NOT FROM HERE VOLUME FOUR
Selected UFO Articles
CONTENTS
Introduction…4
Chapter One: UFO Car-Lift Cases…11
Chapter Two: Independence Day Encounters…37
Chapter Three: I Crashed into a UFO…65
Chapter Four: UFOs over Airports…93
Chapter Five: ETs and Fertilizer…117
Chapter Six: When Abductees Levitate…129
Chapter Seven: I Punched a Gray in the Face…143
Chapter Eight: Extraterrestrial Hitchhikers…155
Chapter Nine: Those Dam UFOs…175
Chapter Ten: Take Me to Your Leader…195
Epilogue…216
Sources…219
About the Author…234
About the Artist…235
Books by Preston Dennett…236
Introduction
Welcome to the fourth volume of Not from Here. As with the other books in this series, volume four explores the stranger and more unusual aspects of the UFO phenomenon. Once again, my goal is to present a broad spectrum of UFO accounts, providing the reader with cases covering the entire gamut of the phenomenon.
This book, however, has a unique feature that none of the other previous volumes have. Some of the chapters in this book are brand new and never before published. The previous volumes were drawn from the more than 100 articles I have written over thirty-five years of UFO research. This book contains mostly new and original material. Only five of the chapters were previously published as articles, and all of them have been expanded to more than twice their original size.
I’m particularly proud of the Not from Here volumes because they contain information and cases that are little known, difficult to find, and often defy the standard model of contact. Each chapter provides unique insights into the nature and origin of the UFO phenomenon. They each reveal aspects of the UFO phenomenon that have never been fully explored before.
One type of UFO behavior that is well-known is the UFO-car chase. For some weird reason, UFOs love to chase cars down highways. However, sometimes this behavior reaches a whole new level. Chapter One, UFO Car-Lift Cases, presents one of the rarest types of UFO-car encounters. In these cases, people driving along a highway (usually at night) observe a UFO which swoops down and actually pulls their car up into the sky, sometimes only a few feet off the road, sometimes much higher. It’s a bizarre aspect of UFO behavior that has baffled ufologists for decades. Why are UFOs lifting cars up into the sky? An analysis of the cases sheds some light on this mysterious behavior.
What is the most likely day to see a UFO in the United States? The answer may surprise you: July 4th! Each year on Independence Day, millions of people flock outside to watch fireworks. And every July 4th, there is a huge spike of UFO sightings. According to the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) and the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC,) the most common day to see a UFO is on July 4th. Chapter Two, Independence Day Encounters, takes a closer look at UFOs seen on the fourth of July. Why are there so many sightings on this day? Are people just seeing fireworks or sky-lanterns? Or are they seeing actual UFOs? The answers may surprise you.
It might be the rarest type of UFO encounter of all -- a collision with a UFO. This is a category of cases unlike any other. Not just a sighting or a landing, or an onboard encounter, but something else entirely. And there are far more cases like this than you might realize. Chapter Three, I Crashed into a UFO, is a collection of cases in which planes, trains, automobiles, and even boats, have collided into a UFO (or an actual extraterrestrial,) sometimes with far-reaching consequences.
Many years ago, I wrote a small article for Uncensored UFO Reports magazine featuring a series of encounters over Los Angeles International Airport. I was stunned to find so many encounters over such an unlikely location. I did a brief survey of the literature and was surprised to find a few other cases over various airports, which I also included. But after the article was published, more cases continued to occur. When the very famous Chicago O’Hare Airport case occurred in 2006, I really began to wonder if there were more cases out there. So, digging deeper, I was shocked to find that in fact, there were dozens of cases, not only involving sightings, but also landings and humanoids. Chapter Four, UFOs over Airports, presents an impressive number of cases that I think will shock both enthusiasts and veteran researchers. There must be a reason for the huge number of encounters at airports, and a review of these very special cases just might provide the answer.
In keeping with the theme of these volumes and their focus on the most bizarre types of UFO cases, outlying accounts that reveal startling patterns of UFO activity, Chapter Five, ETs and Fertilizer presents cases in which fertilizer plays a significant role. Weird, right? Who knew? But apparently, this is a thing! And these cases reveal an undeniable association, and once again, show an aspect of UFO encounters that has never been fully explored.
There are many unusual aftereffects of a UFO encounter. Some people experience nightmares and PTSD. Some people experience a profound psychic and spiritual awakening. Most people experience a dramatic adjustment to their worldview. Among the rarest and strangest aftereffects is spontaneous human levitation. It doesn’t happen a lot, but when it does, the results are truly fantastic. Chapter Six, When Abductees Levitate, explores cases involving this bizarre aftereffect, and shows just how powerfully transformative a UFO encounter can be.
Waking up in the middle of the night to see a gray alien lurking in your bedroom can be an utterly terrifying experience. And sometimes people react with acts of shocking violence. Chapter Seven, I Punched a Gray in the Face, presents cases in which people have reacted violently to a face-to-face encounter with an alien. What happens when you punch a gray? These cases provide a fascinating glimpse into this very unusual type of encounter, and have some important things to say about gray extraterrestrials.
Stranded without a vehicle or any other resources, people across the world have resorted to hitchhiking to reach their destinations. This unique aspect of human culture has resulted in a wide variety of unusual encounters, some romantic, some heroic, some paranormal, and some downright horrific. What many people don’t realize, however, is that there are a good number of cases involving what appears to be extraterrestrials! Chapter Eight, Extraterrestrial Hitchhikers, presents ten astonishing and bizarre accounts in which people have picked up innocent-looking hitchhikers, only to discover that these strangers were not human! This unique category of UFO encounters reveals how truly strange the UFO phenomenon can be. You might never look at hitchhiking the same way ever again.
UFOs are known to be disproportionally attracted to certain areas. Schoolyards, drive-in movie theaters, cemeteries, rocket launches, prisons, factories, nuclear power stations, military bases, graveyards…all are known to attract UFOs. Most of these locations have been profiled in earlier volumes of the Not from Here series or my other books. And of course, an earlier chapter in this book explores one powerful attractor: airports. But there are others. Among the most powerful of all UFO attractors are dams. This of course also involves reservoirs and often hydroelectric power plants. Chapter Nine: Those Dam UFOs, presents more than thirty cases of UFOs hovering over dams. And not only hovering, but landing, sending down beams of light, diving into and out of the water, causing power failures and more. In some cases, humanoids are seen. The dramatic nature of these encounters shows that ETs are, in fact, keeping very close tabs on the progress of human technology and use of power.
One of the most common questions people ask about UFOs and extraterrestrials is: why don’t UFOs just land on the White House lawn and say, “Take me to your leader!” Well, as it turns out, this sort of thing has nearly happened many times. The tenth and final chapter in the book, Take Me to Your Leader, presents a list of very highly-placed government officials who have gone on record about seeing a UFO with their own eyes. Governors, mayors, senators, representatives, presidents, heads of state…all have seen UFOs, not only in the United States, but across the world. Many of our world leaders have had encounters with UFOs. The disclosure movement is leading to huge revelations and exposing the fact that our leaders may know more about this phenomenon than they have publicly revealed.
Ten chapters, fully sourced and footnoted, each revealing different and unusual aspects of UFO behavior, each exposing the extraterrestrial agenda on our planet, each illustrated by award-winning UFO artist, Kesara, and each with a special Behind the Scenes section talking about how these chapters came to be written. Each chapter is both topical, covering a highly specific category of encounter, and also chronological, taking the reader on a journey through time, showing how the UFO phenomenon and our perception of it has evolved from early history to the present day.
The UFO phenomenon remains one of the most perplexing and persistent mysteries of modern times. However, each encounter brings us a greater understanding of the meaning of the ET presence on Earth.
With the recent Pentagon disclosures and U.S. Congressional Hearings about UFOs, the subject is enjoying a huge surge in popularity. For the first time, the U.S. government has officially recognized UFOs as a real phenomenon, even going so far as to state that they may be extraterrestrial in origin. While they still refused to admit that the UFO crash at Roswell, New Mexico is real, or that people are being taken onboard these craft and meeting extraterrestrials face-to-face, the small steps they have taken toward disclosure are unprecedented.
UFO organizations like MUFON (the Mutual UFO Network) and NUFORC (the National UFO Reporting Center) are receiving a growing number of reports. More and more television programs are featuring the subject. There are now hundreds upon hundreds of radio shows and podcasts talking about all aspects of UFOs. The ridicule and disbelief that has plagued this subject for more than seventy years is quickly fading away.
It is a new age for ufology. New laws are being passed. New government UFO study groups are being formed. Governments across the world are opening their formerly confidential databases.
The mainstream news regularly features current sightings and encounters. The books featuring this subject are being published at record levels. The internet is exploding with UFO information, with Facebook groups, Instagram, Twitter and other platforms growing at exponential rates.
No longer can skeptics deny the reality of the extraterrestrial presence on this planet. The evidence speaks for itself. Eyewitness testimonies, photographs and films, landing trace cases, electromagnetic effects, physiological effect cases (including both injuries and healings,) animal reaction cases, “angel hair” emissions from UFO craft, implant-removal cases -- all have come together to provide conclusive evidence for the reality of UFOs.
The tireless work of UFO researchers is finally being rewarded. Humanity is quickly waking up to the idea that we are not alone in this universe.
And yet, there is still work to be done. This subject is conspicuously absent from history books. It is not being taught in schools. The UFO cover-up may be crumbling, but it is still active. And there are still many unanswered questions regarding the nature and origin of UFOs and extraterrestrials.
And so the research continues.
The cases in this book are among the strangest on record, and they also reveal some startling truths. So, get ready as we dive deep into the heart of the UFO phenomenon and explore these new and fantastic avenues of research into extraterrestrial contact.
Chapter One
UFO Car-Lift Cases
UFOs often behave in ways that can only be described as bizarre. One type of behavior that is familiar to most UFO investigators are UFO-car chases. In case after case, UFOs will approach a car driving down a remote highway late at night and chase them down the road. As frightening as this might be, the UFOs’ fascination with harassing drivers does not end there. There’s another type of behavior that goes far beyond just chasing a car. Sometimes UFOs will actually pull the car off the road and suck it up into the sky. These are known as “car-lift” cases.
Some of these cases involve apparent abductions. Others, however, involve no apparent missing time or abduction. For some reason, the UFO occupants just pull the car up, float it around and then set it back down, leaving the people in the car bewildered and more than a little frightened. The question is, why? Are they just trying to scare people? Are they pulling some sort of practical joke?
The best way to get some answers is to examine the cases.
There are many accounts in the UFO literature in which UFOs have been reported to levitate vehicles. The following early case is a particularly unusual example. It took place in the fall of 1959. Three friends (all teenagers) had left their homes in Hollywood, California and ended up in Goldfield, south of Tonopah. One of the witnesses, fourteen-year-old Bradley X. (not his real name) had also brought along his girlfriend.
Bradley writes that they had pulled off the highway and their pickup became stuck in the sand. Attempts to extricate themselves only ended up burying the truck more deeply, until it was buried up to its hubcaps. The teenagers spent the next few hours trying to dig themselves out, but the sand was too deep. They decided that one of them would have to walk out in the morning and they resigned themselves to spending the night in the desert.
The four of them sat in the truck star-gazing and talking when the conversation eventually turned to flying saucers. Bradley’s girlfriend said, “Let’s see if we can contact a saucer to help us.”
Only half-seriously and not expecting anything to happen, Bradley and his girlfriend “started trying to telepathically contact a saucer.”
Writes Bradley, “Not long afterwards we all saw a light approaching. I don’t know the direction it came from. It looked just like a bright star, except it was moving towards us. It got much brighter as it drew overhead…At that moment we felt the truck move. It rose straight up in the air about a foot or two off the ground, floated to the middle of the road, and gently set down. Then the light moved back in the direction it came from and blinked out.”
At the time, Bradley recalls that they all screamed in fear and left the area. However, forty years later he was able to contact his former girlfriend. Writes Bradley, “The first thing she said was, ‘What do you remember about that night?’ We agreed on all the details except I remembered screaming and she remembered laughing.”
While the case does admittedly have fantastic features, the witnesses have sought no publicity and insisted upon remaining anonymous. Nor did they report the sighting until many years later. And it’s certainly not the only case like it.
A particularly terrifying car-lift incident occurred less than two years later, during daylight hours in January of 1961. Mr. Adolfo Paolini Pisano, a government topographer, was driving his jeep alone on the Andean Highway outside of La Victoria in Merida, Venezuela. Pisano had just slowed down and allowed a truck to pass him when a metallic disc with a polished steel-blue color swooped down from the sky, sweeping only a few feet above the hood of the truck ahead of him, and then took off upward. As it sped away, a cloud of dust was lifted from the ground, and the truck itself rose up a few feet into the air and was pulled in the direction of the disc for a few seconds, and then crashed down, overturning onto a sandbank on the right side of the road.
The driver of the truck crawled out of his overturned vehicle. He escaped with only a few scratches, cuts and bumps, but was in a state of nervous shock. The incident was reported to the Venezuelan National Guard, who kept the incident confidential. Pisano also remained silent at first, but later felt that the case was important, and decided to report it to UFO researchers.
Following the above incidents, car-lift cases began to occur with increasing regularity. Four years later, one evening in September 1965, Mrs. A.V. of Brussels, Belgium was driving home on a small road -- a route she traveled twice daily to and from her place of employment. She was traveling just under sixty mph, and was negotiating a curve in the road when the steering wheel suddenly seemed to malfunction, turning from left to right for no apparent reason. She assumed she had a flat tire and tried to slow down.
Instead, the car inexplicably rose several inches off the ground. At the same time, a small glowing light appeared only a few inches from the right side of her windshield, then quickly moved to the center, where it remained. The light was yellow, tube-shaped and about twenty-seven inches long and one or two inches in diameter.
The steering wheel stopped wobbling, and Mrs. A.V. had no control over her vehicle. Instead, the car seemed to float on a cushion of air. The car flew through the air for about 150 feet when the light disappeared and the car was set back on the road. Mrs. A.V. immediately regained control of her vehicle. Badly shaken, she drove straight home.
She was too upset to even tell her husband what happened until about three days later. Hours after the incident, she noticed peculiar markings on the top side of her wrist, where she had been most heavily exposed to the strange yellow light. The marks looked like tiny pinpricks, red, blue and black in color. The marks were sharply outlined, and itched in the manner of a first-degree burn. They disappeared in one week.
Mrs. A.V. noticed no other effects, until about two years later, when one of the “burn” marks on her wrist spontaneously appeared, and again disappeared in about a week.
Following this, Mrs. A.V. completely forgot the incident until years later, when she woke up in bed and saw a similar yellowish light glowing at the foot of her bed. Next to the light, Mrs. A.V. saw her daughter standing there, unmoving. As her daughter was not home at the time, Mrs. A.V. was unable to account for her appearance. Following this incident Mrs. A.V. recalled the first incident during which her car was lifted off the highway by the strange light. More paranormal incidents followed and she was eventually put in touch with investigators, Emile Techeur and Jean-Luc Vertongen, who researched her case. But why her car was lifted off the road was never explained.
Two months later, on December 20, 1965, fifteen-year-old Edward Bruns from Herman, Minnesota experienced a harrowing car-lift incident. It was just before midnight, and Edward was only two miles from his home when he saw a bright light ahead of him on the road. It hovered about six feet above the highway and covered the entire width of the road.
Edward was driving a pick-up truck heading west, and as he approached the object, his car engine failed and the headlights went out.
At this point, the object glowed red and sparks came out from underneath. Edward saw what appeared to be a human-like figure in the interior of the object.
The object then began to rise up. To Edward’s amazement, his pick-up truck promptly floated up off the road, rising along with the flying saucer. The interior of his vehicle filled with red light.
The next thing Edward knew, his car had been turned around 180 degrees, and was now facing north, lodged into a ditch on the opposite side of the road. Terrified, Edward fled the vehicle and ran the remaining two miles home.
Edward told his father what happened. They returned together to the scene, and examined the area with flashlights. Edward’s father was amazed to see that there were no tire tracks surrounding the truck. It looked as though it had been deposited there from above, exactly as his son had described. The next morning, they examined the area again, and confirmed that there were no tire-tracks.
Another early case was investigated by famed researcher Don Worley. Throughout her life, Martha Carnes (a 56-year-old nursing home worker) had experienced many UFO encounters and paranormal events. But what occurred on December 8, 1967 was among the strangest. On that evening, just after midnight, she was driving down Chicken Run Road near her home in Madison, Indiana. Suddenly a strange orange, glowing, bowl-shaped craft appeared, following her car from above.
This was not the first time this happened. Twice earlier in November of that year, the same craft had followed her car for several miles. Now, here it was again. This time, however, was different.
It came right over her car and suddenly grabbed it, pulling it into the air. Martha heard a loud humming sound. A strange odor filled the air, and she felt a “stinging” sensation on her skin. An unseen force paralyzed her body so that she was unable to even turn her head. It felt as if the car was being sucked up into a tunnel. She could no longer feel the road at all. She wondered if she might be having a seizure when suddenly, she felt the car tires hit the road and her car rolled to a stop.
Martha sat there stunned. Her head, neck and spine were all painful and swollen. She felt hot flashes and bright spots of light swam before her eyes. Also, her bra was now too tight.
Dazed and disoriented, she somehow drove home. When she arrived, she saw that her 1967 Buick, less than a year old, now had a sheen of solid rust on it. It wasn’t long before more damage became apparent. All the car windows now leaked, the water hose burst, and both the battery and the radio quit working. Martha now feels she was abducted. She later had further encounters.
On February 18, 1969, schoolteacher Barbara Smythe was driving to school in Craigmyle, Alberta, Canada and saw a glowing red object with two white lights. It appeared to be about forty feet in diameter or more. The object, which had been hovering, began to move. Immediately, Smythe’s car began “floating.” The car seemed to levitate for about three minutes or one full mile, during which Smythe felt entranced. At this point, the object disappeared and Smythe found herself driving along the road normally.
About two years later, on the evening of May 24, 1971 also in Alberta, a Blackfeet Native American couple, Mr. & Mrs. Raw Eater drove along a bumpy, unpaved road through their Reservation. Without warning, their car was struck on the right side by a bright beam of light coming from above. Mrs. Raw Eater cried out, “The car has left the ground!”
For the next quarter mile, the car flew about two feet above the road at about forty-three mph. During this time, the Raw Eaters were unable to control their vehicle. The brilliant light then disappeared, the car was placed back on the road, and the terrified couple continued their interrupted journey. They reported no physical effects to their car or themselves.
Another dramatic case occurred in November 1973, in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Says the witness: “My husband at the time and I left a party of athletes and their girlfriends or wives. They were drinking [and] the party got too wild for us. Another couple asked if they could ride home with us. The couple said they didn't like the wild party either. None of us four were drinking or smoking pot as the others were. We left in our car. My husband [was] driving and I [was] in the front seat and the other couple in the back seat. We were driving toward home on a four-lane highway. All of a sudden, the car started being pulled up and dropped over and over again. I thought my husband might be fooling around. I told him to stop doing that and he took his hand off the wheel and said, ‘The car cut off. It's dead.’ That is when I noted that the car was not on. There was a white light over us with no noise and it was large, hovering and casting a large light over us and on the highway. We were scared, yelling and holding on to each other. The car lifted up and dropped over and over. I was terrified, as was everyone else. I don't remember much of anything after that, although I think I should remember more. All I remember after that was the car started up and the light lifted up and over us and disappeared without a sound. It appeared to be a saucer shape, just lit up white. I was three months or so pregnant at the time with my now forty-year-old daughter.”
On February 14, 1974, two brothers (both businessmen) were driving a rented U-Haul truck to move their parents’ furniture from Idaho to California. At around 4:15 a.m., they were driving on Highway 93 about fifty-five miles north of Ely, Nevada. Suddenly the first brother, “Chuck,” (pseudonym) who was driving, observed four luminous bluish-green objects flying in a row at a low elevation to the right. One of the objects was flickering on and off.
Chuck turned to his brother, “Dave” (pseudonym) who was asleep in the front passenger seat. “Wake up!” he shouted, and told him that they were being followed by a UFO.
Dave, who was tired, didn’t open his eyes and said, “You’re crazy. I want to sleep.”
Chuck kept his silence, and continued driving while the strange objects paced their vehicle. After a few minutes, one of the objects zoomed forward about a mile ahead, crossed the road from right to left, and then hovered at an altitude of ten feet, waiting for the truck to catch up.
Seeing what was happening, Chuck again shook his brother and said, “Hurry up, wake up, fast! Get up! I want you to see what’s going on here. What is this?” Dave finally woke up. Looking outside, he was shocked to see the strange lights.
As the brothers approached the hovering light on the left, it suddenly transformed into a bright “orange, luminous ball.”
Says Dave, “At that moment, it felt like we had been hit by a blast of wind or force field…it felt to me like a blast of wind hit the back of the truck and it felt like it just picked it up and we were like floating…I was sitting there in the right-hand side of the seat watching him and he just kept going like this with the truck and he couldn’t steer it. He didn’t have control of the truck.”
Says Chuck, who was now struggling to regain control of his vehicle, “The only thing I can compare it with is if you take a curve or something on ice, how the truck sways from one side to the other…This is how it felt to me. But at the same time, the lights were flickering off and on, the motor was missing and I was losing power. I kept my foot on the gas, and I was losing power. Now, I want to tell you that what it felt like to me was that I was actually floating…It [the truck] was floating slightly off the highway in the air. None of the wheels were touching the highway.”
Dave confirms his brother’s testimony: “The lights on the truck flickered on and off and the engine started to miss…he [Chuck] lost control of the truck and couldn’t steer it. I told him to stop, and then before we could stop, the transmission selector jumped out of ‘drive’ into ‘neutral,’ and we coasted to a stop.”
At this point, the orange luminous ball had disappeared. Dave got out and inspected the undercarriage of the truck. He was shocked to see that the drive-shaft was still spinning, even though the truck was in neutral and not moving. He then got back in the truck, which was still running.
At this point, the brothers saw a large silver-colored object shaped like a “ball with a dome on top and sharp wings” floating over a hill to their left. However, they were more concerned about what they now saw ahead of them: another extremely brilliantly lit object, landed in the center of the road. Says Chuck, “I saw down the road in front of us a light that covered the whole road -- just a big, big, bright luminous light…It was something that was just enormous in size.”
He turned to Dave and said, “What in the hell is that?”
Chuck shook his head, “Uh-oh, they’re playing games with us.” Chuck had the sudden strong impression that “they were coming to get us.”
At this point, the brothers became too frightened to pay attention to the other objects around them. Their main concern was the giant UFO that was landed 150 yards on the road ahead of them, blocking their way.
Dave jumped out of the car and blinked a flashlight at the slowly approaching object, which responded by moving towards their truck.
“Dave!” Chuck screamed. “Get back in the truck!”
Dave, “fearing for my life,” jumped back in the vehicle and with his brother, watched in terror as the object approached. As he says, “We felt that we were in a vacuum of some kind and isolated from the rest of the world…You felt like you were trapped, in other words. Couldn’t go back, couldn’t go forward, the truck wouldn’t move, you were just sitting there waiting for something to change.”
The face-off lasted for several minutes. Dave noticed that strange spears of light were coming off the object, which had an outline of reddish light on the top.
Before the object approached any further, it suddenly disappeared. As Chuck says, “…it just seemed as though -- I don’t know -- it disappeared. Something came by us real fast.”
Neither brother could describe exactly how the object left, just that it disappeared swiftly. Both were very relieved. The brothers estimate that the encounter lasted about twenty minutes. Afterwards, their U-Haul truck remained completely disabled, so they were forced to flag down another driver who took them into town.
The brothers contacted the local U-Haul station owner who replaced the truck and then returned to the scene to retrieve the stranded vehicle. The owner of the station had heard the brothers’ story and was amazed to find that the truck had been severely damaged by the encounter. As he says, “The back axle was twisted right off.” He said that the driveshaft had been welded into the rear end. When they tried to haul the truck away on a tow-truck, said the owner, “…the rear wheels just fell right off! Those men stopped that truck just in time.” The truck ended up needing new tires, a new rear axle, new outside housing and gears. These facts were later verified by UFO investigators.
Both brothers were severely traumatized by the incident. Says Dave, “It took about thirty days for it to sink in my mind that I really saw it.”
It was a warm September day in 1974. An anonymous farmer was driving his pickup, and had just approached his home in the town of Hobbs, New Mexico. At that moment, a huge “disc-shaped” object descended over the fields about 500 feet over his barn, and almost directly above the farmer. Amazed, the farmer leaned out of his window and looked up at the object.
Watching from the farmer’s home were his wife, daughter and a neighbor. Writes Leonard Stringfield, who first revealed the case, “Suddenly, before their eyes, the pickup truck with the farmer in it was lifted vertically from the ground and vanished into the underbelly of the disc. Hysterically, the farmer’s wife called the police.”
The unfortunate farmer, however, was not returned by the UFO, and was never seen again. Despite the fantastic nature of this case, Stringfield says that it came from a reliable source. Writes Stringfield, “The facts of this case, still incomplete, are in the confidential files of the International UFO Registry. The investigator in this case, a radio newsman, prefers anonymity. Through a good source he got the basic information about the incident from an officer only on the basis that the names and most of the data be kept confidential until the victim was found, dead or alive.” In this case, the car-lift was obviously an abduction. However, in other cases, the car is simply lifted up and placed back down on the highway.
HERE'S AN EXCERPT OF CHAPTER TWO: INDEPENDENCE DAY ENCOUNTERS
An examination of popular UFO reporting centers such as NUFORC and MUFON shows that UFOs are reported every single day of the year. However, there are a few days when reporting a UFO becomes problematic. For example: April Fools’ Day. If you see a UFO on April 1, there is a good chance that nobody will believe you! Another highly questionable day to see a UFO is Independence Day. If you see a UFO on July 4th, people often assume that you must have seen fireworks.
Interestingly, and perhaps not surprisingly, the Fourth of July does, in fact, produce a disproportionally large number of UFO reports. As it turns out, according to the reports made to NUFORC, for the last ten years, the month of July is the most common month to see a UFO. Likewise, the single most common day to see a UFO in July is on, guess what day: July Fourth!
The number of cases on this day is truly incredible. Could it be that people are actually seeing fireworks? Or is this day truly a UFO magnet? And if so, why?
Several thousand cases were reviewed for this chapter. It quickly became very clear that there are two main types of cases. The first type involves anomalous lights, orbs in particular, and usually described as red, orange, amber, yellow or white, sometimes fiery. The size is usually described as small, with distance hard to determine. It was the movement, however, that gave it away.
In case after case, people describe glowing orbs that hover in place, or move slowly across the sky, often in a straight line, or sometimes with a wobbling movement and occasional changes in direction. Typically, multiple orbs are seen, usually all traveling in the same direction. Some describe triangular patterns, or what appears to be a shifting, playful movement among the orbs. In most cases, the orbs are seen for only a few minutes before suddenly winking out or moving away. Virtually no witnesses report hearing any sound whatsoever.
Of the thousands of cases examined for this chapter, the vast majority, about eighty percent or more, involve these glowing orbs. The witnesses are sometimes convinced they are viewing extraterrestrial spacecraft that have come to view the fireworks display. Despite the belief of many of the witnesses, it appears very likely that most of the glowing orbs seen on the Fourth of July are probably sky lanterns.
Also called party lanterns, Chinese lanterns, Japanese lanterns, sky candles…these so-called “UFOs” are actually a small candle inside a carefully designed paper balloon. The party lanterns range in size from one to about four feet in diameter. The hot air generated by the candle causes the lantern to rise. It glows with a beautiful red-orange-yellow light (depending on the lantern) and can reach altitudes of up to 5000 feet.
As I waded through the cases, most described some variation of a glowing red-orange orb of light. The color can also be influenced by the color of the paper lanterns themselves, which come in a wide variety of vivid hues. They are easy to launch and can travel for many miles. Although they are not large, they can be seen from many miles away. From a distance, they appear as vivid glowing orbs of light. Because they can only carry a very small candle, the wax quickly burns. They last for only ten or fifteen minutes before burning out.
Depending on wind patterns, sky lanterns can appear to hover in place, travel swiftly across the sky, turn sharply and travel in different directions, and fly in ways that are clearly unlike a normal aircraft. Most of the descriptions of UFOs seen on the Fourth of July match this behavior. While some of these might be actual UFOs, they have the appearance and movement of sky-lanterns.
So, while the Fourth of July does generate the most UFO reports of any other day, most are apparently not extraterrestrial or certainly not provable as such.
None of those are presented here. Instead, this chapter is about a different and much more interesting type of sighting.
The second category involves objects or crafts, often described as structured, hovering in place, darting rapidly, accelerating or showing other non-conventional movements. While these cases are far less common than the first category, there are enough of them to raise the strong probability that at least some of the UFOs seen on Independence Day are, in fact, genuine UFOs, and that UFOs are, as the witnesses attest, there to watch the fireworks show.
Do fireworks actually attract UFOs? Let us examine some of the Fourth of July cases that rise above the rest.
On July 4, 1963, an anonymous gentleman was with a group of young boys watching a fireworks show on the grounds of the Starmount Forest County Club in Greensboro, North Carolina. While watching the fireworks, his attention was diverted to a very strange-looking saucer-shaped object. It glowed orange and had a row of about thirty small red lights along the circumference.
“When I saw this UFO, I was with a group of boys,” the witness says. “We were watching fireworks, which were to our east. I noticed the UFO to the north, but said nothing to no one. I observed it for two minutes as it moved silently eastward, then suddenly reversed direction as it picked up speed. Then assuming its original course once again, it moved slowly upwards and out of sight. It was very large, and was yellow or orange, with a row of red lights at its perimeter. The sky was clear, and somewhat lit up from the fireworks. The UFO was about a mile away, at treetop level. I don’t claim that the UFO was extraterrestrial, but its size and pattern of flight would suggest that it was not a conventional craft.”
The witness was so convinced of the object’s strangeness that he reported the sighting to the Air Force’s Project Blue Book, providing a detailed report and drawings. According to the witness, it moved in a zigzag pattern before accelerating out of sight.
On July 4, 1965, thirteen-year-old “Katherine” was with her friends at a farm in Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York to watch the fireworks. The weather was stormy, with thunder and lightning. The instant the fireworks began, Katherine was shocked to see something else in the sky. “There was a tremendous flash of lightning at the same time a firework went off in the sky,” says Katherine. “I looked up and saw an absolutely huge saucer-shaped object sitting right over the ‘mountain’ we were next to.”
The ‘mountain’ was really just a large hill known as “Round Top.” Katherine had hiked to the top before, as it offered a good view of the local Hudson Valley. The object hung directly over this hill, not far away from where they were.
“It was huge,” says Katherine. “…It was hanging there, not moving at all. There was what I thought to be a window which wrapped all the way around the saucer, which was opaque. There were no panes in the windows, or any kinds of divisions…but there was an orange strobe-type light which went around the inside of the window in a rotating or pulsing fashion. After I looked up and saw the craft, I looked at it briefly, turned my head away, looked back up, and it was gone.”
Katherine and her friends were shocked and frightened. “After seeing the object,” says Katherine, “my friends and I all, almost at the same time, decided it was time to leave the area, although we really didn’t discuss what we had seen. Come to think of it, this topic was never discussed amongst us in any of the remaining years we were together. At the age of thirteen, I was pretty unnerved by what I had seen, and had to walk home alone. Needless to say, I ran most of the way. When I got home, I told my mom and dad what I had seen, but they didn’t believe me…”
Although many other people must have seen the object, Katherine never heard anyone else ever talk about it.
On July 4, 1968, “Jessica” and her future husband were dating and driving around looking for a place to watch the fireworks in their home town of Arlington, Massachusetts. “But we saw something we didn’t expect,” writes Jessica. “It was a curved string of lights, set on an angle, just above the rooftops, and it was moving uphill at the same speed that we were. It popped in and out of view as it went behind the tops of trees and houses along the street. Then it began to pick up speed. So, we accelerated until we were going seventy mph…uphill. Then it went faster and faster until we couldn’t keep up, and it disappeared.”
Jessica was the only witness as her boyfriend was driving and had to keep his eyes on the road. Still, Jessica is convinced she saw a genuine UFO. “I saw something very odd,” she says.
On July 4, 1971, “Steve” and his girlfriend hoped to see the fireworks celebration over a lake near their home in Liberal, Kansas. Unfortunately, the walk to the lake took longer than they expected and by the time they arrived, the fireworks show had just finished. People were getting ready to depart and the fire department was securing the area. Steve and his girlfriend may have missed the fireworks, but they were just in time for another show.
“We, along with numerous kids and adults were about to leave when a cigar-shaped object with shining, multicolored lights underneath appeared over the lake,” Steve says. “It hovered for what seemed like fifteen or twenty minutes very low over the small lake.”
All the witnesses who were still there remained to watch the craft until suddenly, someone exploded a loud M80 firecracker. At that moment the object left. Says Steve, “The object raised up a few feet, and then swish, it was gone.”
On July 4, 1972, “Beth” was in the backseat of her parents’ car, along with her older sister. Her dad was driving and her mom was in the front seat. They were on their way home after a fireworks show at Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. The show had just ended and the road was crowded with traffic from the other people who had seen the show. Without warning, Beth and her entire family observed “a silver metallic saucer” hover in complete silence about twenty-five feet high over the highway about six car-lengths in front of them. “We had a very clear view,” says Beth. “There were three horizontal parts -- the middle horizontal part of the craft rotated slowly with red, yellow and other colored, rectangular sections…The top and bottom parts were not rotating. After a few minutes, the craft shot up and away at high speed at about a forty-five-degree angle. Again, no sound or vibrations.”
Some cases do involve the appearance of sky lanterns, except the orbs display behaviors that rule out this theory. A good example occurred on July 4, 1973 in Paterson, New Jersey. The witnesses include a family that celebrated the fourth of July by standing out on their porch to watch the nearby fireworks display. It was something they had done for many years. However, this year, something different happened.
“We casually noticed a bright Venus-like object slowly rise over the horizon and appearing to move toward us,” writes one of the family members. “It appeared to grow somewhat larger as it approached. After a while, it appeared to have stopped dead in the sky, in our clear view…as darkness set, the fireworks started. After about forty-five minutes to an hour, the display ended and we continued to sit on the front porch. We then noticed that the object appeared to be floating away, back in the return direction from which it came.”
Could this be a sky lantern? The movement appears to be consistent with one. However, there is one problem with this theory. As the witness says, “I estimate that from the time we first noticed the light, and the time it finally disappeared, was probably about two hours.”
Sky lanterns last only fifteen minutes. If not a sky lantern, then what did the witnesses see?
While sometimes it’s the length of a sighting that proves the objects aren’t sky lanterns, with other cases, the movement of the orbs seems to defy the lantern-theory. Consider what happened to a husband and wife in a campground in Rio Grande, New Jersey. It was around midnight on the evening of July 4, 1975 when the husband noticed “hundreds of star-like objects” flying in intricate formations across the sky. His wife saw the objects too. The husband describes how the objects moved. “Hundreds of star-like objects, in one formation, flew intricate military-like flight patterns, from horizon to horizon. They flew in perfect synchronization, changing direction and speed.”
They discussed what they were seeing and agreed on the details. The objects did not appear to be fireworks or any type of laser show. But it was the maneuvers of the objects that impressed them the most. “After a few minutes,” he says, “…the objects separated into multiple groups and flew different patterns, in quadrants. Each group was still in perfect sync with their group. Then they reunited into one formation and zoomed away beyond our visibility.”
Selected UFO Articles
CONTENTS
Introduction…4
Chapter One: UFO Car-Lift Cases…11
Chapter Two: Independence Day Encounters…37
Chapter Three: I Crashed into a UFO…65
Chapter Four: UFOs over Airports…93
Chapter Five: ETs and Fertilizer…117
Chapter Six: When Abductees Levitate…129
Chapter Seven: I Punched a Gray in the Face…143
Chapter Eight: Extraterrestrial Hitchhikers…155
Chapter Nine: Those Dam UFOs…175
Chapter Ten: Take Me to Your Leader…195
Epilogue…216
Sources…219
About the Author…234
About the Artist…235
Books by Preston Dennett…236
Introduction
Welcome to the fourth volume of Not from Here. As with the other books in this series, volume four explores the stranger and more unusual aspects of the UFO phenomenon. Once again, my goal is to present a broad spectrum of UFO accounts, providing the reader with cases covering the entire gamut of the phenomenon.
This book, however, has a unique feature that none of the other previous volumes have. Some of the chapters in this book are brand new and never before published. The previous volumes were drawn from the more than 100 articles I have written over thirty-five years of UFO research. This book contains mostly new and original material. Only five of the chapters were previously published as articles, and all of them have been expanded to more than twice their original size.
I’m particularly proud of the Not from Here volumes because they contain information and cases that are little known, difficult to find, and often defy the standard model of contact. Each chapter provides unique insights into the nature and origin of the UFO phenomenon. They each reveal aspects of the UFO phenomenon that have never been fully explored before.
One type of UFO behavior that is well-known is the UFO-car chase. For some weird reason, UFOs love to chase cars down highways. However, sometimes this behavior reaches a whole new level. Chapter One, UFO Car-Lift Cases, presents one of the rarest types of UFO-car encounters. In these cases, people driving along a highway (usually at night) observe a UFO which swoops down and actually pulls their car up into the sky, sometimes only a few feet off the road, sometimes much higher. It’s a bizarre aspect of UFO behavior that has baffled ufologists for decades. Why are UFOs lifting cars up into the sky? An analysis of the cases sheds some light on this mysterious behavior.
What is the most likely day to see a UFO in the United States? The answer may surprise you: July 4th! Each year on Independence Day, millions of people flock outside to watch fireworks. And every July 4th, there is a huge spike of UFO sightings. According to the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) and the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC,) the most common day to see a UFO is on July 4th. Chapter Two, Independence Day Encounters, takes a closer look at UFOs seen on the fourth of July. Why are there so many sightings on this day? Are people just seeing fireworks or sky-lanterns? Or are they seeing actual UFOs? The answers may surprise you.
It might be the rarest type of UFO encounter of all -- a collision with a UFO. This is a category of cases unlike any other. Not just a sighting or a landing, or an onboard encounter, but something else entirely. And there are far more cases like this than you might realize. Chapter Three, I Crashed into a UFO, is a collection of cases in which planes, trains, automobiles, and even boats, have collided into a UFO (or an actual extraterrestrial,) sometimes with far-reaching consequences.
Many years ago, I wrote a small article for Uncensored UFO Reports magazine featuring a series of encounters over Los Angeles International Airport. I was stunned to find so many encounters over such an unlikely location. I did a brief survey of the literature and was surprised to find a few other cases over various airports, which I also included. But after the article was published, more cases continued to occur. When the very famous Chicago O’Hare Airport case occurred in 2006, I really began to wonder if there were more cases out there. So, digging deeper, I was shocked to find that in fact, there were dozens of cases, not only involving sightings, but also landings and humanoids. Chapter Four, UFOs over Airports, presents an impressive number of cases that I think will shock both enthusiasts and veteran researchers. There must be a reason for the huge number of encounters at airports, and a review of these very special cases just might provide the answer.
In keeping with the theme of these volumes and their focus on the most bizarre types of UFO cases, outlying accounts that reveal startling patterns of UFO activity, Chapter Five, ETs and Fertilizer presents cases in which fertilizer plays a significant role. Weird, right? Who knew? But apparently, this is a thing! And these cases reveal an undeniable association, and once again, show an aspect of UFO encounters that has never been fully explored.
There are many unusual aftereffects of a UFO encounter. Some people experience nightmares and PTSD. Some people experience a profound psychic and spiritual awakening. Most people experience a dramatic adjustment to their worldview. Among the rarest and strangest aftereffects is spontaneous human levitation. It doesn’t happen a lot, but when it does, the results are truly fantastic. Chapter Six, When Abductees Levitate, explores cases involving this bizarre aftereffect, and shows just how powerfully transformative a UFO encounter can be.
Waking up in the middle of the night to see a gray alien lurking in your bedroom can be an utterly terrifying experience. And sometimes people react with acts of shocking violence. Chapter Seven, I Punched a Gray in the Face, presents cases in which people have reacted violently to a face-to-face encounter with an alien. What happens when you punch a gray? These cases provide a fascinating glimpse into this very unusual type of encounter, and have some important things to say about gray extraterrestrials.
Stranded without a vehicle or any other resources, people across the world have resorted to hitchhiking to reach their destinations. This unique aspect of human culture has resulted in a wide variety of unusual encounters, some romantic, some heroic, some paranormal, and some downright horrific. What many people don’t realize, however, is that there are a good number of cases involving what appears to be extraterrestrials! Chapter Eight, Extraterrestrial Hitchhikers, presents ten astonishing and bizarre accounts in which people have picked up innocent-looking hitchhikers, only to discover that these strangers were not human! This unique category of UFO encounters reveals how truly strange the UFO phenomenon can be. You might never look at hitchhiking the same way ever again.
UFOs are known to be disproportionally attracted to certain areas. Schoolyards, drive-in movie theaters, cemeteries, rocket launches, prisons, factories, nuclear power stations, military bases, graveyards…all are known to attract UFOs. Most of these locations have been profiled in earlier volumes of the Not from Here series or my other books. And of course, an earlier chapter in this book explores one powerful attractor: airports. But there are others. Among the most powerful of all UFO attractors are dams. This of course also involves reservoirs and often hydroelectric power plants. Chapter Nine: Those Dam UFOs, presents more than thirty cases of UFOs hovering over dams. And not only hovering, but landing, sending down beams of light, diving into and out of the water, causing power failures and more. In some cases, humanoids are seen. The dramatic nature of these encounters shows that ETs are, in fact, keeping very close tabs on the progress of human technology and use of power.
One of the most common questions people ask about UFOs and extraterrestrials is: why don’t UFOs just land on the White House lawn and say, “Take me to your leader!” Well, as it turns out, this sort of thing has nearly happened many times. The tenth and final chapter in the book, Take Me to Your Leader, presents a list of very highly-placed government officials who have gone on record about seeing a UFO with their own eyes. Governors, mayors, senators, representatives, presidents, heads of state…all have seen UFOs, not only in the United States, but across the world. Many of our world leaders have had encounters with UFOs. The disclosure movement is leading to huge revelations and exposing the fact that our leaders may know more about this phenomenon than they have publicly revealed.
Ten chapters, fully sourced and footnoted, each revealing different and unusual aspects of UFO behavior, each exposing the extraterrestrial agenda on our planet, each illustrated by award-winning UFO artist, Kesara, and each with a special Behind the Scenes section talking about how these chapters came to be written. Each chapter is both topical, covering a highly specific category of encounter, and also chronological, taking the reader on a journey through time, showing how the UFO phenomenon and our perception of it has evolved from early history to the present day.
The UFO phenomenon remains one of the most perplexing and persistent mysteries of modern times. However, each encounter brings us a greater understanding of the meaning of the ET presence on Earth.
With the recent Pentagon disclosures and U.S. Congressional Hearings about UFOs, the subject is enjoying a huge surge in popularity. For the first time, the U.S. government has officially recognized UFOs as a real phenomenon, even going so far as to state that they may be extraterrestrial in origin. While they still refused to admit that the UFO crash at Roswell, New Mexico is real, or that people are being taken onboard these craft and meeting extraterrestrials face-to-face, the small steps they have taken toward disclosure are unprecedented.
UFO organizations like MUFON (the Mutual UFO Network) and NUFORC (the National UFO Reporting Center) are receiving a growing number of reports. More and more television programs are featuring the subject. There are now hundreds upon hundreds of radio shows and podcasts talking about all aspects of UFOs. The ridicule and disbelief that has plagued this subject for more than seventy years is quickly fading away.
It is a new age for ufology. New laws are being passed. New government UFO study groups are being formed. Governments across the world are opening their formerly confidential databases.
The mainstream news regularly features current sightings and encounters. The books featuring this subject are being published at record levels. The internet is exploding with UFO information, with Facebook groups, Instagram, Twitter and other platforms growing at exponential rates.
No longer can skeptics deny the reality of the extraterrestrial presence on this planet. The evidence speaks for itself. Eyewitness testimonies, photographs and films, landing trace cases, electromagnetic effects, physiological effect cases (including both injuries and healings,) animal reaction cases, “angel hair” emissions from UFO craft, implant-removal cases -- all have come together to provide conclusive evidence for the reality of UFOs.
The tireless work of UFO researchers is finally being rewarded. Humanity is quickly waking up to the idea that we are not alone in this universe.
And yet, there is still work to be done. This subject is conspicuously absent from history books. It is not being taught in schools. The UFO cover-up may be crumbling, but it is still active. And there are still many unanswered questions regarding the nature and origin of UFOs and extraterrestrials.
And so the research continues.
The cases in this book are among the strangest on record, and they also reveal some startling truths. So, get ready as we dive deep into the heart of the UFO phenomenon and explore these new and fantastic avenues of research into extraterrestrial contact.
Chapter One
UFO Car-Lift Cases
UFOs often behave in ways that can only be described as bizarre. One type of behavior that is familiar to most UFO investigators are UFO-car chases. In case after case, UFOs will approach a car driving down a remote highway late at night and chase them down the road. As frightening as this might be, the UFOs’ fascination with harassing drivers does not end there. There’s another type of behavior that goes far beyond just chasing a car. Sometimes UFOs will actually pull the car off the road and suck it up into the sky. These are known as “car-lift” cases.
Some of these cases involve apparent abductions. Others, however, involve no apparent missing time or abduction. For some reason, the UFO occupants just pull the car up, float it around and then set it back down, leaving the people in the car bewildered and more than a little frightened. The question is, why? Are they just trying to scare people? Are they pulling some sort of practical joke?
The best way to get some answers is to examine the cases.
There are many accounts in the UFO literature in which UFOs have been reported to levitate vehicles. The following early case is a particularly unusual example. It took place in the fall of 1959. Three friends (all teenagers) had left their homes in Hollywood, California and ended up in Goldfield, south of Tonopah. One of the witnesses, fourteen-year-old Bradley X. (not his real name) had also brought along his girlfriend.
Bradley writes that they had pulled off the highway and their pickup became stuck in the sand. Attempts to extricate themselves only ended up burying the truck more deeply, until it was buried up to its hubcaps. The teenagers spent the next few hours trying to dig themselves out, but the sand was too deep. They decided that one of them would have to walk out in the morning and they resigned themselves to spending the night in the desert.
The four of them sat in the truck star-gazing and talking when the conversation eventually turned to flying saucers. Bradley’s girlfriend said, “Let’s see if we can contact a saucer to help us.”
Only half-seriously and not expecting anything to happen, Bradley and his girlfriend “started trying to telepathically contact a saucer.”
Writes Bradley, “Not long afterwards we all saw a light approaching. I don’t know the direction it came from. It looked just like a bright star, except it was moving towards us. It got much brighter as it drew overhead…At that moment we felt the truck move. It rose straight up in the air about a foot or two off the ground, floated to the middle of the road, and gently set down. Then the light moved back in the direction it came from and blinked out.”
At the time, Bradley recalls that they all screamed in fear and left the area. However, forty years later he was able to contact his former girlfriend. Writes Bradley, “The first thing she said was, ‘What do you remember about that night?’ We agreed on all the details except I remembered screaming and she remembered laughing.”
While the case does admittedly have fantastic features, the witnesses have sought no publicity and insisted upon remaining anonymous. Nor did they report the sighting until many years later. And it’s certainly not the only case like it.
A particularly terrifying car-lift incident occurred less than two years later, during daylight hours in January of 1961. Mr. Adolfo Paolini Pisano, a government topographer, was driving his jeep alone on the Andean Highway outside of La Victoria in Merida, Venezuela. Pisano had just slowed down and allowed a truck to pass him when a metallic disc with a polished steel-blue color swooped down from the sky, sweeping only a few feet above the hood of the truck ahead of him, and then took off upward. As it sped away, a cloud of dust was lifted from the ground, and the truck itself rose up a few feet into the air and was pulled in the direction of the disc for a few seconds, and then crashed down, overturning onto a sandbank on the right side of the road.
The driver of the truck crawled out of his overturned vehicle. He escaped with only a few scratches, cuts and bumps, but was in a state of nervous shock. The incident was reported to the Venezuelan National Guard, who kept the incident confidential. Pisano also remained silent at first, but later felt that the case was important, and decided to report it to UFO researchers.
Following the above incidents, car-lift cases began to occur with increasing regularity. Four years later, one evening in September 1965, Mrs. A.V. of Brussels, Belgium was driving home on a small road -- a route she traveled twice daily to and from her place of employment. She was traveling just under sixty mph, and was negotiating a curve in the road when the steering wheel suddenly seemed to malfunction, turning from left to right for no apparent reason. She assumed she had a flat tire and tried to slow down.
Instead, the car inexplicably rose several inches off the ground. At the same time, a small glowing light appeared only a few inches from the right side of her windshield, then quickly moved to the center, where it remained. The light was yellow, tube-shaped and about twenty-seven inches long and one or two inches in diameter.
The steering wheel stopped wobbling, and Mrs. A.V. had no control over her vehicle. Instead, the car seemed to float on a cushion of air. The car flew through the air for about 150 feet when the light disappeared and the car was set back on the road. Mrs. A.V. immediately regained control of her vehicle. Badly shaken, she drove straight home.
She was too upset to even tell her husband what happened until about three days later. Hours after the incident, she noticed peculiar markings on the top side of her wrist, where she had been most heavily exposed to the strange yellow light. The marks looked like tiny pinpricks, red, blue and black in color. The marks were sharply outlined, and itched in the manner of a first-degree burn. They disappeared in one week.
Mrs. A.V. noticed no other effects, until about two years later, when one of the “burn” marks on her wrist spontaneously appeared, and again disappeared in about a week.
Following this, Mrs. A.V. completely forgot the incident until years later, when she woke up in bed and saw a similar yellowish light glowing at the foot of her bed. Next to the light, Mrs. A.V. saw her daughter standing there, unmoving. As her daughter was not home at the time, Mrs. A.V. was unable to account for her appearance. Following this incident Mrs. A.V. recalled the first incident during which her car was lifted off the highway by the strange light. More paranormal incidents followed and she was eventually put in touch with investigators, Emile Techeur and Jean-Luc Vertongen, who researched her case. But why her car was lifted off the road was never explained.
Two months later, on December 20, 1965, fifteen-year-old Edward Bruns from Herman, Minnesota experienced a harrowing car-lift incident. It was just before midnight, and Edward was only two miles from his home when he saw a bright light ahead of him on the road. It hovered about six feet above the highway and covered the entire width of the road.
Edward was driving a pick-up truck heading west, and as he approached the object, his car engine failed and the headlights went out.
At this point, the object glowed red and sparks came out from underneath. Edward saw what appeared to be a human-like figure in the interior of the object.
The object then began to rise up. To Edward’s amazement, his pick-up truck promptly floated up off the road, rising along with the flying saucer. The interior of his vehicle filled with red light.
The next thing Edward knew, his car had been turned around 180 degrees, and was now facing north, lodged into a ditch on the opposite side of the road. Terrified, Edward fled the vehicle and ran the remaining two miles home.
Edward told his father what happened. They returned together to the scene, and examined the area with flashlights. Edward’s father was amazed to see that there were no tire tracks surrounding the truck. It looked as though it had been deposited there from above, exactly as his son had described. The next morning, they examined the area again, and confirmed that there were no tire-tracks.
Another early case was investigated by famed researcher Don Worley. Throughout her life, Martha Carnes (a 56-year-old nursing home worker) had experienced many UFO encounters and paranormal events. But what occurred on December 8, 1967 was among the strangest. On that evening, just after midnight, she was driving down Chicken Run Road near her home in Madison, Indiana. Suddenly a strange orange, glowing, bowl-shaped craft appeared, following her car from above.
This was not the first time this happened. Twice earlier in November of that year, the same craft had followed her car for several miles. Now, here it was again. This time, however, was different.
It came right over her car and suddenly grabbed it, pulling it into the air. Martha heard a loud humming sound. A strange odor filled the air, and she felt a “stinging” sensation on her skin. An unseen force paralyzed her body so that she was unable to even turn her head. It felt as if the car was being sucked up into a tunnel. She could no longer feel the road at all. She wondered if she might be having a seizure when suddenly, she felt the car tires hit the road and her car rolled to a stop.
Martha sat there stunned. Her head, neck and spine were all painful and swollen. She felt hot flashes and bright spots of light swam before her eyes. Also, her bra was now too tight.
Dazed and disoriented, she somehow drove home. When she arrived, she saw that her 1967 Buick, less than a year old, now had a sheen of solid rust on it. It wasn’t long before more damage became apparent. All the car windows now leaked, the water hose burst, and both the battery and the radio quit working. Martha now feels she was abducted. She later had further encounters.
On February 18, 1969, schoolteacher Barbara Smythe was driving to school in Craigmyle, Alberta, Canada and saw a glowing red object with two white lights. It appeared to be about forty feet in diameter or more. The object, which had been hovering, began to move. Immediately, Smythe’s car began “floating.” The car seemed to levitate for about three minutes or one full mile, during which Smythe felt entranced. At this point, the object disappeared and Smythe found herself driving along the road normally.
About two years later, on the evening of May 24, 1971 also in Alberta, a Blackfeet Native American couple, Mr. & Mrs. Raw Eater drove along a bumpy, unpaved road through their Reservation. Without warning, their car was struck on the right side by a bright beam of light coming from above. Mrs. Raw Eater cried out, “The car has left the ground!”
For the next quarter mile, the car flew about two feet above the road at about forty-three mph. During this time, the Raw Eaters were unable to control their vehicle. The brilliant light then disappeared, the car was placed back on the road, and the terrified couple continued their interrupted journey. They reported no physical effects to their car or themselves.
Another dramatic case occurred in November 1973, in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Says the witness: “My husband at the time and I left a party of athletes and their girlfriends or wives. They were drinking [and] the party got too wild for us. Another couple asked if they could ride home with us. The couple said they didn't like the wild party either. None of us four were drinking or smoking pot as the others were. We left in our car. My husband [was] driving and I [was] in the front seat and the other couple in the back seat. We were driving toward home on a four-lane highway. All of a sudden, the car started being pulled up and dropped over and over again. I thought my husband might be fooling around. I told him to stop doing that and he took his hand off the wheel and said, ‘The car cut off. It's dead.’ That is when I noted that the car was not on. There was a white light over us with no noise and it was large, hovering and casting a large light over us and on the highway. We were scared, yelling and holding on to each other. The car lifted up and dropped over and over. I was terrified, as was everyone else. I don't remember much of anything after that, although I think I should remember more. All I remember after that was the car started up and the light lifted up and over us and disappeared without a sound. It appeared to be a saucer shape, just lit up white. I was three months or so pregnant at the time with my now forty-year-old daughter.”
On February 14, 1974, two brothers (both businessmen) were driving a rented U-Haul truck to move their parents’ furniture from Idaho to California. At around 4:15 a.m., they were driving on Highway 93 about fifty-five miles north of Ely, Nevada. Suddenly the first brother, “Chuck,” (pseudonym) who was driving, observed four luminous bluish-green objects flying in a row at a low elevation to the right. One of the objects was flickering on and off.
Chuck turned to his brother, “Dave” (pseudonym) who was asleep in the front passenger seat. “Wake up!” he shouted, and told him that they were being followed by a UFO.
Dave, who was tired, didn’t open his eyes and said, “You’re crazy. I want to sleep.”
Chuck kept his silence, and continued driving while the strange objects paced their vehicle. After a few minutes, one of the objects zoomed forward about a mile ahead, crossed the road from right to left, and then hovered at an altitude of ten feet, waiting for the truck to catch up.
Seeing what was happening, Chuck again shook his brother and said, “Hurry up, wake up, fast! Get up! I want you to see what’s going on here. What is this?” Dave finally woke up. Looking outside, he was shocked to see the strange lights.
As the brothers approached the hovering light on the left, it suddenly transformed into a bright “orange, luminous ball.”
Says Dave, “At that moment, it felt like we had been hit by a blast of wind or force field…it felt to me like a blast of wind hit the back of the truck and it felt like it just picked it up and we were like floating…I was sitting there in the right-hand side of the seat watching him and he just kept going like this with the truck and he couldn’t steer it. He didn’t have control of the truck.”
Says Chuck, who was now struggling to regain control of his vehicle, “The only thing I can compare it with is if you take a curve or something on ice, how the truck sways from one side to the other…This is how it felt to me. But at the same time, the lights were flickering off and on, the motor was missing and I was losing power. I kept my foot on the gas, and I was losing power. Now, I want to tell you that what it felt like to me was that I was actually floating…It [the truck] was floating slightly off the highway in the air. None of the wheels were touching the highway.”
Dave confirms his brother’s testimony: “The lights on the truck flickered on and off and the engine started to miss…he [Chuck] lost control of the truck and couldn’t steer it. I told him to stop, and then before we could stop, the transmission selector jumped out of ‘drive’ into ‘neutral,’ and we coasted to a stop.”
At this point, the orange luminous ball had disappeared. Dave got out and inspected the undercarriage of the truck. He was shocked to see that the drive-shaft was still spinning, even though the truck was in neutral and not moving. He then got back in the truck, which was still running.
At this point, the brothers saw a large silver-colored object shaped like a “ball with a dome on top and sharp wings” floating over a hill to their left. However, they were more concerned about what they now saw ahead of them: another extremely brilliantly lit object, landed in the center of the road. Says Chuck, “I saw down the road in front of us a light that covered the whole road -- just a big, big, bright luminous light…It was something that was just enormous in size.”
He turned to Dave and said, “What in the hell is that?”
Chuck shook his head, “Uh-oh, they’re playing games with us.” Chuck had the sudden strong impression that “they were coming to get us.”
At this point, the brothers became too frightened to pay attention to the other objects around them. Their main concern was the giant UFO that was landed 150 yards on the road ahead of them, blocking their way.
Dave jumped out of the car and blinked a flashlight at the slowly approaching object, which responded by moving towards their truck.
“Dave!” Chuck screamed. “Get back in the truck!”
Dave, “fearing for my life,” jumped back in the vehicle and with his brother, watched in terror as the object approached. As he says, “We felt that we were in a vacuum of some kind and isolated from the rest of the world…You felt like you were trapped, in other words. Couldn’t go back, couldn’t go forward, the truck wouldn’t move, you were just sitting there waiting for something to change.”
The face-off lasted for several minutes. Dave noticed that strange spears of light were coming off the object, which had an outline of reddish light on the top.
Before the object approached any further, it suddenly disappeared. As Chuck says, “…it just seemed as though -- I don’t know -- it disappeared. Something came by us real fast.”
Neither brother could describe exactly how the object left, just that it disappeared swiftly. Both were very relieved. The brothers estimate that the encounter lasted about twenty minutes. Afterwards, their U-Haul truck remained completely disabled, so they were forced to flag down another driver who took them into town.
The brothers contacted the local U-Haul station owner who replaced the truck and then returned to the scene to retrieve the stranded vehicle. The owner of the station had heard the brothers’ story and was amazed to find that the truck had been severely damaged by the encounter. As he says, “The back axle was twisted right off.” He said that the driveshaft had been welded into the rear end. When they tried to haul the truck away on a tow-truck, said the owner, “…the rear wheels just fell right off! Those men stopped that truck just in time.” The truck ended up needing new tires, a new rear axle, new outside housing and gears. These facts were later verified by UFO investigators.
Both brothers were severely traumatized by the incident. Says Dave, “It took about thirty days for it to sink in my mind that I really saw it.”
It was a warm September day in 1974. An anonymous farmer was driving his pickup, and had just approached his home in the town of Hobbs, New Mexico. At that moment, a huge “disc-shaped” object descended over the fields about 500 feet over his barn, and almost directly above the farmer. Amazed, the farmer leaned out of his window and looked up at the object.
Watching from the farmer’s home were his wife, daughter and a neighbor. Writes Leonard Stringfield, who first revealed the case, “Suddenly, before their eyes, the pickup truck with the farmer in it was lifted vertically from the ground and vanished into the underbelly of the disc. Hysterically, the farmer’s wife called the police.”
The unfortunate farmer, however, was not returned by the UFO, and was never seen again. Despite the fantastic nature of this case, Stringfield says that it came from a reliable source. Writes Stringfield, “The facts of this case, still incomplete, are in the confidential files of the International UFO Registry. The investigator in this case, a radio newsman, prefers anonymity. Through a good source he got the basic information about the incident from an officer only on the basis that the names and most of the data be kept confidential until the victim was found, dead or alive.” In this case, the car-lift was obviously an abduction. However, in other cases, the car is simply lifted up and placed back down on the highway.
HERE'S AN EXCERPT OF CHAPTER TWO: INDEPENDENCE DAY ENCOUNTERS
An examination of popular UFO reporting centers such as NUFORC and MUFON shows that UFOs are reported every single day of the year. However, there are a few days when reporting a UFO becomes problematic. For example: April Fools’ Day. If you see a UFO on April 1, there is a good chance that nobody will believe you! Another highly questionable day to see a UFO is Independence Day. If you see a UFO on July 4th, people often assume that you must have seen fireworks.
Interestingly, and perhaps not surprisingly, the Fourth of July does, in fact, produce a disproportionally large number of UFO reports. As it turns out, according to the reports made to NUFORC, for the last ten years, the month of July is the most common month to see a UFO. Likewise, the single most common day to see a UFO in July is on, guess what day: July Fourth!
The number of cases on this day is truly incredible. Could it be that people are actually seeing fireworks? Or is this day truly a UFO magnet? And if so, why?
Several thousand cases were reviewed for this chapter. It quickly became very clear that there are two main types of cases. The first type involves anomalous lights, orbs in particular, and usually described as red, orange, amber, yellow or white, sometimes fiery. The size is usually described as small, with distance hard to determine. It was the movement, however, that gave it away.
In case after case, people describe glowing orbs that hover in place, or move slowly across the sky, often in a straight line, or sometimes with a wobbling movement and occasional changes in direction. Typically, multiple orbs are seen, usually all traveling in the same direction. Some describe triangular patterns, or what appears to be a shifting, playful movement among the orbs. In most cases, the orbs are seen for only a few minutes before suddenly winking out or moving away. Virtually no witnesses report hearing any sound whatsoever.
Of the thousands of cases examined for this chapter, the vast majority, about eighty percent or more, involve these glowing orbs. The witnesses are sometimes convinced they are viewing extraterrestrial spacecraft that have come to view the fireworks display. Despite the belief of many of the witnesses, it appears very likely that most of the glowing orbs seen on the Fourth of July are probably sky lanterns.
Also called party lanterns, Chinese lanterns, Japanese lanterns, sky candles…these so-called “UFOs” are actually a small candle inside a carefully designed paper balloon. The party lanterns range in size from one to about four feet in diameter. The hot air generated by the candle causes the lantern to rise. It glows with a beautiful red-orange-yellow light (depending on the lantern) and can reach altitudes of up to 5000 feet.
As I waded through the cases, most described some variation of a glowing red-orange orb of light. The color can also be influenced by the color of the paper lanterns themselves, which come in a wide variety of vivid hues. They are easy to launch and can travel for many miles. Although they are not large, they can be seen from many miles away. From a distance, they appear as vivid glowing orbs of light. Because they can only carry a very small candle, the wax quickly burns. They last for only ten or fifteen minutes before burning out.
Depending on wind patterns, sky lanterns can appear to hover in place, travel swiftly across the sky, turn sharply and travel in different directions, and fly in ways that are clearly unlike a normal aircraft. Most of the descriptions of UFOs seen on the Fourth of July match this behavior. While some of these might be actual UFOs, they have the appearance and movement of sky-lanterns.
So, while the Fourth of July does generate the most UFO reports of any other day, most are apparently not extraterrestrial or certainly not provable as such.
None of those are presented here. Instead, this chapter is about a different and much more interesting type of sighting.
The second category involves objects or crafts, often described as structured, hovering in place, darting rapidly, accelerating or showing other non-conventional movements. While these cases are far less common than the first category, there are enough of them to raise the strong probability that at least some of the UFOs seen on Independence Day are, in fact, genuine UFOs, and that UFOs are, as the witnesses attest, there to watch the fireworks show.
Do fireworks actually attract UFOs? Let us examine some of the Fourth of July cases that rise above the rest.
On July 4, 1963, an anonymous gentleman was with a group of young boys watching a fireworks show on the grounds of the Starmount Forest County Club in Greensboro, North Carolina. While watching the fireworks, his attention was diverted to a very strange-looking saucer-shaped object. It glowed orange and had a row of about thirty small red lights along the circumference.
“When I saw this UFO, I was with a group of boys,” the witness says. “We were watching fireworks, which were to our east. I noticed the UFO to the north, but said nothing to no one. I observed it for two minutes as it moved silently eastward, then suddenly reversed direction as it picked up speed. Then assuming its original course once again, it moved slowly upwards and out of sight. It was very large, and was yellow or orange, with a row of red lights at its perimeter. The sky was clear, and somewhat lit up from the fireworks. The UFO was about a mile away, at treetop level. I don’t claim that the UFO was extraterrestrial, but its size and pattern of flight would suggest that it was not a conventional craft.”
The witness was so convinced of the object’s strangeness that he reported the sighting to the Air Force’s Project Blue Book, providing a detailed report and drawings. According to the witness, it moved in a zigzag pattern before accelerating out of sight.
On July 4, 1965, thirteen-year-old “Katherine” was with her friends at a farm in Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York to watch the fireworks. The weather was stormy, with thunder and lightning. The instant the fireworks began, Katherine was shocked to see something else in the sky. “There was a tremendous flash of lightning at the same time a firework went off in the sky,” says Katherine. “I looked up and saw an absolutely huge saucer-shaped object sitting right over the ‘mountain’ we were next to.”
The ‘mountain’ was really just a large hill known as “Round Top.” Katherine had hiked to the top before, as it offered a good view of the local Hudson Valley. The object hung directly over this hill, not far away from where they were.
“It was huge,” says Katherine. “…It was hanging there, not moving at all. There was what I thought to be a window which wrapped all the way around the saucer, which was opaque. There were no panes in the windows, or any kinds of divisions…but there was an orange strobe-type light which went around the inside of the window in a rotating or pulsing fashion. After I looked up and saw the craft, I looked at it briefly, turned my head away, looked back up, and it was gone.”
Katherine and her friends were shocked and frightened. “After seeing the object,” says Katherine, “my friends and I all, almost at the same time, decided it was time to leave the area, although we really didn’t discuss what we had seen. Come to think of it, this topic was never discussed amongst us in any of the remaining years we were together. At the age of thirteen, I was pretty unnerved by what I had seen, and had to walk home alone. Needless to say, I ran most of the way. When I got home, I told my mom and dad what I had seen, but they didn’t believe me…”
Although many other people must have seen the object, Katherine never heard anyone else ever talk about it.
On July 4, 1968, “Jessica” and her future husband were dating and driving around looking for a place to watch the fireworks in their home town of Arlington, Massachusetts. “But we saw something we didn’t expect,” writes Jessica. “It was a curved string of lights, set on an angle, just above the rooftops, and it was moving uphill at the same speed that we were. It popped in and out of view as it went behind the tops of trees and houses along the street. Then it began to pick up speed. So, we accelerated until we were going seventy mph…uphill. Then it went faster and faster until we couldn’t keep up, and it disappeared.”
Jessica was the only witness as her boyfriend was driving and had to keep his eyes on the road. Still, Jessica is convinced she saw a genuine UFO. “I saw something very odd,” she says.
On July 4, 1971, “Steve” and his girlfriend hoped to see the fireworks celebration over a lake near their home in Liberal, Kansas. Unfortunately, the walk to the lake took longer than they expected and by the time they arrived, the fireworks show had just finished. People were getting ready to depart and the fire department was securing the area. Steve and his girlfriend may have missed the fireworks, but they were just in time for another show.
“We, along with numerous kids and adults were about to leave when a cigar-shaped object with shining, multicolored lights underneath appeared over the lake,” Steve says. “It hovered for what seemed like fifteen or twenty minutes very low over the small lake.”
All the witnesses who were still there remained to watch the craft until suddenly, someone exploded a loud M80 firecracker. At that moment the object left. Says Steve, “The object raised up a few feet, and then swish, it was gone.”
On July 4, 1972, “Beth” was in the backseat of her parents’ car, along with her older sister. Her dad was driving and her mom was in the front seat. They were on their way home after a fireworks show at Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. The show had just ended and the road was crowded with traffic from the other people who had seen the show. Without warning, Beth and her entire family observed “a silver metallic saucer” hover in complete silence about twenty-five feet high over the highway about six car-lengths in front of them. “We had a very clear view,” says Beth. “There were three horizontal parts -- the middle horizontal part of the craft rotated slowly with red, yellow and other colored, rectangular sections…The top and bottom parts were not rotating. After a few minutes, the craft shot up and away at high speed at about a forty-five-degree angle. Again, no sound or vibrations.”
Some cases do involve the appearance of sky lanterns, except the orbs display behaviors that rule out this theory. A good example occurred on July 4, 1973 in Paterson, New Jersey. The witnesses include a family that celebrated the fourth of July by standing out on their porch to watch the nearby fireworks display. It was something they had done for many years. However, this year, something different happened.
“We casually noticed a bright Venus-like object slowly rise over the horizon and appearing to move toward us,” writes one of the family members. “It appeared to grow somewhat larger as it approached. After a while, it appeared to have stopped dead in the sky, in our clear view…as darkness set, the fireworks started. After about forty-five minutes to an hour, the display ended and we continued to sit on the front porch. We then noticed that the object appeared to be floating away, back in the return direction from which it came.”
Could this be a sky lantern? The movement appears to be consistent with one. However, there is one problem with this theory. As the witness says, “I estimate that from the time we first noticed the light, and the time it finally disappeared, was probably about two hours.”
Sky lanterns last only fifteen minutes. If not a sky lantern, then what did the witnesses see?
While sometimes it’s the length of a sighting that proves the objects aren’t sky lanterns, with other cases, the movement of the orbs seems to defy the lantern-theory. Consider what happened to a husband and wife in a campground in Rio Grande, New Jersey. It was around midnight on the evening of July 4, 1975 when the husband noticed “hundreds of star-like objects” flying in intricate formations across the sky. His wife saw the objects too. The husband describes how the objects moved. “Hundreds of star-like objects, in one formation, flew intricate military-like flight patterns, from horizon to horizon. They flew in perfect synchronization, changing direction and speed.”
They discussed what they were seeing and agreed on the details. The objects did not appear to be fireworks or any type of laser show. But it was the maneuvers of the objects that impressed them the most. “After a few minutes,” he says, “…the objects separated into multiple groups and flew different patterns, in quadrants. Each group was still in perfect sync with their group. Then they reunited into one formation and zoomed away beyond our visibility.”
Click to set custom HTML
