Tag: ET

December 17, 1900: Getting in Touch with Our Outer Selves

Posted on by Richard Daybell

December 17 was an historically busy day in the world of ufology and marsmessagethings extra-terrestrial. While we think of the 1950s as the real age of interplanetary happenings, folks had long been preoccupied by the possibility (or perhaps the certainty) of life beyond planet Earth.

Wasn’t it likely that other heavenly bodies were populated? And wasn’t it a given, observing Earthbound mankind, that beings out there were far more intelligent than us?

Back in the nineteenth century, there was much speculation about the inhabitants of other planets.  Certainly, intelligent beings might live on the Moon, Mars, and Venus; but since travel there was difficult at best we settled for the possibility of somehow communicating with the ETs, itself a poser since there was no radio and the postal service was pitifully land-bound. We were sort of stuck back in the technology of smoke signals.

Carl Friedrich Gauss suggested drawing a giant triangle and three squares, the Pythagoras, on the Siberian tundra, ten miles wide.  Joseph Johann Littrow proposed using the Sahara as a blackboard, filling giant trenches with water, then pouring kerosene on top of the water and lighting it to create different messages.  Using this method, a different signal could be sent every night. The inventor Charles Cros, convinced that pinpoints of light observed on Mars and Venus were large cities, spent years trying to get funding for a giant mirror with which to signal Martians and Venusians.  Astronomer Franz von Gruithuisen saw a giant city surrounded by family farms on the moon. He also saw evidence of life on Venus, and went so far as to suggest that the clouds shrouding the planet were caused by a great fire festival put on by the inhabitants to celebrate their new emperor.

On December 17, 1900, amid beaucoup de publicité,  the French Academie des Sciences announced the Prix Guzman, a 100,000 franc prize to be given to anyone who might find the means “of communicating with a star and of receiving a response.” Communication with Mars was specifically exempted because it would not be a difficult enough challenge.   Although no communications followed, nearly a century of alien sightings, encounters, and abductions did.  But then, on December 17, 1969, the United States Air Force pulled the plug, closing its Project Blue Book and concluding that no evidence of extraterrestrial spaceships existed behind the thousands of UFO sightings. And yet, on the evening of that very day, in full view of millions, an alien sighting occurred right on the television sets in living rooms everywhere, as Tiny Tim married “Miss Vicki” on The Tonight Show.

AUGUST 21, 1955: NIGHT OF THE LITTLE GREEN MEN

Posted on by Richard Daybell

Twenty years before the Allagash Maine Incident (August 20), some Kentuckians had their own alien encounter. This was a legitimate red state encounter, no crazy New England liberals here.  Just salt of the earth, alien-fearing folk living in a farmhouse near Hopkinsville in Christian County.

     Seven good Christian County residents claimed to have been terrorized by a gang of green creatures – gremlins or goblins or maybe leprechauns – whatever they were, they were foreigners. The infidels were three feet tall, with upright pointed ears, thin wobbly limbs , long arms and claw-like hands or talons. Although the creatures remained outside the farmhouse, they raised a real ruckus, popping up at windows and doorways like whack-a-moles, waking up the children and whipping them into a frenzy.

     The good but shaken farmfolk abandoned the house and hied to the local police station. Returning to the farmhouse with the sheriff and twenty officers of the law, they found it and the surrounding grounds in shambles and could still see strange lights and hear unworldly noises and eerie music. The police finished investigating around two a.m. and departed.  Wouldn’t you know it, as soon as the fuzz was gone, the diminutive devils returned and continued to harass the weary farm folk until nearly dawn. Although they were not hauled aboard a spaceship or subjected to impertinent physical examinations (as far as we know!), they were mightily inconvenienced.

     One more unsolved mystery in the spooky world of extraterrestrial mischief, but sadly there was no television program of that name to give it the As Seen on TV kiss of credence.

 

AUGUST 20, 1976: DROP YOUR PANTS AND SAY AH

Posted on by Richard Daybell

The Allagash incident was the Big Daddy of alien abductions, celebrated not only by UFO groupies but on television’s Unsolved Mysteries (and we all know As Seen on TV is the ultimate bona fides).

The Allagash Waterway is a scenic 65-mile long river flowing through the North Woods of Maine, celebrated by Henry David Thoreau.  It was August on the Allagash (that’s got to be a song, composers), and four young men, students of the Massachusetts School of Art, were in Maine to do a little canoeing and fishing. There were Jim and Jack who were twin brothers and their friends Chuck and Charlie who were not. They had paddled to a remote lake where they intended to spend the night. The fishing was lousy during the day, and they were low on food (being artists they didn’t trouble themselves with proper provisions), so they determined to try some night fishing. They built a huge campfire to guide them back to shore, then headed out in their canoe.

After a time on the lake, the four suddenly saw a light, a luminous sphere too big to be a star, too far above the trees to be their campfire. The sphere moved toward them, changing colors as it approached.

As it came closer, they saw that this flying sucker was over 80 feet in diameter, and they began to worry about its intentions. A brief debate on what to do next resulted in frantic paddling toward shore. The sphere was having none of it; it sent out a shaft of light beckoning them into its ghostly glow. When they didn’t respond, it just gobbled them right up.

The next thing Jim/Jack, Chuck and Charlie knew, they were standing on shore, staring at the sphere, as it gave them a goodbye wave of its beam, and disappeared with a Cheshire Cat grin into the nighttime sky. All this within a matter of minutes. But wait, their once roaring fire was now nothing but ashes, and the light of dawn was erasing the darkness. How could this be?

They evidently chalked it up to the beer or perhaps the pot, because each man went back to his own normal world. But then came the nightmares. Strange beings with long necks, large heads, and lidless metallic eyes that glowed performed inappropriate physical examinations, their insect-like hands with four fingers poking here, there and I beg your pardon! Each dreamer, Jim/Jack, Chuck or Charlie, had the same dream, and each being an artist, rendered a depiction of the encounter, though each presumably in his own medium.

Psychiatric examinations showed Jim/Jack, Chuck and Charlie to be mentally stable (as stable as an artist can be), and they all passed lie-detector tests. Did something from “out there” come down here on August 20, 1976? Will we ever know? And what about that night a few years later when Jim (or Jack) was parking with his girl friend in the Allagash woods and the next morning discovered a hook caught in the door handle of his car?

 

I believe alien life is quite common in the universe, although intelligent life is less so. Some say it has yet to appear on planet Earth.  – Stephen Hawking

 

So That’s What They Were Drinking

For folks in Maine who occasionally like to partake of a brew, Allagash is not so much an “incident” as it is a brewery in Portland featuring such selections as Allagash White, Tripel, Curieux, Barrel & Bean, and the oh-so-appropriate Allagash River Trip.  You can visit them at https://www.allagash.com/beer/.  Tell them Wretched Richard sent you and maybe I’ll get a free beer out of it.

 

December 17, 1900: Getting in Touch with Our Outer Selves

Posted on by Richard Daybell

December 17 was an historically busy day in the world of ufology and marsmessagethings extra-terrestrial. While we think of the 1950s as the real age of interplanetary happenings, folks had long been preoccupied by the possibility (or perhaps the certainty) of life beyond planet Earth.

Wasn’t it likely that other heavenly bodies were populated? And wasn’t it a given, observing Earthbound mankind, that beings out there were far more intelligent than us?

Back in the nineteenth century, there was much speculation about the inhabitants of other planets.  Certainly, intelligent beings might live on the Moon, Mars, and Venus; but since travel there was difficult at best we settled for the possibility of somehow communicating with the ETs, itself a poser since there was no radio and the postal service was pitifully land-bound. We were sort of stuck back in the technology of smoke signals.

 

Carl Friedrich Gauss suggested drawing a giant triangle and three squares, the Pythagoras, on the Siberian tundra, ten miles wide.  Joseph Johann Littrow proposed using the Sahara as a blackboard, filling giant trenches with water, then pouring kerosene on top of the water and lighting it to create different messages.  Using this method, a different signal could be sent every night. The inventor Charles Cros, convinced that pinpoints of light observed on Mars and Venus were large cities, spent years trying to get funding for a giant mirror with which to signal Martians and Venusians.  Astronomer Franz von Gruithuisen saw a giant city surrounded by family farms on the moon. He also saw evidence of life on Venus, and went so far as to suggest that the clouds shrouding the planet were caused by a great fire festival put on by the inhabitants to celebrate their new emperor.

On December 17, 1900, amid beaucoup de publicité,  the French Academie des Sciences announced the Prix Guzman, a 100,000 franc prize to be given to anyone who might find the means “of communicating with a star and of receiving a response.” Communication with Mars was specifically exempted because it would not be a difficult enough challenge.   Although no communications followed, nearly a century of alien sightings, encounters, and abductions did.  But then, on December 17, 1969, the United States Air Force pulled the plug, closing its Project Blue Book and concluding that no evidence of extraterrestrial spaceships existed behind the thousands of UFO sightings. And yet, on the evening of that very day, in full view of millions, an alien sighting occurred right on the television sets in living rooms everywhere, as Tiny Tim married “Miss Vicki” on The Tonight Show.

 

 

 

AUGUST 21, 1955: NIGHT OF THE LITTLE GREEN MEN

Posted on by Richard Daybell

Twenty years before the Allagash Maine Incident (August 20), some Kentuckians had their own alien encounter. This was a legitimate red state encounter, no crazy New England liberals here.  Just salt of the earth, alien-fearing folk living in a farmhouse near Hopkinsville in Christian County.

     Seven good Christian County residents claimed to have been terrorized by a gang of green creatures – gremlins or goblins or maybe leprechauns – whatever they were, they were foreigners. The infidels were three feet tall, with upright pointed ears, thin wobbly limbs , long arms and claw-like hands or talons. Although the creatures remained outside the farmhouse, they raised a real ruckus, popping up at windows and doorways like whack-a-moles, waking up the children and whipping them into a frenzy.

     The good but shaken farmfolk abandoned the house and hied to the local police station. Returning to the farmhouse with the sheriff and twenty officers of the law, they found it and the surrounding grounds in shambles and could still see strange lights and hear unworldly noises and eerie music. The police finished investigating around two a.m. and departed.  Wouldn’t you know it, as soon as the fuzz was gone, the diminutive devils returned and continued to harass the weary farm folk until nearly dawn. Although they were not hauled aboard a spaceship or subjected to impertinent physical examinations (as far as we know!), they were mightily inconvenienced.

     One more unsolved mystery in the spooky world of extraterrestrial mischief, but sadly there was no television program of that name to give it the As Seen on TV kiss of credence.

 

AUGUST 20, 1976: DROP YOUR PANTS AND SAY AH

Posted on by Richard Daybell

The Allagash incident was the Big Daddy of alien abductions, celebrated not only by UFO groupies but on television’s Unsolved Mysteries (and we all know As Seen on TV is the ultimate bona fides).

The Allagash Waterway is a scenic 65-mile long river flowing through the North Woods of Maine, celebrated by Henry David Thoreau.  It was August on the Allagash (that’s got to be a song, composers), and four young men, students of the Massachusetts School of Art, were in Maine to do a little canoeing and fishing. There were Jim and Jack who were twin brothers and their friends Chuck and Charlie who were not. They had paddled to a remote lake where they intended to spend the night. The fishing was lousy during the day, and they were low on food (being artists they didn’t trouble themselves with proper provisions), so they determined to try some night fishing. They built a huge campfire to guide them back to shore, then headed out in their canoe.

After a time on the lake, the four suddenly saw a light, a luminous sphere too big to be a star, too far above the trees to be their campfire. The sphere moved toward them, changing colors as it approached.

As it came closer, they saw that this flying sucker was over 80 feet in diameter, and they began to worry about its intentions. A brief debate on what to do next resulted in frantic paddling toward shore. The sphere was having none of it; it sent out a shaft of light beckoning them into its ghostly glow. When they didn’t respond, it just gobbled them right up.

The next thing Jim/Jack, Chuck and Charlie knew, they were standing on shore, staring at the sphere, as it gave them a goodbye wave of its beam, and disappeared with a Cheshire Cat grin into the nighttime sky. All this within a matter of minutes. But wait, their once roaring fire was now nothing but ashes, and the light of dawn was erasing the darkness. How could this be?

They evidently chalked it up to the beer or perhaps the pot, because each man went back to his own normal world. But then came the nightmares. Strange beings with long necks, large heads, and lidless metallic eyes that glowed performed inappropriate physical examinations, their insect-like hands with four fingers poking here, there and I beg your pardon! Each dreamer, Jim/Jack, Chuck or Charlie, had the same dream, and each being an artist, rendered a depiction of the encounter, though each presumably in his own medium.

Psychiatric examinations showed Jim/Jack, Chuck and Charlie to be mentally stable (as stable as an artist can be), and they all passed lie-detector tests. Did something from “out there” come down here on August 20, 1976? Will we ever know? And what about that night a few years later when Jim (or Jack) was parking with his girl friend in the Allagash woods and the next morning discovered a hook caught in the door handle of his car?

 

I believe alien life is quite common in the universe, although intelligent life is less so. Some say it has yet to appear on planet Earth.  – Stephen Hawking

 

So That’s What They Were Drinking

For folks in Maine who occasionally like to partake of a brew, Allagash is not so much an “incident” as it is a brewery in Portland featuring such selections as Allagash White, Tripel, Curieux, Barrel & Bean, and the oh-so-appropriate Allagash River Trip.  You can visit them at https://www.allagash.com/beer/.  Tell them Wretched Richard sent you and maybe I’ll get a free beer out of it.