be taller terms that the 1955 group, but not really definitively so when you read both cases. Bangor seems over six feet, whereas Kelly seems more like 5+ feet. Both sets of critters were very big-headed, very large pointed-eared, naked, and significantly smaller as you went down the bodies. The boys said that they thought that their beings had "greenish fur" [quite short according to the sketches], while the Kelly creatures have been described as having a glowing light green aura about them. Bangor was in the day, Kelly at night.

... so, confusion for me. The easiest thing would be for me to either reject Bangor [I find it hard to just toss Kelly out], or keep Kelly as folkloric and Bangor as an outlier UFO encounter whose beings are "just a coincidence."

What to do?

Agatha Christie is, of course, sane and wise. Keep the "coincidence", it can't hurt if you don't take it too seriously. Maybe the Universe IS speaking curiously to us. Maybe the UFOnauts know all about Kelly and decided to do what they do best: muddy the waters. Maybe it's the Trickster at it again.

Well, at least we know it's not this guy....