Tag: UFO

November 20, 1952: Hi, I’m a Stranger in These Parts

Posted on by Richard Daybell

George Adamski had his first close encounter of the weird kind in November 1952 when he and a few friends were out in California’s Colorado Desert. There they saw what appeared to be a large submarine hovering in the sky. Adamski for some reason believed the ship was looking for him (or maybe for an ocean) and, leaving his friends, went off to greet it.

A bit later, Adamski returned to report that the ship had landed, and its pilot had disembarked and greeted him. The visitor was an outgoing alien who introduced himself as a Venusian named Orthon. He did not ask to be taken to Adamski’s leader. Orthon was a humanoid of medium height with long blond hair and sported a great tan for the time of year. He wore reddish-brown Thom McAns and rather unfashionable trousers.

Adamski said Orthon chatted using telepathy and hand signals while talking very loudly, each assuming the other was deaf. Then the engaging Orthon took Adamski on a quick sightseeing trip of the Solar System, including his home planet Venus, where the late Mrs. Adamski just happened to have been reincarnated. Ever the tourist, Adamski tried to take pictures, but Orthon turned all camera shy and refused to allow himself to be photographed. But he agreed to take a blank photographic plate and promised to return with an autographed picture.

 

True to his word, Orthon returned the plate a few weeks later, but it only contained a bunch of strange symbols. Piqued, Adamski surreptitiously took a picture of Orthon’s space ship, a photo that afterward became famous in ufology circles.

Although Adamski’s tale seemed a bit much for some naysayers, Adamski had a letter he received in 1957 from the Cultural Exchange Committee of the U.S. State Department corroborating that Adamski had spoken to extraterrestrials in a California desert in 1952. Adamski frequently waved this letter around to support his claims.

Unfortunately, in 2002 some spoil-sport ufologist revealed that the letter was a hoax, that it had probably been written by those Communists who were everywhere in the State Department during the 50s.

 

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.

 

JUNE 24, 1947: BAD DREAM AT 9,000 FEET

Posted on by Richard Daybell

At about three in the afternoon on June 24, 1947, Kenneth Arnold, a recreational private pilot, was heading toward Yakima, Washington. Flying at 9,000 feet, Arnold saw nine objects flying in formation out of the side window of his airplane. He watched them bob, weave, and dart about – showing off at an incredible speed. These strange craft were not your traditional flying machine shape; they had no nose or tail, but rather were perfectly round, metallic and highly polished.  Arnold radioed in his sighting. It must have been a slow news day for when he landed at the Pendleton Field in Oregon, he found a full news conference waiting for him. It was there that Arnold used the words that found legs with scary space phenomena enthusiasts everywhere. He said that these strange flying objects looked like saucers skipping across water.

In addition to being the first use of the term ‘flying saucers,’ it is generally considered to be the first widely reported UFO sighting in the United States. There was a corroborative sighting ten days later.  A United Airlines crew also spotted five to nine disk-like objects over Idaho that paced their plane for 10 to 15 minutes before suddenly disappearing. (This may have been the very flight on which William Shatner saw one of the actual aliens chewing on the wing – but that’s an allusion for another day.)

The United States Air Force officially classified Arnold’s sighting as a mirage.

And some ufologists (yes, ufologists) began to express doubts about the psychology of the man when he reported several other UFO sightings in the years that followed, particularly his report of two living transparent UFOs that he characterized as space animals with the ability to change their density.  And a fondness for chewing on the wings of airplanes.

 

JUNE 21, 1947: PLAN 10 FROM OUTER SPACE

Posted on by Richard Daybell

In 1947, shortly after noon, Harold A. Dahl, who had spent the day scavenging for drifting logs in Puget Sound, near Tacoma, Washington, saw something. It wasn’t a drifting log.  Actually it was four or five somethings. They were shaped like doughnuts (he had already eaten, so it wasn’t his stomach’s imagination, and none of the objects were glazed or chocolate-covered).  They were overhead.  And they were flying in formation.

Dahl described these curiosities in detail. He said he could see blue sky through the holes in the center of the discs, and that there were portholes lining the inside of the ring. One of the craft appeared to be having engine trouble (if indeed it had an engine). A second doughnut came alongside, then retreated. At this point, things began being tossed out through the inner portholes of the troubled doughnut. Stuff began raining on and hitting the little boat, damaging its windshield, the wheel house and a light fixture, wounding Dahl’s son and killing his dog Shep.

The next morning, even though Dahl had not publicly described the incident, a mysterious man in black visited Dahl. He was driving a new black 1947 Buick and had the air of a government official. “I know a great deal more about this experience of yours than you will want to believe,” the man said cryptically (and rather dramatically). He also made not-so-subtle threats that Dahl’s family might be in danger. As a result, Dahl later claimed the UFO sighting was a hoax, but even later suggested he had claimed it was a hoax to avoid bringing harm to his family. His son, however, claimed not to have been on the boat.  And Dahl’s dog wasn’t really named Shep.

None of this is fooling conspiracy theorists who have suggested one great big cover-up which they follow directly to the executive boardroom of none other than Dunkin’ Donuts.

 

November 20, 1952: Hi, I’m a Stranger in These Parts

Posted on by Richard Daybell

George Adamski had his first close encounter of the weird kind in November 1952 when he and a few friends were out in California’s Colorado Desert. There they saw what appeared to be a George_Adamski_ship_1large submarine hovering in the sky. Adamski for some reason believed the ship was looking for him (or maybe for an ocean) and, leaving his friends, went off to greet it.

A bit later, Adamski returned to report that the ship had landed, and its pilot had disembarked and greeted him. The visitor was an outgoing alien who introduced himself as a Venusian named Orthon. He did not ask to be taken to Adamski’s leader. Orthon was a humanoid of medium height with long blond hair and sported a great tan for the time of year. He wore reddish-brown Thom McAns and rather unfashionable trousers.

Adamski said Orthon chatted using telepathy and hand signals while talking very loudly, each assuming the other was deaf. Then the engaging Orthon took Adamski on a quick sightseeing trip of the Solar System, including his home planet Venus, where the late Mrs. Adamski just happened to have been reincarnated. Ever the tourist, Adamski tried to take pictures, but Orthon turned all camera shy and refused to allow himself to be photographed. But he agreed to take a blank photographic plate and promised to return with an autographed picture.  True to his word, Orthon returned the plate a few weeks later, but it only contained a bunch of strange symbols. Piqued, Adamski surreptitiously took a picture of Orthon’s space ship, a photo that afterward became famous in ufology circles.

Although Adamski’s tale seemed a bit much for some naysayers, Adamski had a letter he received in 1957 from the Cultural Exchange Committee of the U.S. State Department corroborating that Adamski had spoken to extraterrestrials in a California desert in 1952. Adamski frequently waved this letter around to support his claims.

Unfortunately, in 2002 some spoil-sport ufologist revealed that the letter was a hoax, that it had probably been written by those Communists who were everywhere in the State Department during the 50s.

October 24, 1886: Aliens, the South American Way

Posted on by Richard Daybell

It was a dark and stormy night — “rainy ;and tempestuous” as one observer would describe it. Of course, rain and tempest would not be that unusual for a place like Maracaibo, Venezuela. On the night of October 24, 1886, a family of aliensnine, sleeping in a hut on the outskirts of the city, were rudely awakened by a loud humming noise and a vivid, dazzling light that lit up the entire interior of the hut.

As you might guess, these folk were alarmed — terror-stricken actually. In fact, they could not be faulted for assuming that the world was coming to an end right there and then. They got right down on their knees and began to pray like the dickens (although it was a tad late for praying). Their prayers, however, were punctuated every few moments by severe projectile vomiting. And worse still, blisters began to spread around their lips,across their faces, and down their torsos.

The blisters subsided by the following morning, leaving large black blotches in their place.  The victims did not feel any particular pain — until nine days later when the skin peeled off, and these blotches were transformed into virulent raw sores.

And yet the house sustained no damage, all doors and windows being closed at the time. No trace of lightning could be detected afterward. The victims also agree that there was no explosion and no heat, just that loud humming and dazzling light. The trees around the house showed no signs of injury until the ninth day, when they suddenly withered, almost simultaneously with the development of the sores upon the occupants of the house.

At the time this was attributed to some unknown electrical effects, the concept of radiation poisoning not being familiar. The source of the poisoning has never been explained, except by a few people who say it was most likely a passing alien spacecraft having mechanical difficulties, pulling over to the side of the planet, and inadvertently causing the incident.

 

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.

 

JUNE 24, 1947: BAD DREAM AT 9,000 FEET

Posted on by Richard Daybell

At about three in the afternoon on June 24, 1947, Kenneth Arnold, a recreational private pilot, was heading toward Yakima, Washington. Flying at 9,000 feet, Arnold saw nine objects flying in formation out of the side window of his airplane. He watched them bob, weave, and dart about – showing off at an incredible speed. These strange craft were not your traditional flying machine shape; they had no nose or tail, but rather were perfectly round, metallic and highly polished.  Arnold radioed in his sighting. It must have been a slow news day for when he landed at the Pendleton Field in Oregon, he found a full news conference waiting for him. It was there that Arnold used the words that found legs with scary space phenomena enthusiasts everywhere. He said that these strange flying objects looked like saucers skipping across water.

In addition to being the first use of the term ‘flying saucers,’ it is generally considered to be the first widely reported UFO sighting in the United States (even though our friend Harold Dahl saw his flying doughnut a few days earlier). Perhaps because there was a corroborative sighting ten days later (although people were now beginning to see UFOs more often than pigeons).  A United Airlines crew also spotted five to nine disk-like objects over Idaho that paced their plane for 10 to 15 minutes before suddenly disappearing. (This may have been the very flight on which William Shatner saw one of the actual aliens chewing on the wing – but that’s an allusion for another day.)

The United States Air Force officially classified Arnold’s sighting as a mirage.

And some ufologists (yes, ufologists) began to express doubts about the psychology of the man when he reported several other UFO sightings in the years that followed, particularly his report of two living transparent UFOs that he characterized as space animals with the ability to change their density.  And a fondness for chewing on the wings of airplanes.

 

JUNE 21, 1947: PLAN 10 FROM OUTER SPACE

Posted on by Richard Daybell

In 1947, shortly after noon, Harold A. Dahl, who had spent the day scavenging for drifting logs in Puget Sound, near Tacoma, Washington, saw something. It wasn’t a drifting log.  Actually it was four or five somethings. They were shaped like doughnuts (he had already eaten, so it wasn’t his stomach’s imagination, and none of the objects were glazed or chocolate-covered).  They were overhead.  And they were flying in formation.

Dahl described these curiosities in detail. He said he could see blue sky through the holes in the center of the discs, and that there were portholes lining the inside of the ring. One of the craft appeared to be having engine trouble (if indeed it had an engine). A second doughnut came alongside, then retreated. At this point, things began being tossed out through the inner portholes of the troubled doughnut. Stuff began raining on and hitting the little boat, damaging its windshield, the wheel house and a light fixture, wounding Dahl’s son and killing his dog Shep.

The next morning, even though Dahl had not publicly described the incident, a mysterious man in black visited Dahl. He was driving a new black 1947 Buick and had the air of a government official. “I know a great deal more about this experience of yours than you will want to believe,” the man said cryptically (and rather dramatically). He also made not-so-subtle threats that Dahl’s family might be in danger. As a result, Dahl later claimed the UFO sighting was a hoax, but even later suggested he had claimed it was a hoax to avoid bringing harm to his family. His son, however, claimed not to have been on the boat.  And Dahl’s dog wasn’t really named Shep.

None of this is fooling conspiracy theorists who have suggested one great big cover-up which they follow directly to the executive boardroom of none other than Dunkin’ Donuts.