SAUCER RECOVERY

Most people have heard of the crashed flying saucer at Roswell, New Mexico. But this was not the only supposed crash of an alien craft.
One of the earliest recorded UFO crashes is said to have happened on 6 June 1884 when a blazing object crashed in Dundy County, Nebraska. Local farmhands rushed to the scene and found sand fused to a glass-like substance, and a large pile of hot debris. One person who got too close suffered blisters similar to radiation exposure today. It took several days for the debris to cool down, whereupon the local paper reported it was extremely light metal but incredibly strong. It could have been aluminium, except it had not yet been invented. Local papers of the time even speculated the object could have come from outer space.

THEY KEEP COMING DOWN

Researcher Todd Zechel learnt from witnesses about a possible UFO retrieval when a saucer crashed in Laredo, Texas, on 7 July 1948. Prior to the crash, the 90 foot disc was seen by pilots, and said to be travelling at 2,000mph. Witnesses at the crash site spoke of a craft being taken away by US forces, and that a hairless, four foot alien had died there.
At the time it was dismissed as a hoax, and government papers since released show that Nazi V2 rockets were being modified in the area at the time.
Researcher Ivan Sanderson collected sighting reports of an object that flew over the Great Lakes on 9 December 1965. Towards early evening there was a boom in the sky, followed by a trail of smoke and a tremor shook the ground in a wood near Kecksburg, Pennsylvania. A Soviet rocket, Cosmos 96, had re-entered that day, but 13 hours earlier.
In 1980, the fire chief who attended the incident finally told that he saw a conical craft 12 feet high embedded in the ground, but they were cleared away by the military. Later that night, a truck left the site, the military claiming nothing was found.

TOLD AFTER THE FACT

In 1973, US scientist Fritz Werner contacted UFOlogist Ray Fowler, telling him of an event at Kingman, Arizona, on 20 May 1953. Picked up by a blacked-out bus, he and over a dozen other scientists were taken out into the wilderness to do tests on a 30 foot diameter disc embedded in the soil.
Taking a quick peek into nearby tents, Werner observed the body of a four foot alien in a silver suit. Four years after Werner had told his story, confirmation came from a pilot, then at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. He knew of crates being received one night in mid-1953 containing wreckage with strange writing on it, and the bodies of three aliens packed in dry ice.

THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL

One of the latest episodes comes from Brazil. In the early hours of the morning of 20 January 1996, a farmer outside the city of Varginha saw a bus-sized object hovering above the ground spewing smoke.
By 08.30, the fire department received an anonymous call about a bizarre creature in the Jardim Abdere neighbourhood. When they arrived at the scene they found a group of adults chasing the creature which was bald, brown-skinned, had bulging, blood-red eyes and strange limbs. Capturing it, it was driven away in an army truck.
Rumours circulated that there had been more than one creature, and platoons of soldiers were seen throughout the day, with sporadic machine gun fire. At 15.30 hrs the Da Silva sisters were walking across a field when they saw a creature hiding fearfully behind a brick wall.
Within 24 hours of the first sighting of the craft, three extraterrestrials are said to have been taken to a Hospital, where medical tests killed at least one of them. The following day, bodies of the aliens were said to have been transferred to the University of Campinas, never to be heard of again as a military cover-up attempted to deny anything had occurred.

MILITARY MIS-IDENTIFICATION

Could the above have been real extraterrestrial events, or could something else be going on? There seem to be several factors identical to most of these episodes. First of all, something appeared to crash. And second, in many cases, it isn’t until many years later that people come forward to talk about it.
As these incidences usually revolve around military personnel, it is taken for granted that aerial phenomena that led to the ‘crash’ could not have been mis-identified. Yet how valid is this assumption?
As an ex-military man myself, I can testify to numerous exercises where personnel have ended up chasing shadows. A report comes in of an incident in the dead of night and it is soon blown up out of all proportion, with personnel regularly ‘seeing’ things that are not there.
The process can lead to a form of induced, and communal, self-hypnosis. You know that what is going on cannot be real, but your senses conflict with what you’re seeing. The Angels of Mons is not the only time such incidences have occurred, usually fuelled by fatigue followed by a rush of adrenalin.

A RECURRING THEME

After the event – a form of communal hallucination – the personnel involved feel rather stupid, and the authorities conspire to keep the event quiet. After all, it is inadvisable to let it be known that the military can occasionally seem to go insane.
Over the years, the personnel put the experience to the back of the mind, but as a culture forms out of research by non-military investigators, ‘false memories’ begin to form of what actually happened. And in no time at all, you’re sure that, as the books say, such events really did happen.
Hence, the result is a continuing culture of saucer crashes, almost identical in every case, because they are more a product of the researcher’s mind than the actual experiencers.
Indeed, this is a theme that can be found again and again in all manner of ‘paranormal’ experience, from exact mechanisms behind past-life regression through hypnosis, to the archetypal alien abduction event.
Of course, I am not saying that saucer crashes are not exactly what they seem. I am merely saying the possibility of other cultural and psychological processes should not be discounted.

© Anthony North, August 2007

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