ONE IN FORTY
ONE IN FORTY – THE UFO EPIDEMIC
True Accounts of Close Encounters with UFOs
By Preston Dennett
Most UFO books cover the same old cases over and over. Dennett’s investigations, however, are totally original firsthand cases. One In Forty – The UFO Epidemic presents more than 40 brand new firsthand cases of UFO contact of all types including: unexplained lights, UFO beams of light, face-to-face alien encounters, intelligent fireballs, silent metallic saucers, missing-time UFO abductions, friendly contactee accounts, spiritual UFOs, Bigfoot encounters, poltergeist-UFO cases, even the cases of the cover-up of UFO crash retrievals. Each case is told in the witnesses’ own words and is fully illustrated by awared-winning UFO artist, Kesara. In this massive 342 page hard-cover volume, you will read about the following exciting encounters:
--three ladies encounter a metallic disk hovering at tree-top level which follows them home over their car. All three experience a period of missing time.
--three men chase a UFO across the San Fernando Valley, passing several other cars chasing the same mysterious object.
--a group of climbers encounter a mysterious object at the peak of Mount San Gorgonio.
--a gentleman claims to have seen hundreds of UFOs on a regular basis, and he can prove it.
--two men experience missing time when a UFO lands next to them on the freeway, striking them with a powerful beam of light, completely altering the course of their lives.
--two ladies encounter a UFO which plays computer-like music. The object later returns and strikes one of the witnesses with a beam of light, rendering her temporarily paralyzed.
--a young lady confronts two gray-type aliens face-to-face, whiling walking near her home.
--an alarming series of abductions which spread like a contagion among a small group of friends.
--an incredible daylight sighting involving literally thousands of witnesses.
--three sisters see a large metallic UFO hovering outside their bedroom, while at the same time the entire neighborhood is besieged with UFO calls.
--a family watches as three metallic disks hover over their strawberry field. One of the witnesses reports a telepathic communication with the object.
--a gentleman accidentally stumbles using lights and lasers to repeatedly initiate UFO contact.
--two sisters experience hundreds of bedroom visitations by a gray-type alien. Years later, the aliens return for one of their children.
--a gentleman encounters Bigfoot, and then the very next night, encounters a UFO.
--a family starts seeing UFOs, which escalate into a series of terrifying UFO abductions, and culminating in a baby presentation and an alien genetic experiment that evidently went horribly wrong.
--two cases of government retrievals of crashed UFOs, and reverse engineering of alien technology.
These are just a few of the exciting cases you will find in One In Forty: The UFO Epidemic. Dennett remains one of the few researchers who continues to publish brand new original cases. The book also contains an analysis of the government involvement with UFOs and a condensed history of the most popular UFO incidents in history.
ONE IN FORTY: THE UFO EPIDEMIC
True Accounts of Close Encounters with UFOs
By Preston E. Dennett
Artwork by Kesara
Contents
1. How the Investigation Began….1
2. The UFO That Followed a Car….9
3. UFO Chase In Reseda….19
4. UFO Over San Gorgonio Peak….27
5. Glowing Objects Over Van Nuys….31
6. Alien Encounter at Stagg Street Elementary School….37
7. Cavorting Stars Over Palm Springs….47
8. Mark and the UFOs….51
9. The Green Glow in the Mojave Desert….57
10. UFO Landing on Interstate Five….61
11. The Musical UFO….71
12. The Chatsworth UFO Epidemic….79
13. Multicolored Lights in the Forest….89
14. Metallic Disk Over Neptune….93
15. The Belle Vernon UFO Invasion….99
16. The Great San Fernando Valley Fireball….105
17. The Strawberry Field UFOs….111
18. The Blueridge Mothership Sighting….117
19. UFO or Poltergeist?….121
20. A Cluster of Colored Lights….127
21. A Tiny UFO….131
22. Calling All UFOs!….135
23. The Muddy Man….145
24. The Repeater Problem….169
25. The Spiraling Star….177
26. The Terminal Tower Sighting….181
27. A Case of High Strangeness….185
28. The Pacoima UFO Display….191
29. Is Bigfoot an Alien?….197
30. They Flew All Night!….207
31. Thousands of People Saw It!….211
32. Another “Unsolved Mystery.”….215
33. The Robinson Family UFO Siege….221
34. A Genetic Experiment….243
35. The Uninvestigated Reports….257
36. The Identified Sightings….265
37. The Psychic Connection….269
38. The Testimony of a Lieutenant Colonel….275
39. Secret Government Bases and Crashed UFOs….279
40. UFO Politics….287
41. Alternate Theories….303
42. A Condensed History of UFOs….309
43. Conclusions….317
Epilogue….331
Selected Bibliography….333
Published by Kroshka Books, c1997.
Three Incredible Close Encounters
by Preston Dennett
(excerpted from the book “One in Forty: The UFO Epidemic” published by Kroshka)
After investigating UFOs for more than ten years, I have uncovered cases of virtually every type. I am constantly amazed by the huge number of reports and the high credibility of the witnesses. It is extremely important for witnesses to report their encounters because each case contains new information. Let’s face it, UFOs are still a mystery. We don’t know who they are, how they get here, or what their agenda is. In fact, some feel that we are still at the stage of trying to prove their existence!
The evidence that UFOs are real is, I think, overwhelming, and would convince any reasonable person. Beyond that, it’s anyone’s guess. The UFO phenomenon is so vast and bizarre that it is difficult for any single theory to account for all the evidence. Some cases just seem to defy any rational explanation.
What follows are three cases which I think show some of the strangeness and complexity of the UFO phenomenon. All are taken from my book, One In Forty -- The UFO Epidemic: True Accounts of Close Encounters With UFOs, published by Kroshka Books.
THE STRAWBERRY FIELD UFOS
Some UFO encounters are so close, they leave absolutely no room for misidentification. The following case is a perfect example. Sally Sanders (not her real name) was only nine years old when she had her encounter. She was working with her parents in a strawberry field in Livingston, California. The family had immigrated from the Philippines, and their livelihood depended on the prosperity of their strawberry farm. The family had therefore spent many hours under the open sky, picking the ripest strawberries.
Then, one clear summer afternoon in 1953, Sally and her family became witness to an amazing close up UFO sighting right over their strawberry field. Sally vividly remembers how the whole ordeal began.
They were all busy picking the berries when seeming out of nowhere, three small saucer-shaped objects swooped silently out of the sky and hovered low to the ground only a few hundred feet away. The saucers were very small, only about twenty feet wide and ten feet thick. They were a polished silver color, and the only sound they made was a soft whirring noise. As they hovered, they seemed to wobble.
Sally started at them in awe. As she says, “My dad had a strawberry field and it was close to the river. We were all working at the time. And this thing didn’t make a lot of noise, it was like a soft whirring sound...but it must have been the sound that made us look up, because we were busy. I had the impression we all pretty much looked up at the same time. It’s like, all of a sudden, it just appeared. And we looked up and everybody was surprised...I saw three of them. I’ll tell you, one was pretty close to us -- really close. It looked so close, like it could have been within fifty to a hundred feet of us. The other two, were spread out in a sort of semi-circle. There was a gas station about three miles down the road, and it looked like the last one in the semi-circle might have been over in that area. They all just sat there. It seemed like forever. We were scared. It was almost like whispering. We were looking up at it...it was really weird. It’s like you don’t know what to do; it was right there. It was so close. It looked so close.”
This case is interesting because the witnesses knew instantly that they were seeing alien spacecraft. There was simply no other explanation. As Sally says, “It was the old saucer-shape that a lot of people talk about...they didn’t look like they were that big. No windows, not nothing. It was all a silver-steel color, completely closed. They almost seemed to move in a slow whirl, a very slow whirl, and they stayed in one spot. It was like you could see it whirling around, from what I can recall. Because it was just staying there. It stayed there. It stayed there. It stayed there for -- it seemed like twenty minutes...The reason I have a feeling that it was probably that long is because we talked about it. We looked down. We looked up. I don’t recall having the feeling of wanting to run. I don’t know if it’s because there was no place to run to. I guess after a few minutes, we all calmed down.”
Many questions raced through Sally’s mind as she watched the objects. She couldn’t help but wonder what their intention was. Or who was inside. As Sally says, “They were small. I still to this day have the feeling that it would hold no more than one or two people. It just didn’t look that big...but it was awful close, and I knew it was really small.”
The entire family was perplexed by the strange behavior of the UFOs. Why were they hovering in one place so close to the ground? What were they doing? Sally and her family continued working as best as they could, considering that three UFOs were hovering above them. As Sally says, “We just went and started working. We weren’t working really well now. But it was like we got the impression that nothing was really going to happen. Because they were there so long, it was like the fear had pretty much passed. When they left, they all left at the same time. They all moved at the same time. And when they left, it was really quiet and whispering, really soft and gentle. I mean, planes are loud. This thing, when it came up, it was so quiet that when we looked up, it was already there. So we didn’t hear it until it was already there. It was really quiet.”
So far, Sally’s sighting is important because it displays so many of the classic UFO trademarks including the disk-shape, the wobbly hovering motion, the quiet whirring noise, the silvery metallic surface. There is little possibility that misperception is involved simply because the sighting occurred under ideal conditions. The witnesses were able to observe the objects on a clear sunny day from a close vantage point for a period of twenty minutes. This was no fleeting glimpse.
However, Sally hesitantly mentioned another detail of the sighting which she thought was strange -- something that should be regarded as highly significant. As Sally says, “I remember feeling, thinking they had mental telepathy so that we wouldn’t be afraid...even at that time, I knew it was different. And it was kind of scary. I don’t know if they were actually communicating to us, ‘It’s okay.’ They might have been. I remember thinking that in my head, but I don’t know if that’s what happened or not.”
Unknown to Sally, many witnesses have described the exact same message from UFO occupants. In fact, the phrase, “Do not be afraid,” is among the most common messages given by extraterrestrials.
Sally’s sighting is an investigator’s dream. It is the kind of sighting that just cannot be dismissed as a hallucination or misperception. The objects were too close, and they stayed there for too long. The incident was witnessed by at least four people in broad daylight under perfect conditions.
Many investigators believe these sighting of metallic disks strongly support the extraterrestrial spaceship theory of UFOs. What else could they be? It was by all definitions and craft, but yet, remains totally unknown. It seems safe to make the assessment that Sally and her family witnessed three extraterrestrial spacecraft hovering at the edge of their strawberry field. It is the single explanation which best fits the facts.
What aliens would be doing in a strawberry field remains a mystery.
THE PACOIMA UFO DISPLAY
Another puzzling and dramatic UFO encounter took place in Pacoima, California, over a densely populated suburb. Again, this was no fleeting glimpse of an unexplained light. In this case, the encounter lasted for over an hour. There were several reliable witnesses, and the witnesses were able to view the object through a pair of high-powered binoculars, virtually eliminating any possibilities of misperception.
As they watched the object over their home, it began to change into different shapes, flaring in brightness. It darted around, performing maneuvers that are impossible for conventional aircraft. It moved close to the witnesses, who could easily discern what papered to be lights or portholes around the circumference of the object. At one point, the object actually ejected a number of smaller UFOs which hovered beside it. It was then that the frightened witnesses considered calling the police.
The whole ordeal began innocently enough when the Tanouye family drove to the nearby home of a relative. The family of four was in the car when they first noticed a strange star-like object hovering in the sky.
Ron Tanouye was in the back seat and his father was driving. It was eight o’clock in the winter of 1968, and the sky was dark and clear. Says Ron, “My father happened to notice this really bright light. We thought it was a star or something in the sky, but there was something different about it. So he said, ‘Kind of keep an eye on that.’ So we went to my grandfather’s house, and he wasn’t home. So we turned around and went back home, and we still kept an eye on this bright light. And we got home.
“My dad had these large binoculars,” Ron continues. “It’s one of those that he got off one of those battleships during World War II. And it has pretty good range; you can see the craters on the moon. So we mounted that up onto the brick wall and watched the thin for a while. We each took turns -- me, my brother, my father, my mother.
“So basically, as we looked through the binoculars, it was very bright, almost piercing kind of, to the eye. But at times, it would almost kind of lose its brightness, and it would change shape at the same time. And most of the time it was too bright to even make a shape out. It was just like a bright light. But when it did get a duller color, it would be almost like an oval with two end points, and it would change shape. It would change to that shape, then it would stay there for a while. And then it would turn back and almost be like...you know, the only way I can explain it is that it was kind of like -- when it was really bright, it was probably on its broadside where all the light was illuminating off of it. The other way, I don’t know -- it kind of twisted to a different direction, and the light was emitting the opposite way, so we didn’t see all this light coming off.”
At this point, the Tanouye family was wondering if the object could be a balloon or something conventional. Then, without warning, the object did something that removed all doubt that it was unconventional. As Ron says, “But then, something funny happened. As you’re watching this thing -- this object -- it would make a vertical movement, I mean, almost straight up from its position, a hundred-eighty degrees either way, up or down, and then a ninety-degree angle you know -- jet to the left or the right. It was just so quick. I mean, this was amazing!
“And then it seemed like it was getting closer. The object was getting closer and closer, but by the way the shape of the object was looking. And it got to the point where you could see the bright light coming out what was kind of like, maybe portholes or something, but brighter light coming out of certain areas of this object.
“So we kept watching it for a while. My mother got bored. My brother got kind of bored. So they went inside the house. My father and I were sitting out there looking at this thing. My father was looking at it, and I was just looking at it with my naked eye. And then I see this little streak of light come out from behind it. And my dad said, ‘Did you see that?’ Because he was looking through the binoculars.
“And I said, ‘Yeah, what was that?’
“He said, ‘Something came out of it, and it’s staying to the left of it. Take a look.’
“So I took the binoculars. He said, ‘See! To the left of it! There’s another bright light!’
“It was very small compared to this other large one, and it was just stationary, kind of off to the left of it. So I watched it for a while, and it kind of stayed there. I don’t remember if my father was looking through them [the binoculars] of if it was I, but another one of those things came out of the object and stayed off to the side of it. I don’t remember which side, but the first one went off to the left, and the other one was probably up above or maybe to the right. I don’t remember, but there were two of these little things, and then this big one.
“And then we just kept watching it, and I started getting kind of scared. I was only seven years old then, and I was getting a little bit skittish I guess, and kept wondering if these guys were going to land here and take me away or something like that. Here I am starting to get scared of this thing, even though it was far off. So I ran inside and I told my mom, ‘Call the police! Call the police!’
“My brother, he was getting kind of scared because I was all excited. So I ran back outside, told my dad to come back in. ‘Come in! Come in!’
“He says, ‘No, no, no, no. I want to watch this some more. One of them disappeared, one of those little things!’
“That got me kind of curious, so I went back and looked through the binoculars again, and sure enough, one of them had disappeared. The first one disappeared. The other one was still hovering wherever it was. He said, ‘I was looking at it, and then it was gone.’
“So here is this big one and this other little one. I could see the big one just by looking at it with my naked eye. Then all of a sudden, it was gone. Just boom! Gone! And I asked my dad, ‘Where did it go?’
“He said, ‘It just started to fade out. It just disappeared. It was gone in a matter of seconds.”
After hovering above them for more than an hour, the UFO was finally gone. It left as mysteriously as it had arrived, leaving Ron and his family thoroughly impressed. As he says, “It was enough to scare me. It was enough that I’ll remember it for the rest of my life. I don’t disbelieve in UFOs or anything. I believe in them. I believe there is something there. I saw it...and since then, you know, every time I see something in the sky, I’ll take my dad’s binoculars and look at it.”
A CASE OF HIGH STRANGENESS
The more you study the UFO phenomenon, the more it becomes apparent that there is no single simple explanation that can account for all the different types of UFO encounters. In fact, some cases reach such a high level of strangeness that they seem to defy rational explanation.
On October 14, 1990, at nine o’clock in the evening, art designer Arni Whyler was plunged headlong into one of these bizarre cases. The case involved several strange phenomena including precognition, various unexplained lights, physiological effects, and finally a full-blown journey into what has been often labeled by UFO investigators as the “oz factor.”
The case itself began with a bizarre coincidence. In late September of 1990, I interviewed Arni Whyler concerning previous UFO sightings. After conducting the initial interview, I told Arni that I would call him back if I had any further questions.
Two weeks later, Arni was the one to call me back. The reason for his call? He had just encountered yet another UFO. On this occasion, it was outside his home in Pasadena, California.
The encounter began with a precognitive flash, a sudden impulse to look at a certain portion of the sky. As Arni says, “I was in the living room and all the lights were out. My brother had fallen asleep on the living room couch. And I got this funny feeling I should look out the window. I don’t know why I got the funny feeling I should look out the window. But I got up and went over to the fireplace. And I looked out the window, and a spot of light appeared over the house. If you stretched your hand at arm’s length, and you held a quarter, it would be the size of a quarter. And it was round. It went off from east to west, off to the horizon line. It shrank from the size of a quarter to a pin-point of light, and it also changed color from a warm white to a very, very bright intense blue-white light.”
After the light disappeared, Arni jumped back, totally surprised. Had he just seen another UFO, he wondered. He heard himself saying out loud, “Oh, my god! Oh, my god!” over and over. He whirled around and walked to his brother who was asleep on the couch. By now, his brother had woken up and asked Arni, “What’s the matter?”
Arni said, “I saw something in the sky!”
Arni was just beginning to explain in detail what he saw when suddenly, something bizarre happened -- something Arni would never fully comprehend. It began with a strange wave of light that swept over the house. Says Arni, “I was facing to the east and a glow of light...how to I explain this? It was not like it was from a helicopter because that’s projected down on a beam. But a glow went around the house, and it went from the east side of the house like a wave of light, to the west side of the house. A white light, but it wasn’t a bright, bright white light, and it wasn’t a mist or anything like that. It didn’t seem to have a source like a beam. It was just like a wave of light. And this wave of light went over the house, and I got this pop! in my ears. And everything went very, very quiet. And my brother was waking up and he said, ‘What’s going on? What’s going on?’
“I said, ‘I’m going outside.’ And I went outside and there was absolutely no sound. The crickets had stopped making noise! It was absolutely silent. I got this feeling -- well, I get the same feeling in the winery. My brother and I have a winery. And when you walk into the back of the winery, there’s so much liquid that you feel almost womb-like. It’s very cloistered, very comfortable, almost like someone put their arms around you and hugged you.”
Arni’s experience was quickly escalating in strangeness. What puzzled him the most, however, was the wave of light that swept over the house. As Arni says, “It was so odd. It was not a wave of light. It was a glow that went from the west side of the house -- and the house is mostly windows -- it was on both sides of the house. And it was as though you took a donut -- a gigantic donut of light -- and ran it across the house, so that it glowed only around the house, not down by the street. I don’t think it was a reflection of cars. It was not that bright. It had a vibration more of candlelight, but not as much as incandescent light. Have you ever seen the greenish light that glows from algae? Well it was that kind of glow, but it was more intense...it was easily visible, and it illuminated all of the leaves and the foliage around the house, but nowhere else. And it took at least two seconds to pass over the house.
“It was really strange,” Arni continues. “I’ve never had an experience like that. I’ve seen things from afar, but I just got the funny feeling that something was really up close. I don’t understand it.”
One of the most interesting aspects of Arni’s experience is the total lack of sound. This is one of the earmarks of the “oz factor.” Arni knew that something strange was happening, but he didn’t understand what. As he says, “My ears felt like they were going up another level in height. It was as though I had gone up to about five thousand feet, but it didn’t hurt. If you take your fingers, and you put your fingers in your ear a little bit, that’s what it felt like. It had that sort of silent feeling. I could not hear the refrigerator in the kitchen, or my brother asleep, or the traffic noise. It was absolutely silent until I got to the street, and then the normal noises appeared.”
Another intriguing aspect of Arni’s encounter is his premonition of the event. This bizarre detail turns up in account after account. For some reason, people are overcome with an impulse to look at a certain place in the sky, and then a UFO appears. Arni is unable to explain it. As he says, ‘Something...I had the feeling that I should get up and go look out the window. And there was absolutely no reason for me to get up because everything was quiet. My brother was asleep. I had blown out the candles in the living room, and I was just sitting in the dark, listening to the night sounds. And all of a sudden I just got this feeling that I should get up and look out the window. Not somebody calling to me or anything like that. But I just got the impulse to get up and go look out the window. And when I did that, I saw this glow of light.”
Even more puzzling and somewhat rarer are the physiological effects reported by Arni. The ear-popping was only one such effect. Another wasn’t discovered until after the experience was over. Only then did Arni realize that when he closed his eyes, he could still see the image of the first UFO burned into his retina. As Arni says, “On my retina, the blue light, when it got to be a fine pin-point towards the horizon line, it burned the color into my retina, so every time I closed my eyes, I could see the image of what I saw in the sky.
“It was a perfectly round disk, a little oval, but not too much oval, that shrunk. The other thing that was strange was that it did change color. It went from a very warm rosy white to an absolutely intense blue. If you turn on the gas on the burners and look into the very blue of the burner, it was bluer than that. It was more vivid that that. And then I saw it on my retina for at least two or three hours thereafter. And my brother, he’s a biochemist. He said that it must have burned out a rod or a cone in the retina of my eye. That portion of the light must have been so intense that it destroyed a portion of my retina.”
How does one categorize such an experience as this? There is little doubt that it falls somewhere under that vast UFO umbrella. Arni is certain that the sighting is not easily explained. As he says, “I’ve seen shooting stars and they act much differently than this.”
The entire experience has left Arni baffled. He has no idea what any of it means or how to explain it. He only knows that he saw something. He had no missing time, nor did he see any entities. And yet, he had the strange feeling that something was close. But what?
ONE IN FORTY: THE UFO EPIDEMIC
When I first began investigating UFOs in 1986, I had no idea how many people were having the UFO experience. I assumed it was extremely rare. I was wrong. After surveying the major researchers, and conducting my own survey of experiencers, I came up with the figure that one in forty people have had an onboard UFO experience. This may seem like a lot, but actually, two years later, the Roper Poll came up with the figure, “one in fifty.”
The above three encounters are only a tiny portion of the cases I uncovered in my first few years of research. It quickly became clear to me that UFOs were a hidden epidemic.
I found out that my brother and his friends had chased a UFO across the San Fernando Valley. I found out that my coworker, her friend and her mother experienced missing time when a UFO followed them home from the library. I found out that my sister-in-law had a face-to-face encounter with a gray-type alien. I found out that a friend had experienced a terrifying missing-time encounter while driving with his friend in the middle of the night. I discovered that yet another friend and her sister had had a series of hundreds bedroom encounters with a gray-type alien. I found out that a co-worker and her entire family had an ordeal with UFOs that began with simple sightings and ended up with a terrifying abduction scenario that seemed straight out of science fiction.
And remember, these were all people I knew and trusted. Most had kept their encounters secret for fear of ridicule and disbelief. Still, the encounters kept flooding in. An entire family who saw a cluster of colored lights that seemed to be searching the neighborhood. A gentleman who was able to use strong lights to call UFOs down out of the sky on several different occasions. Two teen-agers who had the most terrifying experience of their life when an “intelligent fireball” swooped down low over their heads.
These are just a few the encounters I investigated that have made me realize that the UFO epidemic is spreading un-controlled.
UFO encounters were once thought to be extremely rare events. However, today many leading researchers have reversed their opinions and say that the experience is quite common. But is this true? And exactly how common are UFO encounters? What exactly are your chances experiencing a UFO abduction?
The late Dr. J. Allen Hynek was considered by many to be one of the world’s leading UFO investigators. He worked for many years as the Air Force’s Astronomical consultant to Project Blue Book and eventually wrote two books that have become classics in the field. When asked by another researcher how many people Hynek thought have been abducted inside of UFOs, Hynek replied, “One out of forty.”
That may seem like a high number, but consider the words of Budd Hopkins, who has specialized in the subject of UFO abductions. Hopkins first became concerned about the possibility that many people had been abducted when he discovered an abductee who had no conscious memory whatsoever of being abducted other than a vague fear of a certain stretch of highway. Says Hopkins, “This opened up the possibility that the experience, whatever it was, had been suppressed in others, and that abduction was widespread.”
Because Kilburn had no memory of his abduction, Hopkins concluded, “This meant that almost anyone can have suffered such an experience and yet be totally unaware of it for all practical purposes. What before was thought of as a very rare event might be infinitely more common than anyone had supposed.”
In his landmark book, Missing Time, Budd Hopkins states, “I have described abductions as constituting an epidemic; in fact, we have no idea how many such kidnappings may already have taken place, but I believe there are vastly more than the two hundred or so isolated cases which have been investigated.” Because most people don’t report their experiences, Hopkins states, “We can logically theorize that there may be tens of thousands of Americans whose encounters have never been revealed.”
Pioneering UFO research Don Worley has been investigating UFOs for more than thirty years, and has quietly amassed a mountain of data concerning UFO abductions. “How many alien abductions are occurring?” asks Worley. “Estimates run from the hundreds of thousands to many millions. Important in the total is the fact that there is an unknown number of citizens who do not suspect that they are part of the game. I have accidentally found some of these, so I’m convinced that the total in this category might shock us.”
David Jacobs’ book, Secret Life, was the first to systematically study the UFO abduction phenomenon in its various stages. Jacobs was impressed by Hopkins’ research, and by the rising tide of people who claim to have had the experience. Says Jacobs, “UFO researchers began to realize that the scope of the phenomenon was far larger than anyone had imagined...by the mid-1980s, there were so many of these reports that researchers could not keep up with them.”
Like Hopkins and Worley, Jacobs is also convinced that abductions are widespread. Says Jacobs, “At first it appeared to be an isolated phenomenon that had occurred to just a few people around the country. That was wrong. We have evidence of thousands of abductions, and that is perhaps only a small fraction of the number. An unpublished survey that I conducted of more than 1,200 at Temple University who answered a written questionnaire suggest that as many as 5.5 percent of them have potentially had abduction experiences. Similarly, a study done of 275 respondents to a magazine’s survey searching for potential abductees came up with 6 percent. Projecting that number to the population as a whole yields to as many as 15 million people in the United States who might have had abduction Experiences. Let us assume that this number is ridiculously high, and that abductions are only to one half of one percent of the population. If that is true, we are dealing with over a million possible abductions in the United States.”
Whitley Strieber is arguably America’s most well-known UFO abductee. And with five best-selling UFO books, he has been at the cutting edge of UFO research. Says Strieber, “I will tell you this: there are a lot of people who have had this experience -- a lot more than even the UFO community realizes. I am now poring through something like 5,000 letters -- I often get 40 and 50 a day, even now. People, again and again, write ‘a friend of mine told me about you and now I can write and tell somebody what happened to me’ and it goes on and on. I don’t know how many people have been involved with this, but I’m sure it’s in the hundreds of thousands.’”
Dr. Leo Sprinkle is one of the early pioneers of UFO research and has investigated some of the best-known UFO abductions including the Carl Higdon case and the Larson-Stafford-Smith case. Sprinkle acknowledges the fact that there may be “hundreds of thousands” of people who have been abducted and have no conscious memory of the experience.
Jacques Vallee is an astronomer and author of a dozen UFO books. Although he remains skeptical of the extraterrestrial theory of UFO origins, he does admit that UFO encounters are much more common than most people realize. As he says, “...the UFOs, if they are spacecraft engaged in a general survey of our plant, must have landed here no fewer than three million times in two decades.”
The late Karla Turner Ph.D. broke new ground with her two books about the abduction phenomenon. Like most people who research abductions, she came to realize that they were deceptively common. As she says, “There are many [abductees]...from the response to Into The Fringe, it sometimes seemed that abduction experiences were becoming virtually epidemic.”
Edith Fiore Ph.D., author of Encounters, writes, “Approximately one-half of the people in the United States believe in UFOs and one out of eleven thinks they have seen them. Not only do people believe in the existence of UFOs, many accept that thousands among us have been abducted by extraterrestrials.”
British researcher Jenny Randles agrees that there are large numbers of abductees that remain largely hidden from public scrutiny. As she says, “The total number of victims of this ‘delusion’ is growing annually at an escalating rate, such that it now borders on epidemic proportions. We already have detailed accounts from hundreds of witnesses who tell of their ordeal. We suspect thousands of others, hiding in the shadows for fear of ridicule or public reaction to such an admission.”
Another leading British researcher, Philip Mantle, writes that abductions “are being reported in ever increasing numbers today...abduction reports run into an astonishing tens of thousands.”
Nick Pope worked for the British Ministry of Defense in the capacity of a UFO investigator. Says Pope, “A fundamental part of any scientific analysis is measurement. The problem with abductions is that it is extremely difficult to evaluate the scope of the phenomenon. Although there are several thousand cases which have come to light around the world and have been subjected to detailed scrutiny, this is likely to be the tip of the iceberg.”
David Webb, the cochairman of MUFON, has asserted his believe that “one out of eight” UFO witnesses may have been abducted.
According to the 1973 Gallup poll, 15 million people believe they have seen UFOs. Now, if 15 million people have seen UFOs, and one out of every eight have been abducted, then one could conclude that 1,850,000 people have been abducted!
In 1990, I wrote an article for the MUFON UFO JOURNAL which presented the argument that UFO abductions occur to one out of every forty people. At the time, this idea was supported by only a few other researchers, and by the results of my own investigations. In about one years time, I uncovered more than sixty UFO reports, and investigated thirty of them. Approximately five of these cases turned out to be abductions. And considering I included about two hundred people in my initial survey, the figure of “one in forty” seemed conservative.
As any researcher will tell you, most people do not report their encounters, especially an abduction. In the hundreds of interviews I have done of UFO experiences, only two reported their sightings to an official agency. Ninety-eight percents of the encounters went unreported. So any official estimates of the number of UFO encounters is vastly underestimated.
Then, in 1991, the most extensive study to measure the actual number of abductees was conducted by the well-known Roper organization. Nearly six thousand people were surveyed, each being asked key questions that would reveal the red-flags of a possible abduction. The results of the survey were staggering.
The Roper poll found that approximately “one out of every fifty adult Americans may have had abduction experiences.” This works out to approximately two percent of the population of the United States, or nearly four million people.
After the results of the survey was released, the editor of the MUFON UFO JOURNAL wrote me a kind note, remarking on how closely my article had come to predicting the survey.
If UFO abductions are as common as I think they are -- as Hynek, Hopkins, Strieber and other leading researchers think they are -- than the implications are incredible. For example, in all probability, if you have not had an abduction experience, you have met someone who has. You are more likely to be abducted by aliens than get bit a shark, struck by lighting or die of a drowning or in an earthquake. Many people are aware of the threat of robbery, rape and murder, but most don’t consider UFO abductions to be an equal or greater threat.
If one in forty people have been abducted, than the influence of UFOs on human society cannot be underestimated. With that many abductees roaming around and more being made every day, it is only a matter of time before the subject receives the kind of attention it deserves. Serious.
One In Forty: The UFO Epidemic can be ordered at your local bookstore, or is available at online bookstores such as amazon.com & barnes&noble.com.
True Accounts of Close Encounters with UFOs
By Preston Dennett
Most UFO books cover the same old cases over and over. Dennett’s investigations, however, are totally original firsthand cases. One In Forty – The UFO Epidemic presents more than 40 brand new firsthand cases of UFO contact of all types including: unexplained lights, UFO beams of light, face-to-face alien encounters, intelligent fireballs, silent metallic saucers, missing-time UFO abductions, friendly contactee accounts, spiritual UFOs, Bigfoot encounters, poltergeist-UFO cases, even the cases of the cover-up of UFO crash retrievals. Each case is told in the witnesses’ own words and is fully illustrated by awared-winning UFO artist, Kesara. In this massive 342 page hard-cover volume, you will read about the following exciting encounters:
--three ladies encounter a metallic disk hovering at tree-top level which follows them home over their car. All three experience a period of missing time.
--three men chase a UFO across the San Fernando Valley, passing several other cars chasing the same mysterious object.
--a group of climbers encounter a mysterious object at the peak of Mount San Gorgonio.
--a gentleman claims to have seen hundreds of UFOs on a regular basis, and he can prove it.
--two men experience missing time when a UFO lands next to them on the freeway, striking them with a powerful beam of light, completely altering the course of their lives.
--two ladies encounter a UFO which plays computer-like music. The object later returns and strikes one of the witnesses with a beam of light, rendering her temporarily paralyzed.
--a young lady confronts two gray-type aliens face-to-face, whiling walking near her home.
--an alarming series of abductions which spread like a contagion among a small group of friends.
--an incredible daylight sighting involving literally thousands of witnesses.
--three sisters see a large metallic UFO hovering outside their bedroom, while at the same time the entire neighborhood is besieged with UFO calls.
--a family watches as three metallic disks hover over their strawberry field. One of the witnesses reports a telepathic communication with the object.
--a gentleman accidentally stumbles using lights and lasers to repeatedly initiate UFO contact.
--two sisters experience hundreds of bedroom visitations by a gray-type alien. Years later, the aliens return for one of their children.
--a gentleman encounters Bigfoot, and then the very next night, encounters a UFO.
--a family starts seeing UFOs, which escalate into a series of terrifying UFO abductions, and culminating in a baby presentation and an alien genetic experiment that evidently went horribly wrong.
--two cases of government retrievals of crashed UFOs, and reverse engineering of alien technology.
These are just a few of the exciting cases you will find in One In Forty: The UFO Epidemic. Dennett remains one of the few researchers who continues to publish brand new original cases. The book also contains an analysis of the government involvement with UFOs and a condensed history of the most popular UFO incidents in history.
ONE IN FORTY: THE UFO EPIDEMIC
True Accounts of Close Encounters with UFOs
By Preston E. Dennett
Artwork by Kesara
Contents
1. How the Investigation Began….1
2. The UFO That Followed a Car….9
3. UFO Chase In Reseda….19
4. UFO Over San Gorgonio Peak….27
5. Glowing Objects Over Van Nuys….31
6. Alien Encounter at Stagg Street Elementary School….37
7. Cavorting Stars Over Palm Springs….47
8. Mark and the UFOs….51
9. The Green Glow in the Mojave Desert….57
10. UFO Landing on Interstate Five….61
11. The Musical UFO….71
12. The Chatsworth UFO Epidemic….79
13. Multicolored Lights in the Forest….89
14. Metallic Disk Over Neptune….93
15. The Belle Vernon UFO Invasion….99
16. The Great San Fernando Valley Fireball….105
17. The Strawberry Field UFOs….111
18. The Blueridge Mothership Sighting….117
19. UFO or Poltergeist?….121
20. A Cluster of Colored Lights….127
21. A Tiny UFO….131
22. Calling All UFOs!….135
23. The Muddy Man….145
24. The Repeater Problem….169
25. The Spiraling Star….177
26. The Terminal Tower Sighting….181
27. A Case of High Strangeness….185
28. The Pacoima UFO Display….191
29. Is Bigfoot an Alien?….197
30. They Flew All Night!….207
31. Thousands of People Saw It!….211
32. Another “Unsolved Mystery.”….215
33. The Robinson Family UFO Siege….221
34. A Genetic Experiment….243
35. The Uninvestigated Reports….257
36. The Identified Sightings….265
37. The Psychic Connection….269
38. The Testimony of a Lieutenant Colonel….275
39. Secret Government Bases and Crashed UFOs….279
40. UFO Politics….287
41. Alternate Theories….303
42. A Condensed History of UFOs….309
43. Conclusions….317
Epilogue….331
Selected Bibliography….333
Published by Kroshka Books, c1997.
Three Incredible Close Encounters
by Preston Dennett
(excerpted from the book “One in Forty: The UFO Epidemic” published by Kroshka)
After investigating UFOs for more than ten years, I have uncovered cases of virtually every type. I am constantly amazed by the huge number of reports and the high credibility of the witnesses. It is extremely important for witnesses to report their encounters because each case contains new information. Let’s face it, UFOs are still a mystery. We don’t know who they are, how they get here, or what their agenda is. In fact, some feel that we are still at the stage of trying to prove their existence!
The evidence that UFOs are real is, I think, overwhelming, and would convince any reasonable person. Beyond that, it’s anyone’s guess. The UFO phenomenon is so vast and bizarre that it is difficult for any single theory to account for all the evidence. Some cases just seem to defy any rational explanation.
What follows are three cases which I think show some of the strangeness and complexity of the UFO phenomenon. All are taken from my book, One In Forty -- The UFO Epidemic: True Accounts of Close Encounters With UFOs, published by Kroshka Books.
THE STRAWBERRY FIELD UFOS
Some UFO encounters are so close, they leave absolutely no room for misidentification. The following case is a perfect example. Sally Sanders (not her real name) was only nine years old when she had her encounter. She was working with her parents in a strawberry field in Livingston, California. The family had immigrated from the Philippines, and their livelihood depended on the prosperity of their strawberry farm. The family had therefore spent many hours under the open sky, picking the ripest strawberries.
Then, one clear summer afternoon in 1953, Sally and her family became witness to an amazing close up UFO sighting right over their strawberry field. Sally vividly remembers how the whole ordeal began.
They were all busy picking the berries when seeming out of nowhere, three small saucer-shaped objects swooped silently out of the sky and hovered low to the ground only a few hundred feet away. The saucers were very small, only about twenty feet wide and ten feet thick. They were a polished silver color, and the only sound they made was a soft whirring noise. As they hovered, they seemed to wobble.
Sally started at them in awe. As she says, “My dad had a strawberry field and it was close to the river. We were all working at the time. And this thing didn’t make a lot of noise, it was like a soft whirring sound...but it must have been the sound that made us look up, because we were busy. I had the impression we all pretty much looked up at the same time. It’s like, all of a sudden, it just appeared. And we looked up and everybody was surprised...I saw three of them. I’ll tell you, one was pretty close to us -- really close. It looked so close, like it could have been within fifty to a hundred feet of us. The other two, were spread out in a sort of semi-circle. There was a gas station about three miles down the road, and it looked like the last one in the semi-circle might have been over in that area. They all just sat there. It seemed like forever. We were scared. It was almost like whispering. We were looking up at it...it was really weird. It’s like you don’t know what to do; it was right there. It was so close. It looked so close.”
This case is interesting because the witnesses knew instantly that they were seeing alien spacecraft. There was simply no other explanation. As Sally says, “It was the old saucer-shape that a lot of people talk about...they didn’t look like they were that big. No windows, not nothing. It was all a silver-steel color, completely closed. They almost seemed to move in a slow whirl, a very slow whirl, and they stayed in one spot. It was like you could see it whirling around, from what I can recall. Because it was just staying there. It stayed there. It stayed there. It stayed there for -- it seemed like twenty minutes...The reason I have a feeling that it was probably that long is because we talked about it. We looked down. We looked up. I don’t recall having the feeling of wanting to run. I don’t know if it’s because there was no place to run to. I guess after a few minutes, we all calmed down.”
Many questions raced through Sally’s mind as she watched the objects. She couldn’t help but wonder what their intention was. Or who was inside. As Sally says, “They were small. I still to this day have the feeling that it would hold no more than one or two people. It just didn’t look that big...but it was awful close, and I knew it was really small.”
The entire family was perplexed by the strange behavior of the UFOs. Why were they hovering in one place so close to the ground? What were they doing? Sally and her family continued working as best as they could, considering that three UFOs were hovering above them. As Sally says, “We just went and started working. We weren’t working really well now. But it was like we got the impression that nothing was really going to happen. Because they were there so long, it was like the fear had pretty much passed. When they left, they all left at the same time. They all moved at the same time. And when they left, it was really quiet and whispering, really soft and gentle. I mean, planes are loud. This thing, when it came up, it was so quiet that when we looked up, it was already there. So we didn’t hear it until it was already there. It was really quiet.”
So far, Sally’s sighting is important because it displays so many of the classic UFO trademarks including the disk-shape, the wobbly hovering motion, the quiet whirring noise, the silvery metallic surface. There is little possibility that misperception is involved simply because the sighting occurred under ideal conditions. The witnesses were able to observe the objects on a clear sunny day from a close vantage point for a period of twenty minutes. This was no fleeting glimpse.
However, Sally hesitantly mentioned another detail of the sighting which she thought was strange -- something that should be regarded as highly significant. As Sally says, “I remember feeling, thinking they had mental telepathy so that we wouldn’t be afraid...even at that time, I knew it was different. And it was kind of scary. I don’t know if they were actually communicating to us, ‘It’s okay.’ They might have been. I remember thinking that in my head, but I don’t know if that’s what happened or not.”
Unknown to Sally, many witnesses have described the exact same message from UFO occupants. In fact, the phrase, “Do not be afraid,” is among the most common messages given by extraterrestrials.
Sally’s sighting is an investigator’s dream. It is the kind of sighting that just cannot be dismissed as a hallucination or misperception. The objects were too close, and they stayed there for too long. The incident was witnessed by at least four people in broad daylight under perfect conditions.
Many investigators believe these sighting of metallic disks strongly support the extraterrestrial spaceship theory of UFOs. What else could they be? It was by all definitions and craft, but yet, remains totally unknown. It seems safe to make the assessment that Sally and her family witnessed three extraterrestrial spacecraft hovering at the edge of their strawberry field. It is the single explanation which best fits the facts.
What aliens would be doing in a strawberry field remains a mystery.
THE PACOIMA UFO DISPLAY
Another puzzling and dramatic UFO encounter took place in Pacoima, California, over a densely populated suburb. Again, this was no fleeting glimpse of an unexplained light. In this case, the encounter lasted for over an hour. There were several reliable witnesses, and the witnesses were able to view the object through a pair of high-powered binoculars, virtually eliminating any possibilities of misperception.
As they watched the object over their home, it began to change into different shapes, flaring in brightness. It darted around, performing maneuvers that are impossible for conventional aircraft. It moved close to the witnesses, who could easily discern what papered to be lights or portholes around the circumference of the object. At one point, the object actually ejected a number of smaller UFOs which hovered beside it. It was then that the frightened witnesses considered calling the police.
The whole ordeal began innocently enough when the Tanouye family drove to the nearby home of a relative. The family of four was in the car when they first noticed a strange star-like object hovering in the sky.
Ron Tanouye was in the back seat and his father was driving. It was eight o’clock in the winter of 1968, and the sky was dark and clear. Says Ron, “My father happened to notice this really bright light. We thought it was a star or something in the sky, but there was something different about it. So he said, ‘Kind of keep an eye on that.’ So we went to my grandfather’s house, and he wasn’t home. So we turned around and went back home, and we still kept an eye on this bright light. And we got home.
“My dad had these large binoculars,” Ron continues. “It’s one of those that he got off one of those battleships during World War II. And it has pretty good range; you can see the craters on the moon. So we mounted that up onto the brick wall and watched the thin for a while. We each took turns -- me, my brother, my father, my mother.
“So basically, as we looked through the binoculars, it was very bright, almost piercing kind of, to the eye. But at times, it would almost kind of lose its brightness, and it would change shape at the same time. And most of the time it was too bright to even make a shape out. It was just like a bright light. But when it did get a duller color, it would be almost like an oval with two end points, and it would change shape. It would change to that shape, then it would stay there for a while. And then it would turn back and almost be like...you know, the only way I can explain it is that it was kind of like -- when it was really bright, it was probably on its broadside where all the light was illuminating off of it. The other way, I don’t know -- it kind of twisted to a different direction, and the light was emitting the opposite way, so we didn’t see all this light coming off.”
At this point, the Tanouye family was wondering if the object could be a balloon or something conventional. Then, without warning, the object did something that removed all doubt that it was unconventional. As Ron says, “But then, something funny happened. As you’re watching this thing -- this object -- it would make a vertical movement, I mean, almost straight up from its position, a hundred-eighty degrees either way, up or down, and then a ninety-degree angle you know -- jet to the left or the right. It was just so quick. I mean, this was amazing!
“And then it seemed like it was getting closer. The object was getting closer and closer, but by the way the shape of the object was looking. And it got to the point where you could see the bright light coming out what was kind of like, maybe portholes or something, but brighter light coming out of certain areas of this object.
“So we kept watching it for a while. My mother got bored. My brother got kind of bored. So they went inside the house. My father and I were sitting out there looking at this thing. My father was looking at it, and I was just looking at it with my naked eye. And then I see this little streak of light come out from behind it. And my dad said, ‘Did you see that?’ Because he was looking through the binoculars.
“And I said, ‘Yeah, what was that?’
“He said, ‘Something came out of it, and it’s staying to the left of it. Take a look.’
“So I took the binoculars. He said, ‘See! To the left of it! There’s another bright light!’
“It was very small compared to this other large one, and it was just stationary, kind of off to the left of it. So I watched it for a while, and it kind of stayed there. I don’t remember if my father was looking through them [the binoculars] of if it was I, but another one of those things came out of the object and stayed off to the side of it. I don’t remember which side, but the first one went off to the left, and the other one was probably up above or maybe to the right. I don’t remember, but there were two of these little things, and then this big one.
“And then we just kept watching it, and I started getting kind of scared. I was only seven years old then, and I was getting a little bit skittish I guess, and kept wondering if these guys were going to land here and take me away or something like that. Here I am starting to get scared of this thing, even though it was far off. So I ran inside and I told my mom, ‘Call the police! Call the police!’
“My brother, he was getting kind of scared because I was all excited. So I ran back outside, told my dad to come back in. ‘Come in! Come in!’
“He says, ‘No, no, no, no. I want to watch this some more. One of them disappeared, one of those little things!’
“That got me kind of curious, so I went back and looked through the binoculars again, and sure enough, one of them had disappeared. The first one disappeared. The other one was still hovering wherever it was. He said, ‘I was looking at it, and then it was gone.’
“So here is this big one and this other little one. I could see the big one just by looking at it with my naked eye. Then all of a sudden, it was gone. Just boom! Gone! And I asked my dad, ‘Where did it go?’
“He said, ‘It just started to fade out. It just disappeared. It was gone in a matter of seconds.”
After hovering above them for more than an hour, the UFO was finally gone. It left as mysteriously as it had arrived, leaving Ron and his family thoroughly impressed. As he says, “It was enough to scare me. It was enough that I’ll remember it for the rest of my life. I don’t disbelieve in UFOs or anything. I believe in them. I believe there is something there. I saw it...and since then, you know, every time I see something in the sky, I’ll take my dad’s binoculars and look at it.”
A CASE OF HIGH STRANGENESS
The more you study the UFO phenomenon, the more it becomes apparent that there is no single simple explanation that can account for all the different types of UFO encounters. In fact, some cases reach such a high level of strangeness that they seem to defy rational explanation.
On October 14, 1990, at nine o’clock in the evening, art designer Arni Whyler was plunged headlong into one of these bizarre cases. The case involved several strange phenomena including precognition, various unexplained lights, physiological effects, and finally a full-blown journey into what has been often labeled by UFO investigators as the “oz factor.”
The case itself began with a bizarre coincidence. In late September of 1990, I interviewed Arni Whyler concerning previous UFO sightings. After conducting the initial interview, I told Arni that I would call him back if I had any further questions.
Two weeks later, Arni was the one to call me back. The reason for his call? He had just encountered yet another UFO. On this occasion, it was outside his home in Pasadena, California.
The encounter began with a precognitive flash, a sudden impulse to look at a certain portion of the sky. As Arni says, “I was in the living room and all the lights were out. My brother had fallen asleep on the living room couch. And I got this funny feeling I should look out the window. I don’t know why I got the funny feeling I should look out the window. But I got up and went over to the fireplace. And I looked out the window, and a spot of light appeared over the house. If you stretched your hand at arm’s length, and you held a quarter, it would be the size of a quarter. And it was round. It went off from east to west, off to the horizon line. It shrank from the size of a quarter to a pin-point of light, and it also changed color from a warm white to a very, very bright intense blue-white light.”
After the light disappeared, Arni jumped back, totally surprised. Had he just seen another UFO, he wondered. He heard himself saying out loud, “Oh, my god! Oh, my god!” over and over. He whirled around and walked to his brother who was asleep on the couch. By now, his brother had woken up and asked Arni, “What’s the matter?”
Arni said, “I saw something in the sky!”
Arni was just beginning to explain in detail what he saw when suddenly, something bizarre happened -- something Arni would never fully comprehend. It began with a strange wave of light that swept over the house. Says Arni, “I was facing to the east and a glow of light...how to I explain this? It was not like it was from a helicopter because that’s projected down on a beam. But a glow went around the house, and it went from the east side of the house like a wave of light, to the west side of the house. A white light, but it wasn’t a bright, bright white light, and it wasn’t a mist or anything like that. It didn’t seem to have a source like a beam. It was just like a wave of light. And this wave of light went over the house, and I got this pop! in my ears. And everything went very, very quiet. And my brother was waking up and he said, ‘What’s going on? What’s going on?’
“I said, ‘I’m going outside.’ And I went outside and there was absolutely no sound. The crickets had stopped making noise! It was absolutely silent. I got this feeling -- well, I get the same feeling in the winery. My brother and I have a winery. And when you walk into the back of the winery, there’s so much liquid that you feel almost womb-like. It’s very cloistered, very comfortable, almost like someone put their arms around you and hugged you.”
Arni’s experience was quickly escalating in strangeness. What puzzled him the most, however, was the wave of light that swept over the house. As Arni says, “It was so odd. It was not a wave of light. It was a glow that went from the west side of the house -- and the house is mostly windows -- it was on both sides of the house. And it was as though you took a donut -- a gigantic donut of light -- and ran it across the house, so that it glowed only around the house, not down by the street. I don’t think it was a reflection of cars. It was not that bright. It had a vibration more of candlelight, but not as much as incandescent light. Have you ever seen the greenish light that glows from algae? Well it was that kind of glow, but it was more intense...it was easily visible, and it illuminated all of the leaves and the foliage around the house, but nowhere else. And it took at least two seconds to pass over the house.
“It was really strange,” Arni continues. “I’ve never had an experience like that. I’ve seen things from afar, but I just got the funny feeling that something was really up close. I don’t understand it.”
One of the most interesting aspects of Arni’s experience is the total lack of sound. This is one of the earmarks of the “oz factor.” Arni knew that something strange was happening, but he didn’t understand what. As he says, “My ears felt like they were going up another level in height. It was as though I had gone up to about five thousand feet, but it didn’t hurt. If you take your fingers, and you put your fingers in your ear a little bit, that’s what it felt like. It had that sort of silent feeling. I could not hear the refrigerator in the kitchen, or my brother asleep, or the traffic noise. It was absolutely silent until I got to the street, and then the normal noises appeared.”
Another intriguing aspect of Arni’s encounter is his premonition of the event. This bizarre detail turns up in account after account. For some reason, people are overcome with an impulse to look at a certain place in the sky, and then a UFO appears. Arni is unable to explain it. As he says, ‘Something...I had the feeling that I should get up and go look out the window. And there was absolutely no reason for me to get up because everything was quiet. My brother was asleep. I had blown out the candles in the living room, and I was just sitting in the dark, listening to the night sounds. And all of a sudden I just got this feeling that I should get up and look out the window. Not somebody calling to me or anything like that. But I just got the impulse to get up and go look out the window. And when I did that, I saw this glow of light.”
Even more puzzling and somewhat rarer are the physiological effects reported by Arni. The ear-popping was only one such effect. Another wasn’t discovered until after the experience was over. Only then did Arni realize that when he closed his eyes, he could still see the image of the first UFO burned into his retina. As Arni says, “On my retina, the blue light, when it got to be a fine pin-point towards the horizon line, it burned the color into my retina, so every time I closed my eyes, I could see the image of what I saw in the sky.
“It was a perfectly round disk, a little oval, but not too much oval, that shrunk. The other thing that was strange was that it did change color. It went from a very warm rosy white to an absolutely intense blue. If you turn on the gas on the burners and look into the very blue of the burner, it was bluer than that. It was more vivid that that. And then I saw it on my retina for at least two or three hours thereafter. And my brother, he’s a biochemist. He said that it must have burned out a rod or a cone in the retina of my eye. That portion of the light must have been so intense that it destroyed a portion of my retina.”
How does one categorize such an experience as this? There is little doubt that it falls somewhere under that vast UFO umbrella. Arni is certain that the sighting is not easily explained. As he says, “I’ve seen shooting stars and they act much differently than this.”
The entire experience has left Arni baffled. He has no idea what any of it means or how to explain it. He only knows that he saw something. He had no missing time, nor did he see any entities. And yet, he had the strange feeling that something was close. But what?
ONE IN FORTY: THE UFO EPIDEMIC
When I first began investigating UFOs in 1986, I had no idea how many people were having the UFO experience. I assumed it was extremely rare. I was wrong. After surveying the major researchers, and conducting my own survey of experiencers, I came up with the figure that one in forty people have had an onboard UFO experience. This may seem like a lot, but actually, two years later, the Roper Poll came up with the figure, “one in fifty.”
The above three encounters are only a tiny portion of the cases I uncovered in my first few years of research. It quickly became clear to me that UFOs were a hidden epidemic.
I found out that my brother and his friends had chased a UFO across the San Fernando Valley. I found out that my coworker, her friend and her mother experienced missing time when a UFO followed them home from the library. I found out that my sister-in-law had a face-to-face encounter with a gray-type alien. I found out that a friend had experienced a terrifying missing-time encounter while driving with his friend in the middle of the night. I discovered that yet another friend and her sister had had a series of hundreds bedroom encounters with a gray-type alien. I found out that a co-worker and her entire family had an ordeal with UFOs that began with simple sightings and ended up with a terrifying abduction scenario that seemed straight out of science fiction.
And remember, these were all people I knew and trusted. Most had kept their encounters secret for fear of ridicule and disbelief. Still, the encounters kept flooding in. An entire family who saw a cluster of colored lights that seemed to be searching the neighborhood. A gentleman who was able to use strong lights to call UFOs down out of the sky on several different occasions. Two teen-agers who had the most terrifying experience of their life when an “intelligent fireball” swooped down low over their heads.
These are just a few the encounters I investigated that have made me realize that the UFO epidemic is spreading un-controlled.
UFO encounters were once thought to be extremely rare events. However, today many leading researchers have reversed their opinions and say that the experience is quite common. But is this true? And exactly how common are UFO encounters? What exactly are your chances experiencing a UFO abduction?
The late Dr. J. Allen Hynek was considered by many to be one of the world’s leading UFO investigators. He worked for many years as the Air Force’s Astronomical consultant to Project Blue Book and eventually wrote two books that have become classics in the field. When asked by another researcher how many people Hynek thought have been abducted inside of UFOs, Hynek replied, “One out of forty.”
That may seem like a high number, but consider the words of Budd Hopkins, who has specialized in the subject of UFO abductions. Hopkins first became concerned about the possibility that many people had been abducted when he discovered an abductee who had no conscious memory whatsoever of being abducted other than a vague fear of a certain stretch of highway. Says Hopkins, “This opened up the possibility that the experience, whatever it was, had been suppressed in others, and that abduction was widespread.”
Because Kilburn had no memory of his abduction, Hopkins concluded, “This meant that almost anyone can have suffered such an experience and yet be totally unaware of it for all practical purposes. What before was thought of as a very rare event might be infinitely more common than anyone had supposed.”
In his landmark book, Missing Time, Budd Hopkins states, “I have described abductions as constituting an epidemic; in fact, we have no idea how many such kidnappings may already have taken place, but I believe there are vastly more than the two hundred or so isolated cases which have been investigated.” Because most people don’t report their experiences, Hopkins states, “We can logically theorize that there may be tens of thousands of Americans whose encounters have never been revealed.”
Pioneering UFO research Don Worley has been investigating UFOs for more than thirty years, and has quietly amassed a mountain of data concerning UFO abductions. “How many alien abductions are occurring?” asks Worley. “Estimates run from the hundreds of thousands to many millions. Important in the total is the fact that there is an unknown number of citizens who do not suspect that they are part of the game. I have accidentally found some of these, so I’m convinced that the total in this category might shock us.”
David Jacobs’ book, Secret Life, was the first to systematically study the UFO abduction phenomenon in its various stages. Jacobs was impressed by Hopkins’ research, and by the rising tide of people who claim to have had the experience. Says Jacobs, “UFO researchers began to realize that the scope of the phenomenon was far larger than anyone had imagined...by the mid-1980s, there were so many of these reports that researchers could not keep up with them.”
Like Hopkins and Worley, Jacobs is also convinced that abductions are widespread. Says Jacobs, “At first it appeared to be an isolated phenomenon that had occurred to just a few people around the country. That was wrong. We have evidence of thousands of abductions, and that is perhaps only a small fraction of the number. An unpublished survey that I conducted of more than 1,200 at Temple University who answered a written questionnaire suggest that as many as 5.5 percent of them have potentially had abduction experiences. Similarly, a study done of 275 respondents to a magazine’s survey searching for potential abductees came up with 6 percent. Projecting that number to the population as a whole yields to as many as 15 million people in the United States who might have had abduction Experiences. Let us assume that this number is ridiculously high, and that abductions are only to one half of one percent of the population. If that is true, we are dealing with over a million possible abductions in the United States.”
Whitley Strieber is arguably America’s most well-known UFO abductee. And with five best-selling UFO books, he has been at the cutting edge of UFO research. Says Strieber, “I will tell you this: there are a lot of people who have had this experience -- a lot more than even the UFO community realizes. I am now poring through something like 5,000 letters -- I often get 40 and 50 a day, even now. People, again and again, write ‘a friend of mine told me about you and now I can write and tell somebody what happened to me’ and it goes on and on. I don’t know how many people have been involved with this, but I’m sure it’s in the hundreds of thousands.’”
Dr. Leo Sprinkle is one of the early pioneers of UFO research and has investigated some of the best-known UFO abductions including the Carl Higdon case and the Larson-Stafford-Smith case. Sprinkle acknowledges the fact that there may be “hundreds of thousands” of people who have been abducted and have no conscious memory of the experience.
Jacques Vallee is an astronomer and author of a dozen UFO books. Although he remains skeptical of the extraterrestrial theory of UFO origins, he does admit that UFO encounters are much more common than most people realize. As he says, “...the UFOs, if they are spacecraft engaged in a general survey of our plant, must have landed here no fewer than three million times in two decades.”
The late Karla Turner Ph.D. broke new ground with her two books about the abduction phenomenon. Like most people who research abductions, she came to realize that they were deceptively common. As she says, “There are many [abductees]...from the response to Into The Fringe, it sometimes seemed that abduction experiences were becoming virtually epidemic.”
Edith Fiore Ph.D., author of Encounters, writes, “Approximately one-half of the people in the United States believe in UFOs and one out of eleven thinks they have seen them. Not only do people believe in the existence of UFOs, many accept that thousands among us have been abducted by extraterrestrials.”
British researcher Jenny Randles agrees that there are large numbers of abductees that remain largely hidden from public scrutiny. As she says, “The total number of victims of this ‘delusion’ is growing annually at an escalating rate, such that it now borders on epidemic proportions. We already have detailed accounts from hundreds of witnesses who tell of their ordeal. We suspect thousands of others, hiding in the shadows for fear of ridicule or public reaction to such an admission.”
Another leading British researcher, Philip Mantle, writes that abductions “are being reported in ever increasing numbers today...abduction reports run into an astonishing tens of thousands.”
Nick Pope worked for the British Ministry of Defense in the capacity of a UFO investigator. Says Pope, “A fundamental part of any scientific analysis is measurement. The problem with abductions is that it is extremely difficult to evaluate the scope of the phenomenon. Although there are several thousand cases which have come to light around the world and have been subjected to detailed scrutiny, this is likely to be the tip of the iceberg.”
David Webb, the cochairman of MUFON, has asserted his believe that “one out of eight” UFO witnesses may have been abducted.
According to the 1973 Gallup poll, 15 million people believe they have seen UFOs. Now, if 15 million people have seen UFOs, and one out of every eight have been abducted, then one could conclude that 1,850,000 people have been abducted!
In 1990, I wrote an article for the MUFON UFO JOURNAL which presented the argument that UFO abductions occur to one out of every forty people. At the time, this idea was supported by only a few other researchers, and by the results of my own investigations. In about one years time, I uncovered more than sixty UFO reports, and investigated thirty of them. Approximately five of these cases turned out to be abductions. And considering I included about two hundred people in my initial survey, the figure of “one in forty” seemed conservative.
As any researcher will tell you, most people do not report their encounters, especially an abduction. In the hundreds of interviews I have done of UFO experiences, only two reported their sightings to an official agency. Ninety-eight percents of the encounters went unreported. So any official estimates of the number of UFO encounters is vastly underestimated.
Then, in 1991, the most extensive study to measure the actual number of abductees was conducted by the well-known Roper organization. Nearly six thousand people were surveyed, each being asked key questions that would reveal the red-flags of a possible abduction. The results of the survey were staggering.
The Roper poll found that approximately “one out of every fifty adult Americans may have had abduction experiences.” This works out to approximately two percent of the population of the United States, or nearly four million people.
After the results of the survey was released, the editor of the MUFON UFO JOURNAL wrote me a kind note, remarking on how closely my article had come to predicting the survey.
If UFO abductions are as common as I think they are -- as Hynek, Hopkins, Strieber and other leading researchers think they are -- than the implications are incredible. For example, in all probability, if you have not had an abduction experience, you have met someone who has. You are more likely to be abducted by aliens than get bit a shark, struck by lighting or die of a drowning or in an earthquake. Many people are aware of the threat of robbery, rape and murder, but most don’t consider UFO abductions to be an equal or greater threat.
If one in forty people have been abducted, than the influence of UFOs on human society cannot be underestimated. With that many abductees roaming around and more being made every day, it is only a matter of time before the subject receives the kind of attention it deserves. Serious.
One In Forty: The UFO Epidemic can be ordered at your local bookstore, or is available at online bookstores such as amazon.com & barnes&noble.com.