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Sunday, 13 August 2023
Haunted Skies
Above are my copies of The Haunted Skies and you will notice via the post-it notes they are regularly looked through and referenced!
The books are published by John Hanson under the Haunted Skies imprint and John has also set up the Great British UFO Learning Centre that one day I need to get over and check out but whether he'll be able to separate me from all those paper files....we'll see!
Below are some short video clips and at the bottom of the post the links you will need. Haunted Skies is a series of books I cannot recommend highly enough and before someone asks: yes, I purchased all of those volumes!Policing the Haunted skies
Major Feature Post: Black UFO Entities or ODINTs?
In presenting this post I have removed many images -maps, photographs, etc-so as not to make this overly long. In Unidentified –Identified I dealt with this subject under the chapter heading of A Previously Un-Noted Alien Entity Type and I was not using hyperbole.
I should note that in the Suddards case John Hanson added much more information after tracking down one of the witnesses for his Haunted Skies UFO encyclopedia series and it shows how little investigators in the 1950s really bothered with these reports. Most, of course, 'knew' thanks to George Adamski that "space brothers" were all tall, blonde and blue-eyed!
This postr is to demonstrate the amount of research work and information gathering carried out for my four specialist books on CE3Ks/AE reports.
UFO literature today is full to over-flowing with accounts of “reptilians”, “insectoids” or “insectalids” and “Greys” (whichever one of the many ‘accurate’ witness descriptions you choose to accept) not to mention “hybrids” and “hubrids” and these are creatures of types never encountered before the 1990s alien abduction paranoia took hold. The UFO groups and those calling themselves investigators and researchers (in the loosest sense) love all of this. It brings in more people, more members and membership fees or sales of their magazines and books and the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) has come in for a great deal of criticism in using and exploiting these false trends.
There is also something that has gone on for about twenty years now –the very distasteful and wholly unscientific “re-booting” of classic cases and old reports. Suddenly, Betty and Barney Hill encountered “Greys”: they did not encounter “Greys”. The witnesses at Flatwoods, Virginia encountered a lizardman or reptilian on some kind of flying platform –it helps promote local “Monster” events and sell books. Artists asked to illustrate these old reports do so but the entity type that was described is now replaced by an image of a “Grey”. There were also no “Greys” seen at Kelly but I have seen two illustrations in which they are!
At one point I actually found myself double and then triple re-checking my files to make sure that my brain had not jumbled up the facts!
I am quite sure that the Reader is now asking when I am going to get to the point. Well, I needed to make the situation clear and explain why pre-1980s reports need to be better looked into and I find it ridiculous that, living in the UK, I am supplying the Centre for UFO Studies (CUFOS) with details of cases from the United States. The whole purpose of CUFOS was to be a reporting centre but Ufologists forget that.
When I was contacted by a formerly active UFO investigator (in the 1960s and 1970s) he mentioned a personal sighting back when he was a youngster and he had written that the AE he had seen along with two friends was totally black. This was later corrected when I mentioned it and he realised his mistake.
Fair enough but the description had led me to search my files to see if there were any similar cases. Back in the 1970s reports were given an alpha-numeric code based on the type of object shape seen or if there was no object sighted there was an entity type reference. At the time it seemed a good system but it was one that really could lead to a lot of confusion so I began to scrawl on a report file if there was a similar case elsewhere.
If the readers entertain themselves by watching the various ‘paranormal’ TV and You Tube shows then it would be impossibnle to have not heard of the "shadow people". When I was younger, and having spent years reading and studying all the material and books put out by the Golden Age ghost hunters I knew what to expect. A dear departed relative seen somewhere around the house. "Crisis ghosts" or some former resident of the property who had passed away and still popped in every now and then to see how things were going. Some sweet elderly lady who was totally non threatening. Harry Price, Elliott O’Donnell I could go on to list the life-long investigators of the weird and ghostly.
No shadow people. The internet is full to overflowing with accounts of these entities. Shadow people seen in the homes of people who "have never had any paranormal experience before" and these accounts can be found on shadowpeople.org, ghostweb.com and from-the-shadows.blogspot.com. People write:
“I opened my eyes and looked towards the middle of the room. I saw a large shadow
in the shape of a person. It had no facial features that I could see and it wasn't moving.
It was just standing there looking at me... I blinked and then it was gone.”
and:
“I felt like someone was watching me so I turned to look toward the hallway and there
it was in the doorway... It was a black figure. I could only see from the torso up. I felt it
was a male and could feel that it was looking at me... I started to walk towards it and it
disappeared back into the room.”
Plus the ever ubiquitous:
“There, at the foot of my bed, was a tall dark figure like a shadow. It appeared to be
almost 7 feet tall with broad shoulders and was wearing what seemed to be an old
fashioned top hat and some sort of cape... I watched as it glided past me and out the
door of my room.”
Most of the accounts, when read sensibly, are of “waking dreams” and you may well ask What is a waking dream? Well, it is a hypnagogic hallucination that occurs just as a person is drifting off into sleep and see, hear, feel or smell something that isn't actually present. For instance, when I was about twelve years old I awoke and saw at the foot of my bed a partially materialised Medieval, fully armoured figure in the dim night-light. Even now I laugh when I think of my reaction. I mumbled “There were no Medieval settlements around here and you aren’t a ghost” and then...I went back to sleep.
Paralysis with a figure of some type standing over them is likely sleep paralysis and although I suffer from that ‘joy’ I have never seen “the old hag” or a “shadow person”. The other probable cause of many “I saw a dark figure rush by through the corner of my eye” are eye-floaters which are particles of dirt in the eye that can be a big problem for some.
Rather like “orbs” and “rods” as well as “mists” becoming a “thing” in paranormal TV shows that were picked up by the internet fakers, and some still claim these are evidence of spirits forming, so shadow people have been adopted as the thing to pull in views. Many combine the shadow figures with badly faked poltergeist activity and when they do not use digital effects to show the presence of a shadow person they have a friend dress up there are so many examples because shadow figures are good clickbait for any social media video makers. Even non existent “ancient native American legends” have been created by modern day writers to show a “lineage” but the truth of the matter is that shadow people are a creation from the last ten years or so.
I mention all of this as someone suggested, jokingly I hope, that the black entities I highlighted could be shadow people. No. The last thing Ufology or MUFON needs is another fake addition to exploit and deviate research with.
There is also thinking that shadow people and some UFO entities may be “from a dimension one level up from ours” (what John Keel and co. used to term ODINT -Other Dimensional Intelligences) and while accounts in which no UFO was seen, such as the Aylen case, it does not mean that they are from another dimension or the “multiverse”. These are all theoretical and not, as soon seem to keep stating, proven scientific fact. The same applies for time travellers of some sort -time travel is theory until someone actually does travel back or forth in time and even then there is the suggestion that as the past is gone and the future has not happened a traveller may merely be shunting ‘sideways’ into alternate realities. I will have more to say on possible origins further on. Here are the cases to be considered.
Arc-Sous-Cicon, France 15:00 hrs, 17th July, 1967
A group of young children had left the village to go for a walk through fields that are dotted with bushes and led up to the pine forest on the plateau slopes. Five years old Patricia Bepoix was a few metres ahead of her friends but suddenly turned back, terrified. Crying, she ran past her friends all the way home. Here, Patricia told her mother that she had surprised several “little Chinamen” that were sitting behind a bramble bush. One of these entities had, apparently, stood up and seemed to have the intention of grabbing her.
Joelle Ravier’s ten years old brother had seen smoke coming “out of the bush” though Joel Mesnard notes that “it sounded more like a vertical, luminous, yellowish beam of light”.
Joelle Ravier and her companion, Marie-Reine Mairot, both curious about what Patricia had reported, set out from the village to head to the field where the children were, around 300-400 metres from the houses. On arriving at the field they saw a strange little creature that was running from bush to bush and at a very speedy rate. The leg movement was said to be faster than you see in normal people.
Both described what they saw as about 1 metre high, black and seemed to be wearing a sort of short jacket that floated behind it as it ran. Whatever it was had a protuberant belly and while its legs were described as being short neither could describe arms –in fact they didn’t know if there were any. Facial details they could not describe.
The two girls then went over to the bramble bush where the “little Martian” had disappeared and heard “somebody” talking in a strange sing-song fashion. Both now became very frightened and went to join the group of children.
Newspapers later distorted this account to make it “several” entities the duo saw and even stated Joelle described them as having “heads shaped like a potato”. Only Patricia had seen several entities and she had been too frightened and too young to question in detail.
On the 23rd –six days later- inhabitants of the village noticed in the area around the bush where the little being was seen, a dozen very prominent marks where the grass was dry and straw-coloured: everywhere else the grass was green. Heat could be felt over these yellowed patches and a strange odour detected.
Seen as a "classic" it is very seldom noted that the children at Cussac, later in August, also observed small, black entities with physical traces. None of the children ever confessed to a hoax or did so later on.
On the 19th an unusual light was seen in a wooded area by another youngster but nothing on the 17th. It is interesting that when shown an unspecified illustration from p. 65 of Flying Saucer Review’s The Humanoids Special Issue 1 (I no longer have this but the book (The Humanoids, Ed. By Charles Bowen) has drawings of the Kelly, Villa Santina entities) Joelle said no and had laughed. You might expect that a child making up a story would take this prompt to add to the ‘authenticity’ of the story.
Cussac, France. 29th August, 1967
The second case to involve children was thoroughly investigated (officially) and declared to not be a hoax or joke and no other explanation was found. It is officially still seen as a genuine case so worthy of mention.
The village of Cussac which is located on a plateau at 1045 m altitude in Cantal, massif central at that time had 282 inhabitants in 70 houses and was devoid of television and radio and only received a local newspaper,.
François was 13. 5 years old at the time and his sister, Anne-Marie, was nine years old and on the Tuesday morning in question they were accompanied by their dog, Medor. It was around 08:00 hrs and the duo were to lead a dozen cows to a pasture about 800 m west of the village, at the place called Les Tuiles. The meadow was located on the edge of the departmental 57, which connects the Ternes to Pont-Farin. The weather was fine, the sky clear, a light wind blew from the west.
To pass the time, the duo play cards while sitting behind a dry stone wall to protect them from the north breeze and to benefit from the morning sun. From their position they can monitor the cows easily. However, at around 10:30 hrs they had to stop playing cards as the cows were about to cross through a gap in a field wall that separates them from a pasture in which there are about thirty cows belonging to a neighbour. Francois stood up to call his dog and to try to make the cows come back.
It was now that he saw, on the other side of the road, behind a hedge, approximately 80 meters from him, four “little beings”, which he at first thinks are children. He climbed up a few stones to get a better look at them. Francoise said that they were all of a black "silky" appearance, without any noticeable distinction of clothes or facial features. The size of the entities varies between 1 m and 1.20 m, and two being smaller than the others. Their arms are long and thin, and their legs short and fine. The heads seems to be of normal proportions, however, the skull and chin seem more accentuated and he notices that all seem to wear a "beard."
Francois noticed behind the “black children”, half hidden by the hedge, an extremely brilliant sphere some 4 to 5 m in diameter. No opening/doorway was visible.
Francois said: “Oh, there are black children!” and, without turning around, Anne-Marie replied: "You call them". However, he responded back: “Look! Look!” and then climbs onto the low wall to get a better look at the "black children". His sister now gets up and sees the “black children”. One of them is low down and seems to be on the ground, while two others are seen in profile ; the fourth, a little bigger, holds a rectangular object reflecting the Sun behind the witnesses - Francis compares this to a mirror – and waves his hands seeming to make signs to his companions.
It is now that the small beings seemed to become conscious of the duo watching them and the first entity flew vertically and then plunges head first into the top of the sphere. Then the second entity enters the object in the same way and then the third, after rising up, does likewise. Then it is the turn of the fourth and tallest entity, however, first it bends down to pick something up –Francois felt that this might have been the “mirror”. But it does not yet enter the object.
The sphere then began to rise up into the air in a kind of spiral or cork-screw motion of 4 - 6 clock-wise turns, with a radius increasing on 10, 50 and 100 m and the cows begin to bellow. The fourth entity then flew away and, on catching up with the sphere, now at approximately 15 m in the air, enters head first the same as the others. The children believe that they could distinguish "webbed feet" while the entity was in the air. Anne-Marie also noticed a "pointed nose".
Below: A model of the AE seen at Arc-sous-Cicon. Accuracy possibly suspect? Source possibly Antonio Ribera
As the object rose it emitted a soft and rather shrill whistle, mingled with the sound of rushing air. The sphere continued ascending with a few spiral movements while the intensity of the light it gave off increased; the noise then stopped and the sphere moved away at high speed towards the north west. The duo noticed an odour similar to sulphur (the investigators suggested, perhaps, SO2 or ozone).
The cows Francois and Anne-Marie were looking after had begun to bellow and appear restless and at the same time the 25 cows in the nearby meadow, some 300 m away, also bellowed and huddled together near those of the duo. The dog, Medor, barked at the object and appeared ready to chase after it. The observation had lasted around 30 seconds but neither of the witnesses saw the object disappear as they had to take care of their cows –all of which were very nervous so Francois and Anne-Marie hurriedly took them back to the farm, long before the scheduled time. Some 10 minutes after the observation a farmer had seen the pair returning with the cows and he stated that they were both in tears and appeared to be in a state of shock. He also noticed the agitation of the cows.
The mayor of Cussac, father of the children, stated that he saw the dog arrive followed by the children and that both seemed in shock and he decided to call the gendarmes of Saint Flour, some 19 km away as he knew and trusted them –these gendarmes were the ones who dealt with road accidents and many other problems. The gendarmes arrive at 16:00 hrs and gather the testimonies, and inform their superiors by radio. However, interestingly, no report could later be found and that is odd since the gendarmerie treated these matters seriously.
Anne Marie could not sleep for the next two days and both of the children would remain shocked for almost a week. Francois, who wore glasses, had tearful eyes after the incident and this continued for several days in succession. His sister had no physiological effects but she was able to tell investigators that there appeared to be 3 or 4 straight landing struts while the sphere was still on the ground.
Claude Pavy and Joel Mesnard began an investigation for GEPA in the winter of 1967, and visited the scene of the landing with the children. LDLN also conducted its own investigation via Claude de Saint Etienne then B. Pulvin and J.-C. Ameil (Clermont-Ferrand).
In 1977, Luc Bourdin, an LDLN investigator met François, then a student at the Faculty of Clermont, and made a full follow-up inquiry into the case. He learnt that a sentence attributed to Anne-Marie - “you come to play with us?” – was a purely journalistic invention since both had realized that they were not dealing with other children. François also confirmed that he did not see any "legs" which the sphere would have rested on. It was also noted that François said that he did not believe in extraterrestrials. But, rather, he thinks he experienced a "distortion" of time which he feels incapable of explaining via things he knows about and he also states that he was always wondering about the exact nature of his experience.
The similarities of this observation with that of Arc-sous-Cicon, 340 kms and a month-and-a-half before are striking. Now, although I think that every possibility has to be looked into and negated before a report can be labelled as “High Strangeness” I have to say that some seem somewhat silly.
In the mid 2000s a lot of work was put into the theory that what the children saw was a French military Alouette helicopter. Fair enough. A “guesstimate” was made of how tall the investigator in one photo must be and from that a further “guesstimate” of how tall that made the trees and so on. To some this proved that it was indeed an Alouette helicopter. For the French sceptic Venus, shooting stars and swamp gas were not good enough –as mentioned in the previous chapter helicopters and helicopter pilots were the explanations of choice.
There are problems. “Guesstimate” means just that: you are guessing and estimating based on a “possible” –whether someone’s height or the height of a tree based on how tall that person might have been. Even if the proponents of this theory were spot on with their measurements they would not make the object a helicopter.
As a silly example: I get a bread roll that is the approximate size of a doughnut. It is the right size and fits into my hand exactly the same way the doughnut would. I therefore have a doughnut in my hand. I take a bite but it is not a cream covered, jam-filled doughnut. It is a bread roll. Just because a helicopter could have fitted into the area where the children saw the object does not mean that it was.
M. Masse, at Valensole, was familiar with military helicopters flying over and even landing nearby so when that solution was offered it was immediately dismissed. Besides, the military had no helicopter at that location and at that time. Helicopters are almost the “luminous owls” in some French cases. So let us look at this possibility without pre-prejudice.
We have to ask ourselves some questions such as;
(1) Are we to believe that two children had no idea what a helicopter looked like?
(2) That they saw a helicopter and imagined they saw more people than it could carry jumping on board…through the rotor blades?
(3) At no time after their sighting did François or Anne-Marie see a photograph or any other source depicting a helicopter and say “That’s what we saw!”? And some ten years later as a student, François who wanted to explain what he had seen to himself was still deceiving himself rather than thinking “Oh. We were so dumb. I realize it was a helicopter now!”?
Then we have the fact that a helicopter landing or taking off, let alone flying over the area, would have made a lot of noise and been quite a sight: most people in the vicinity would have heard or seen it. But no one said “Those silly kids – that was a helicopter!” Living in a German village at around that time I can tell you that everyone knew about any helicopters flying nearby or asked “Did you see the helicopter earlier?”
Again, we are to assume that the gendarmes and GEPAN investigators were so totally stupid and incompetent that they never even looked at the possibility of a helicopter having been involved? When the gendarmes radioed in their report checks were not made regarding helicopters in the area? Remember that the whistling sound was also heard by someone else.
No matter what measurements you guess at or even if they are accurate down to the last millimetre; if it was not a helicopter then it was something else. The question is what was it and did more happen to the children than we know -we could speculate on and on but add nothing more that can be checked -would the siblings have anything to add in 2022?
Whiddon Down and Saint-Jean-du-Guard
The Anders case is one that has given me a great many troubled thoughts over the years. Initially, the brief sighting was reported in an issue of the Flying Saucer Review through the letters page. I had assumed that, being linked to FSR, the oft cited UFO Investigators Network would have jumped in pretty quickly; as it turned out I was wrong.
I did, quite quickly, contact ‘Mr. Anders’ and it turned out that in his letter to FSR (a copy of which I saw) he had asked that his name and address not be given for privacy reasons. Mr. Anders also asked whether investigators working with FSR might be interested in looking into the incident and went on to even offer overnight accommodation if investigators had to travel any distance.
Below: Claude Pavy with Anne-Marie and François during the GEPA investigation.
Below: an illustration from LDLN showing what François and Anne-Marie reported: all very unlike a helicopter.
Mr. Anders never got his anonymity; full name and address were given. Despite a second letter to UFOIN HQ itself, no investigators got in touch. A very disreputable ‘investigator’, the late Eric Morris, told me that he had “been in touch with this Mr. Anders –it’s all rubbish!” The pseudonym ‘Anders’ had been given by me and was never used by the witness himself prior to contact with me so how Morris (whom Mr Anders stated that he had never even heard of) had “carried out a full witness search to track down Mr Anders address” is beyond me!
But there were other factors I shall refer to after a summary of the incident itself.
At around 18:30 hours, in either July or August, 1977, Mr Anders was driving across Dartmoor on his way to a barbeque at Whiddon Down, Devon. With him were two females who wished to be anonymous. At this point in their journey they were on a very lonely stretch of the Whiddon Down Road (A382) with only one other vehicle in sight several hundred yards ahead.
Above: entities as described by Mr. Anders and sketches were approved by the witness. (c)2023 T. Hooper
Below: The view of the figures Mr Anders and his companions had (c)2023 T. Hooper
The conversation amongst the trio was fairly light and all were in a good mood and looking forward to their evening out.
Mr Anders slowed down considerably as two very weird figures emerged from some high hedgerows on the right hand side of the road. The trio stared in disbelief and, based on the description given, that is not very surprising. The entities were approximately 1.8m (6 ft) tall, very thin and stick-like; the heads were “shaped rather like footballs” and large “eyes” were seen. The shoulders of these entities were squarish but none of the witnesses could remember whether arms were present. The arms could have been held close to the sides but if not moved missed because, apart from the eyes, the entities were completely black. The legs were seen but witnesses never looked down to see any feet.
Within a matter of seconds of appearing, the entities had gone from view through a gap in hedgerows on the left hand side of the road. No one wanted to stop to investigate but, rather subdued, the trio continued on to their event and tried to put the incident out of their minds – though they did try to find a rational explanation(s) but failed.
Reported “UFO” activity in Devon during 1977 was high, and there were several other alleged landings in the UK –resulting in 24 entity reports.
Prior to his encounter, Mr Anders had been your average working class man but after he became more interested in UFOs and got books and magazines, collected newspaper cuttings and later included reading material on the fictional ley-line network that Alfred Watkins suggested covered the UK.
I was asked whether this interest had been “created by something that had happened during the sighting he could not recall?” In other words: had the trio been abducted and their interest stemming from this. Well, the two ladies in question never developed an interest in UFOs –they seemingly wanted nothing to do with the subject.
Mr Anders was asked from the outset whether they had arrived at the barbeque later than expected. No. They were ahead of schedule. Later: had he noticed any sudden, seeming “jerk” in events –i.e. : had they seen the entities move in front of them and then they were gone and the car was further up the road than it should have been]? No. Later still, it was put another way. Same response: “all time was accounted for”.
I then tried certain trick questions to see whether Mr Anders might be fantasy-prone or trying to hoax me: was it possible that he might have just glimpsed something beyond the hedgerow? When the car slowed on its own account had they been aware of anything –maybe meteor-like in the sky? I was corrected: Mr Anders had slowed down when he saw the entities.
In fact, I felt pretty bad about trying to trip him up. He added no more to his account despite the fact that it might be “more notable” had a UFO been seen. The encounter had lasted “seconds” but was very vivid.
By late 1980, Mr Anders had read all the “UFO cover-up” nonsense and began to formulate this own theories that were a little esoteric. However, despite this, he still did not change a single aspect of his report and corrected me when I later sent an illustration of the entities in which I’d added things not reported by him as a test.
I had not, in the thousands of reports of entity incidents I have on file, come across a description such as Mr Anders gave. It made no sense: he wanted no publicity. He was not saying anything that would get people talking about his case. His theories he later formed based on what he read in the literature which is not unusual and does not detract from his earlier account.
To be honest, every time I remembered the case I had to wonder.
In 1984, while going through some of my late colleague, Franklyn Davin-Wilson’s, old notes, I came across a reference to a sighting in the book A Crack In The Universe, by Jean-Claude Bourret. This was a book based on the ground-breaking 1974 series on UFOs broadcast on France-Inter radio.
Published in French, in 1974, it was not until 1978 that Neville Spearman published an English language version translated by FSRs Gordon W. Creighton. So, I went to check the reference and noted one chapter was titled “The Black Robot”. My interest piqued, I turned to the chapter in question.
At around 02:30 hours, on Wednesday, 9th August, 1972, Madame X and her husband (she a teacher of French and he was a music teacher) had retired to bed in their tent. They were camping in a friend’s terraced garden at Saint-Jean-du-Gard and, hearing the noise from the local fete, Madame X stepped outside for some fresh air. A light glow came from illuminations from the fete however, on the side of the valley where they camped, the sky was dark. It was on this side that the witness saw an egg-shaped white object. By this time, Madame X was standing in a little parking area reserved for tenants of three or four villas on the hill.
Looking at the object and wondering why it was so bright, it obviously wasn’t a car; Madame X heard slow, regular foot-steps behind her. In her own words:
“…I turned to my left: and there, three or four metres from me, a form
was standing facing me. I don’t mean to say ‘a being was watching me’,
because, at that time, I didn’t get that impression. The form was about
1 metre 20 cms. in height. It was completely black. A curious point is
that the body had about it something of the nature of a parallelepiped. It
seemed to me that the object was made of wood some 30 or 40 centimetres
thick. This parallelepiped was surmounted by an egg-shaped form at the
place of the head. Two round white discs set at eye-level, two round white
discs some 5 centimetres in diameter, alone stood out against the black mass
which was turned towards me, motionless. I could see neither feet nor legs
(or, let us rather say, whatever it must have used for walking) as they were
Hidden in the long grass.”
Apparently a “parallelepiped” is “a solid contained by parallelograms”.
Rather unusually, Madame X stated that she sensed “a morbid, unbelievable fear, not a bit natural. It was not coming from me; it seemed to be emitted by this shape…” and seconds later, she was back in the tent. Next morning one resident did confirm hearing footsteps at 02:30 hours but had stayed in bed rather than going to investigate.
The initial account was a tape-recording by a student interested in UFOs and it lay in a desk drawer for years before Jean-Paul Guguen tracked down the teachers and got a few more details.
Reading this account of the “Madame X” encounter left me astonished.
“…I can’t really say I saw ‘something’, because I got the clear
sensation that whatever it was had life in it. I saw someone –or
something- which was looking at me, or was at any rate turned
towards me, and which was motionless. Imagine a sugar cube
which you have painted black. Then you put an oval head on it.
“The whole thing not shiny, but a matte black. In the place of the
eyes two white discs, very big. And that’s all. No mouth, no nose,
no arms. I couldn’t see if it had legs, because the rank grass there
was quite high. ‘He’ was about 1 metre 20 centimetres in height.”
Above; from Bourret’s, The Crack In The Universe, illustrating the entity encountered by Madame X. The Author only saw this a year after talking with Mr Anders who was staggered by the image and felt less “mad” for reporting his encounter.
The whole observation lasted about fifteen seconds before fear over-took Madame X and she dashed into the tent “in one gigantic leap”. Her husband confirmed this sudden bounding back into the tent and when asked why he never went outside to check himself he replied: “Her face was literally distorted with fear. I just didn’t have the courage to go out. I closed the tent fastening from inside.” The couple then sat in silence listening.
On this occasion a bright object was sighted –by inference connected to the entity— and when I saw the illustration by Pierre Giroud I was taken aback. Could Mr Anders have read Bourret’s book? Well, no because from a casual question I once asked I knew he didn’t speak French. The English edition, of course, came out after he had made his initial report.
Black, round headed and seemingly armless entities with huge eyes in France during 1972 and then similar in England in 1977; personally, I have to admit to being stumped. Why two people separated by language and national boundaries with no connections should report unique entities is beyond me –unless they did encounter them. I should note that Anders made it clear that he was not saying the entities he sighted had no arms –he just could not see them. Black arms held against a black body?
I have written about the Anders case since the 1980s in various UK UFO publications but like some of those publications, the case is still unknown in the UK and no doubt the same applies in the United States and most other countries. The point here has to be made: the children at Arc-Sous-Cicon did not know of the Cussac case or vice versa. Anders was unaware of both cases until after he had contacted Ufologists to report his sighting and he most certainly had no knowledge of the Madame X case. There is no chance of reports being contaminated but there is one more report of a black entity and this report was made in 1969 –forty years after it had occurred in 1929.
Leicester, Summer, 1928
The Reader will now be asking how I can even consider a report if it was not made until forty years after the event. In this case the witness’ account was always known to her family and it was her son who had read of the Cussac sighting in Flying Saucer Review and urged her to put pen to paper. So there was already a known and well established history of the event not a sudden “I saw a black alien once!” out of the blue. According to Pauline Berger (1):
“Sir, -After reading the article Encounter with Devils …I was persuaded
by my family to re-tell my meeting with similar creatures.
“It must be almost forty years ago, as a little girl of six, I was often taken
by my father for a walk in the fields along Anstey Lane, Leicester. On one
such occasion, being a hot summer’s day, my father settled down to have a
sleep while I read a book.
“I suddenly became aware of something watching me, and saw what I took
at first to be a scarecrow because of its odd shape, and the fact that it was all
in black and did not appear to have any face, although it had a large head. I
was some distance from it, so it may well have had features which I could
not discern, but I did notice that its arms were long and dangling. Being
interested in my book, I dismissed it as being just a scarecrow and continued
to read.
“However, I could still feel it watching me, and on looking up again I saw
by the side of it what I first took to be a hut. As the hut had not been there
before, I became frightened and tried to wake my father. When I eventually
woke him the scarecrow and the hut had disappeared. For years afterwards
the tale of the disappearing scarecrow has been a big joke with my family.
“My son, who is familiar with my scarecrow story, on looking through the
September/October edition of Flying Saucer Review came to me and said:
‘Look, mummy, isn’t this what you saw?’ The sphere and the black figure
must have been about five feet in height and reminded me of an octopus, but
with fewer legs. I remember thinking at the time what a funny hut it was
because it was like a large globe on legs.”
“Pauline Berger, Leicester, December 1, 1968”
When I read this account I did what anyone interested in this sort of report does: I went to the source –Flying Saucer Review. I had any number of questions that I wanted to get answers to even though I knew there might not be any chance but Berger’s family might be able to help.
(1) How long did the incident last? Well, it was 1929 so not likely that a six year old girl would have had a watch and perhaps her father did have a time-piece but he was deceased.
(2) How difficult was it for her to wake her father? Again, it was a hot day, he might have been tired from working and that kind of sleep can be hard to wake someone from. It is a question that even at the time might not have gotten us much information
The thing is that it is very easy to jump to many conclusions: there was just the black scarecrow –then (at some point) there was the ‘hut’ and I am quite sure Mrs Berger mentioned this to her father if she was frightened. They often went for a walk in the fields so had they been observed and the ‘scarecrow’ had waited for the right moment to act? Was it just the hot weather that made her father decide to stop and go to sleep and leave his six year old daughter to read a book? Was there something that happened between her noticing the ‘scarecrow’ and the sudden appearance of the ‘hut’?
Charles Bowen, the editor of FSR had travelled a great distance to visit Maurice Masse in Valensole, despite Masse not wanting Ufologists pestering him, Leicester was much closer so if he had not followed up on the report then an FSR associate probably had, especially since it seemed to be similar to the Cussac case. No, as far as FSR knew no one had talked or written to Mrs. Berger. This was the face of elite Ufology and the UFO publication. But it all seemed slightly odd since the letter appears to have been forwarded by Dr. E. Bernard Finch, a noted Ufologist. By the time I had read this account in the late 1970s FSR could not find the letter and there seemed no way to contact the family. It might be that Mrs Berger had made a drawing or drawings of the ‘scarecrow’ and the ‘hut’; even Dr. Finch could not help out.
Some might question the testimony of a six year old girl but children are often far more effective in sensing danger than a lot of adults and Pauline Berger had sensed someone watching her. Nothing out of the ordinary there and she looked up and saw that there was just a ‘scarecrow’. So she decided to go back to her book but then felt it was still watching her –which is when she looked up to see the ‘hut’ had joined the ‘scarecrow’. It was then that she became scared because an odd ‘scarecrow’ was one thing but a ‘hut’ suddenly appearing? There could be more to her sudden panic but we will never know and that Ufologists never followed this through is not surprising. Someone probably chuckled and said “Little girl’s imagination stoked by her book!” Case dismissed.
I was looking for something unrelated one day on Patrick Gross’ Ufologie website when I found this: reference Aug-54-Saint-Sauveur.
Saint-Sauveur-la-Sagne, Puy-de-Dôme. August, 1954
The two Ufologists, Charles Garreau and Raymond Lavier reported that a Madame Carrière wrote a letter to them in which she reported her encounter; two other witnesses were present. All we know, for reasons I shall come back to further on, is that the encounter took place in August of 1954.
Madame Carrière was on holiday with her husband and her six children in Saint-Sauveur-la-Sagne. One morning she had cause to go to a shop in the village and on her return walk met a farmer and his wife. It was now that Madame Carrière reported that she saw a kind of “very black balloon” land and the trio found they were unable to move; in a nearby meadow, Madame Carrière, noted that two cows fell to the ground "and twisted their neck as if they had been tortured."
From the landed object emerged "a very small man, and with a dreadful face, with a very black face”. A second entity was seen but it had remained in the machine. The first entity now stepped down and remained on the ground only a few seconds before it "went up on board fast". The object now rose without noise but leaving a very white trail behind.
We have here a case where three people no less were seemingly “paralyzed” and there is also a noted animal reaction to the object. No investigation took place; just the witness letter was quoted in a book and we are not even sure exactly when Madame Carrière sent the letter. At times I find it very hard not to scream in utter frustration at Ufologists; why are they even involved in a subject if they cannot be bothered to carry out a simple interview –is it just to get a book out there and media attention?
The report features black entities and even a spherical object so it can be added to this previously undiscussed entity type even if it lacks the detail we would like. Normally one might just skip past reports of this type but after almost 50 years it grabs you like an obsessive compulsive disorder -you just catch the line “landed UFO and entity” and you have to read on.
Bradford, 16th August, 1955
There was another black entity encounter in the UK in 1955 and the theory supported by Patrick Gross on his Ufologie internet site as the most likely explanation for the Suddards report (1-5) tends to not stand up to scrutiny and author John Hanson of the Haunted Skies Project actually talked to Suddards’ son and others –far more than any Ufologists before them appear to have done; possibly because at the time “if it isn’t Adamski it does not count”.
It was shortly before 04:00 hours on the 16th August, 1955, that Bradford lorry driver, Ernest Suddards (35 years old) had his 13 years old son, Raymond, with him in the cab of his firm’s lorry that he had just collected from the overnight garage. As the lorry was driven down Roundhill Street, not far from their home, they observed “something or someone” approaching in the glare of the headlights. According to Mr Suddards:
“It looked about 4 feet tall, dressed in skin-tight black clothes, with arms close to
its sides, with feet together, and hopped, or jumped forwards, in a series of jerky
movements. On its chest was a circular silver disc, with holes cut into it, below the
throat. It then turned down a nearby passage. We were literally paralysed by the
sight. After arriving home, we talked about it and then contacted the police, who
had a look around but found nothing”.
When Hanson spoke to Ray Suddards (at the time 63 years old and a lorry driver himself) he told them:
“I remember it clearly –like yesterday. It had this silver plate, with holes on its
chest, hopping up Roundhill Street. After my dad reported what we had seen,
he was subjected to a lot of ridicule. A few days later, he picked up a newspaper
and read about a similar ‘figure’ being seen in Horton Lane, close to where we
had seen it”.
Above: “The Thing” illustration from Flying Saucer News of “what the Suddards’ saw”.
There was no object sighted in connection with the Suddards’ sighting, however, on the 19th August, 1955, a Bradford warehouseman, Mr Woods, was walking past Bowling Park at 23:30 hours. This location is approximately half-a-mile from Roundhill Street. Mr Wood noticed a bright silver object with the shape of a bullet and approximately 12 feet high and 4 feet in width; the object appeared to be emitting a buzzing noise. The witness walked on but 30 minutes later as he walked past the spot again he noticed that the object was still present and he found it very frightening. At one point he had observed a horse approach the object but then run away and seemed quite disturbed.
There were other sightings around this time but there was that all-pervasive attitude of dismissal of any case not involving space brothers amongst the flying saucer buffs. When I joined the British Flying Saucer Bureau, in the 1970s, the first thing I asked about was the Suddards case. I got a chuckle in response and a remark about silly stories. I asked whether I might see the investigation report; there was none and the whole stance of early flying saucer researchers, though not all was to accept newspaper accounts of everything and anything so long as “it fitted” with whatever your belief was. Had Suddards and his son actually claimed to have seen a tall, long haired, blond space brother the case would have been classed as “priority one”.
Above: enlargement of “The Thing” drawing from FSN
Below: The object sighted within a half mile of the Suddards encounter
It is time to address the theory, put forward originally by Merseyside UFO Research Group in 1966, to explain this sighting. One Patrick Gross seems to think highly likely to be correct. At just before 04:00 hours on a dark August morning, some child had decided to go out and play hop-scotch –why had the Suddards’ been so stupid not to realise this?
This explanation was never put forward to involved as, apparently, it is best if a solution can be offered with no discussion regarding it. The following would have been good counter points:
(1) What child would be allowed out to play hop-scotch by obviously totally incompetent parents at before 04:00 hours on a dark morning?
(2) Hop-scotch does not simply involve “hopping” and squares were usually chalked onto pavements where this was being played.
(3) The figure in question was illuminated by the lorry headlights. Are we to believe that Suddards and his son were so visually impaired that they could not see that the figure was a child? Had it been a child there might have been a few shouted expletives but father and son would certainly not have been left in the state they were by seeing a kid run out playing.
(4) Certainly even in the 1960s we never had skin-tight black clothing –clothing was mainly baggy and often hand-me-downs. The figure being a child wearing a silver perforated disc over the chest hopping about being involved: It gets a little silly.
(5) The game of hop-scotch does not involve moving from one street along to another so what was this ‘child’ doing?
Policemen are policemen and there is little doubt that Suddards would have been given “the copper’s eye” for signs of drink or faulty vision because he was driving a road vehicle. Then what about his son –the police involved seem certain something happened to unnerve the duo. This is not mentioned by other ufologists because, unlike Hanson, they did not mount any kind of investigation. Hanson placed an appeal in a local Bradford newspaper, the Bradford Telegraph and Argus; this led to retired Detective Sergeant Paul Jackson contacting them. He recalled the incident well as his partner at that time had been Police Constable Victor Briggs; Briggs had interviewed the Suddards and checked out the area. Nothing about hop-scotch chalk marks mentioned. According to Jackson:
“He (P.C. Briggs) often brought up the subject in conversation, as he believed
They had genuinely sighted something highly unusual”.
Old time coppers were not idiots or easily fooled and they would certainly not bring up a subject like this in conversations unless it really puzzled them and for that the witnesses would need to have a great deal of credibility. Beat policemen knew their areas and the people in it –it was part of the job. If any child had been known to be out playing at 04:00 hours, in the dark, locals would know and say something because (I speak as someone who got a clip across the ear from the local Bobby) you did not mess police about that much back then.
UFO activity was reported in the area at the time but that is only circumstantial and certainly no link to connect them with what the Suddards’ saw. The theory at the time was that there might be a connection but all the talk of the figure being from a “downed flying saucer” is fantasy speculation from much later. The other theory was that the duo had seen a ghost –that was dismissed by ufologists with a loud “Pfah! Ghosts do not exist!” There is one factor no one has mentioned: a child at that time, dressed and acting as he/she is described and causing a local furore might keep quiet at the time but not to come forward and say “It was me. I never meant to cause all the fuss” seems unlikely –though possible.
As far as I am concerned, with no full investigation into the Suddards’ sighting and no real details of the witness or sighting in Horton Lane, this is included for the record. If there was the remotest chance of the figure having been a child playing hop-scotch I would have, literally, jumped and accepted the solution.
Another “black aliens” sighting occurred after the Suddards’ encounter which was mentioned briefly in Flying Saucer Review –only an entry in yet another Vallee analysis of reports- and local newspaper account it appears to have never been investigated. The main sighting took place during daylight here is the press report:
Schenectady, New York 10th October, 1957
''SPACESHIP. THINGS LAND—OR DID THEY'?"
“The story said the sheriffs office and the Mariaville fire department yesterday checked out woman report that an alien spaceship had landed in field near her trailer on the Duanesburg-Church road extension.
"Mrs Edward Yeager told deputies and Mariaville Fire Chief Everett Smith she saw the ship and spacemen twice—yesterday at 2.40 pm and Wednesday at 3.30 pm.
'She said the strange craft—shaped like 'an old-fashioned washtub' and with about the same dimensions—landed in field across the road from her trailer As soon as the 'tub landed two "little black things" leaped out and "hopped into the woods She said the craft then took off and disappeared 'straight up The little 'things' never returned.
"When the 'tub' took off, Mrs Yeager related, it sucked up leaves and dirt like vacuum cleaner.
“Authorities said they checked the area without finding trace of the 'spaceship" or its occupants. They also were unable to find disturbance of leaves or dirt.
“Chief Smith said the woman, whose husband works nights, told him she was padlocking her trailer and would call police immediately if the strange craft returns”.
We have here what became a joke about an object the size of a washtub; it is possible that the witness was referring to the apparent size of the object from her position. We will never know. We do not even know the apparent height of the entities and Vallee simply writes: “two dark dwarfs”.
It is interesting that the motion of the entities in this incident was described as hopping while boys in Bardney refer to a “jolting” movement. There are points to note and the first is that the entities were all black and as a naturalist I can tell you that getting details from untrained observers of melanistic (black) animals can be hard to impossible. Photographing a melanistic animal such as a cat and getting good details even when it is stationary can produce bad results.
1928 Berger AE all black. No features large head, long dangling
arms. Approx. 5 feet (1.52 m) tall. Spherical object. Day
1954 Madame Carriere –“similarities”; short stature, black and spherical
object.
1955 Suddards’ All black, humanoid (?), silver chest disc. Approx. 4 feet
(1.20 m) tall. No object.
1967 Cussac AE black, longish arms, large head no discernible features
Approx. 3 ft 3 ins to 3ft 11 ins (1-1.20m) tall. Spherical
object. Day
1967 Arc-Sous-Cicon Approx. 3 ft 3 ins (1 m) tall. Black and could not see arms.
No object –light? Day
1972 Madame X Approx. 3 ft 11 ins (1.20 m) tall. Black, large round head,
large eyes, seemingly armless. Bright object? (night time)
1977 Anders Approx. 6 ft (1.8 m) tall? All black, round head, large eyes
Appeared to be arm-less. No object.
In the Anders case the height was a pure guess so he decided “6 feet”. Madame X had her encounter at night and so the bright object was seen. There could indeed have been arms present on the entities at Arc-Sous-Cicon and regarding what he saw, Mr Anders stated that if long, straight arms were present and held down at the sides of the entities he “probably would not see them”.
There are, of course, small dissimilarities but we are dealing with youngsters and adults who were suddenly confronted by something extraordinary and did not have the opportunity to examine the entities involved for a long time or from every angle. I have talked to policemen suddenly dropped into far more “normal” incidents lasting seconds and even their expert eyes missed details of what they saw.
There are older reports where all we have is “small, black entity” or “short black occupant” and these were never the subject of any kind of in-depth investigation by Ufologists and they mainly referenced a newspaper or magazine item or radio report. It is shoddy but it is why so many reports exposed as hoaxes are still referenced as genuine.
For me the fact that there are at least five –seven if we count the Suddards’ and Saint-Sauveur-la-Sagne incidents- reasonably similar entity cases from 1928-1977 that are unique and rare is an eye-opener. There could, in fact, be eight possible accounts of black entities. If we look at Rogerson’s IntCat we find the following entry:
UK 105 Mid June 1976. Afternoon . BARDNEY (LINCOLNSHIRE )
“A group of schoolboys saw something like a stick man, black with a round head, jolting along without making any noise, 150m (490 ft.) away, behind a hedge. No investigation took place”.
Bearing in mind that the Anders report was from 1977, when I read this and the entity description I had a rush of excitement mixed with disbelief. As far as I was concerned the entity described by Mr Anders was unique, if similar to others but it was early days and I had not collated all the material at that point. My mind was expecting to find enough differences to avoid having to face two reports that matched –and neither party involved knowing of the other.
It turned out that the quoted source was Nigel Watson and I had corresponded with him on UFO cases back in the 1980s so we at least knew each other. I tracked down Nigel’s current contact email and wrote to him to explain that the report is very similar to another from the UK as well as one from France and the US around the same period it would be interesting to try to find out more.
Nigel responded quickly:
“I mention the case in Portraits of Alien Encounters but I don't think there is much further info to add. I remember it was provided by one of the boys in a short letter”.
I checked the book in question but nothing on this case and I went through it four times but still nothing and so I wondered whether there was a later edition and got another copy but the contents were exactly the same. I went through the book line-by-line four times. Not a mention of the report so I got back to Nigel and asked what page the account was on; he checked and got back to me: “I just checked and couldn't find it either! I'll check elsewhere it might have been in an article I did for Strange magazine - I'll check that out”
Prior to final editing of this work I thought I would try and see whether Nigel had found the missing report –he had. It was, in fact, in a BUFORA publication and what made me want to bang my head repeatedly into a wall was that I had a PDF of the very publication! Here is what was written to Nigel by a ‘UFO investigator’ and included in his article in which he looked at attitudes toward children as witnesses in UFO sightings:
“Concerning the reference made by the schoolboy to a 'stick man: I dismissed it partly because there was only one person who saw it, and secondly…that the lads had claimed to have seen so many UFOs in that area" (Woodhall Spa, Lincolnshire) .
"Anyway I'11 quote from the letter I received from the lads.
'On Sunday afternoon boys are allowed to go to Bardney. In the summer term, 1976, about mid-June, we saw a "stick man" jolting along. It was black with a round head, not making any noise. It was about 15O yards away from us, and it was quite hard to see’.
"In my letter to Ken Phillips (BUFORA National Investigations Coordinator) I said that if the 'stick man' had been seen by more reliable people, and also if these young boys had not seen so many 'UFOs' (and many of them sounded like phantoms) I might have felt that the report justified an intensive investigation. However, even if the report was investigated little could be achieved because (a) it took place (allegedly) in summer 1976, (b) its value is very limited as I certainly would not hope to have to resort to reports made by young boys who; (i) could not be bothered to report the incident in 1976, (ii) probably have very strong imagination”.
Ufology and Ufologists are nothing more than a joke. There used to be really good investigators and researchers so where are they now because there are whole groups of “sceptical Ufologists” (i.e. the “debunkers”) who do not leave their comfortable chairs. Ufology damns itself.
Since noting this report in Unidentified – Identified I have made various attempts to track down at least one witness but the fact that BUFORA says that it has no record of this report and that no witness name is given has made it next to impossible. I made appeals in the local press but there have been no responses. It is probable that the way they were treated when they were youngsters reporting the encounter and the level of prejudice and incompetence of the investigator has stuck with the witnesses into adulthood.
It seems Ufologists lost another potentially valuable report. Again.
Here is an example or two from my own experiences with witnesses. In one case I had to visit a person who had seen a number of UFOs but had been told not to by other Ufologists because the witness was “obviously a UFO-nut!” As it turned out the witness was reporting what he had seen…not what the other 4-5 people nearby had seen because “I can’t speak for them”! It turned out to very possibly be a natural phenomenon –marsh gas. However, as I was leaving the witness casually said: “Old Ron will be happy about that because he was terrified that thing walked around the one he saw on the ground was a Martian!” It seems that Ron was the neighbour who first reported the UFOs but it was just before he moved home and when he mentioned that he had seen “someone get out and walk about the thing when it was on the ground” the Ufologist he spoke to had responded with “You need more water in your whisky!” Would Ron ever talk to a Ufologist again? An expletive was the response to that question.
In another case workers at a quarry were reporting strange light phenomena on the vast site including one ball of light that landed on a fork-lift truck which then began to power-up. It was all a big joke –even the local BBC news sent a reporter who filmed in the area and then joked about events there. Workers told me later that had the BBC reporter returned he would have been thrown from the highest excavation cliff. So the Ufologists decided it was all a publicity stunt but I went to the quarry and spoke to workers and discovered the reports were true.
In the case cited by Nigel Watson it is quite obvious the alleged ‘investigator’ had a few credibility problems of his own. Firstly, only one of the boys had seen the “stick man” but then we have a quote from the letter: “we saw a ‘stick man’” which seems to suggest that there was more than one observer of the figure. Just what exactly were these “phantoms” –light phenomena? If the witnesses were youngsters then it was probably not easy for them at that time to find out to who they should report these things. It is even possible that if they told their parents they might have been told not to say anything for fear of ridicule or worse. The ‘investigator’ seems to have put a lot of work into “why I cannot be bothered” to even talk to the witnesses. The Anders case was 1977 so could it be that these boys saw a similar entity but there was associated UFO activity?
Remember that, even up until the 1980s, if you reported seeing a UFO more than once you were considered to be either a bad observer and seeing stars, aircraft, etc. and not able to identify them; or you were a UFO-nut seeing UFOs everywhere. It is scary to think about the amount of data in the form of reports lost because of these attitudes. The attitude of Ufologists of “couldn’t be bothered as it didn’t sound legitimate” showed ignorance because it is very hard for people who see phenomenon they have never seen or encountered before to be matter-of-fact about it. They simply do not have the experience or references so they may well seem to be a “bit off” when writing.
It may be a little late now but I do intend trying to track down these witnesses to see exactly what was going on in 1976. That is research and investigation and these reports are also all, obviously, untainted by the more recent alien abduction invention of “tall black aliens”.
According the website Hybrid Rising:
“The Tall Blacks have physical characteristics which are not unlike Hybrid Greys, but their coloration is like that of the black Mantis-Insectoid beings. The HR Team believes it is plausible the Tall Blacks are a Hybrid version of the Black Mantises who we have placed at the top of the overall Hierarchy. We also suspect both types of beings contain or are aided by Human DNA. You might notice the Reptilians appear last or at the bottom of our menu here at Hybrids Rising and this was done because we view the hierarchy of these beings as falling within a Möbius where the Reptilians are actually next to the Mantis-Insectoids. Of course, this is impossible to graphically demonstrate using a pull down menu. As you will learn from the accounts we provide in this document, the heights of the Tall Blacks vary and although they appear to sometimes arrange themselves in a height based hierarchy we believe the shorter beings only have a lesser status due to their height and/or because of their age, i.e., not being fully mature”.
Before you ask none of these revelations refers to any of the cases in this chapter and I do wonder whether in a year or so we shall all discover that there is an “alien species” even further up the hierarchy. This is why the old reports are the ones we need to concentrate on because, although new reports should be investigated, they tend to be dismissed unless they fall within the criteria which the abduction ‘experts’ have dictated and some of those ‘experts’ are the same people who told me to ignore an Australian case as it was a hoax or at best quite unreliable.
The Kelly Cahill case was put on the back-burner as I updated other files but then I chanced upon an illustration online which made me sit up and pay very close attention.
The Cahill case, in my opinion and based on what we have been told over the years is probably one of the best cases of alleged UFO abductions to be recorded and “The Kelly Cahill case” is not correct since others were involved in the events of that night. There are major problems and these are not in the actual event itself but due solely to the Ufologists involved. Bill Chalker did the sensible thing when he was contacted and that was to contact a UFO group closer to where Cahill lived and that is when things fell apart. This is a very complex case and I am relying heavily on the article by Bill Chalker in the International UFO Reporter (1).
At the time of the encounter Kelly Cahill was a 27 -year-old housewife and mother of three children; on the 4th October, 1993, she contacted Chalker seeking assistance in understanding a bizarre experience she had undergone in the early hours of the 8th August, near the Melbourne suburban housing estate of Narre Warren North, between Belgrave and Fountain Gate in the foothills of the Dandenongs, Victoria. Kelly lived in Victoria and Chalker in New South Wales and so he passed details on to John Auchettl of Phenomena Research Australia (PRA) and urged Kelly to contact him. The PRA got on the case immediately but this is where things began to go wrong. According to Cahill’s account:
“My husband and I were driving to my girl friend’s place up in the mountains. It was her daughter’s birthday. It was just after dark, and we were nearly there, about half an hour from her place. It takes us about an hour and a half from our place. It was just after 7. (The area has) little bits of field...and then you run right into a major shopping centre. . . .
“My husband drives really fast. . . . I’m just busy looking out the window. It’s turned dark, and I look over towards this field as we are going past, and I see a ring of orange lights. It was the first time I ever thought I had seen something that wasn’t normal. . . . I was going to shut my mouth. I thought, “No, he’s just going to have a go at me.” But a couple of minutes up the road I said, “I swear I saw a UFO.” He said, “Don’t be stupid! It was probably a helicopter.” I said, “It wasn’t making any noise. It was just sitting on the ground. Anyway, after a few jibes at me, he forgot all about it, and we arrived at (my girl friend’s place).
“When we were there, my friends bring up this conversation, about what I thought I had seen. Her father says, “You think you’ve seen little green men or something, Kelly?” and all this sort of stuff. It was turned into a joke, and I just totally forgot about it. We went out and played bingo. We came back. We had a bit of a problem about what time we left. As far as my husband’s concerned, because we got home at 2:30 in the morning, it means we must have left at one o’clock.
“But that night I think we left at a quarter to 12. We got back from bingo at about 11, and we didn’t stay for very long because (my friend’s) daughter’s boy friend had just…split up with her and had gone home with the new girl friend…and she was really upset and crying, and we didn’t want to stay. So we weren’t there for that long at all.
“Anyway, we were driving back down the road in the same stretch. Both of us, just me and my husband…we both saw this ring, mind you…in front of us, hovering above the road. It was just something sitting there…I couldn’t tell what it was. We were at first far away, but as you got closer to it was sort of …well, it wasn’t like the orange light in the field. It was a round shape with some sort of glass around, or what looked like windows and lights around the bottom. Because it was dark, you couldn’t really tell at first. But as we got closer and closer, there was no noise or anything. Even my husband’s going. “You’re right! That’s something. That’s very, very strange.” And I swear we saw people in there, and then just as I said to him, “I swear there’s people in there,” it just shot off to the left as fast as it could go. I mean it just disappeared. Within a split second it had gone.
“We kept driving and about a kilometre ahead, all of a sudden, there’s this really, really bright light in front of us, and I’ve got my hand up, up above my brow, to look out the window, because it’s that bright, but I can’t see anything. I said to (my husband), “What are you going to do?” He said, “I’m going to keep driving.” From there, that is the last we remembered until…I knew I was going to see a UFO, you know, I just knew, because of what we had seen, I’d seen it twice in one night and he had seen it once…and the adrenalin is pumping, the heart is thumping, I’m so excited. All of a sudden I’m sitting in the car, and I’m saying to my husband, “What happened?” And he says to me, “I don’t know. We must have gone around a corner or something.” By the time we got home, he was definite of everything, but at that time he didn’t know what happened either. I said to him, “I swear I’ve had a blackout,” because adrenalin just doesn’t disappear in a split second like that. I mean your heart is going mad! And all of a sudden…
“One thing that really annoyed me was that I could smell vomit. I couldn’t figure out where the smell of vomit was coming from. I argue about this half the way home until it started getting ridiculous, and I ended up just shutting up to stop all the fighting that was going to come out of it, you know, because we fight like cats and dogs…As we were getting close to our home, about 20 minutes away from where we live (there was no one on the road), I saw a figure standing on the side of the road a tall dark figure. It was only for a couple of seconds, and I didn’t relate it to anything until much later on at all. But it made me turn my head. I kept it in my mind, because it reminded me of a story I was told when I was a little girl about the headless horseman on the side of the road…because it was on the side of the road. It wasn’t headless or anything, just this tall black figure. I saw it for only a couple of seconds, and then I couldn’t see it anymore, but I thought I saw it.
“I get home. That night I actually had a dream about UFOs to top it all off, that something happened…but a whole lot of it went out of my head”.
Although Cahill and her husband agreed that they had seen a UFO they could not agree on Kelly’s feeling of having blacked-out or the missing time nor even of seeing people and so they argued part of the way home. Both could smell vomit and each experienced unexplained stomach pain: Kelly said that it was like pain from severe muscle fatigue and that this radiated from her lower abdomen to the upper shoulders.
After getting home Kelly experienced menstrual bleeding and became quite ill and she had her period only the week before. The problems led to her eventually being hospitalised with a womb infection and the doctors believed that she must have been either pregnant or that she had undergone some kind of gynaecological operation. She had, in fact, neither been pregnant nor undergone a medical procedure in recent times. A strange triangular mark was also found on her abdomen along with a scar.
Cahill elaborated on this:
“…when I got home that night, that’s when I found the triangular mark below my navel, with what I thought was a little laparoscopy cut, and I also started bleeding that night. Three and a half weeks later I ended up in hospital…(the hospital) actually did a laparoscopy, another laparoscopy. This was not when I first went in. I went back in later, another six weeks after that, because I had a lot of pains in my stomach and just wanted to have it checked to see what it was. And I still had the triangular mark there. They just did a blooming laparoscopy cut right next to it. (There was) no comment whatsoever…I have a letter from a friend saying that she saw it”.
Cahill’s recollections did not come from any hypnosis sessions and she had only one session well after the main investigation had been completed but failed to reveal anything of significance. Cahill had the feeling that at best she had been lightly under and that the session had been of little value.
When it came to the events of 8th August, Cahill recalls crossing the road to the paddock and then seeing at first one tall black being with glowing red eyes and then many entities. These seemed to be approaching rapidly as if gliding and the large group of entities split into two groups; one focussed on Kelly and her husband while the other moved toward the other people who had also crossed farther down the road. The rest of her recollection is largely confusing and fragmented; she experienced voices and blindness.
Cahill elaborated on how her memory came back:
“We went down to a girl friend’s place a little bit later, a few weeks later, and the subject of UFOs came up, and her husband was saying, “Oh, I don’t think they really exist.” It was my husband that said, “If you had seen what Kelly and I saw, you might change your mind.” I said, “What are you talking about?” You know, if I’d seen something, I’d have remembered it. I didn’t even remember that I had seen it hovering in the middle of the road. It had been totally blanked out of my mind. And I search my head for days, because I knew he wouldn’t say something if he didn’t mean it. He was telling me, “Remember, on the way home from (your girl friend’s), remember, it wasn’t making any noise?” And I was just sitting there. I couldn’t remember it.
“And a few days later, all of a sudden I remembered it! It hit me! And…then I remembered going into the light, and then I couldn’t remember anything else. A couple of weeks after that, this started to really bug me, because I remembered that light, and I remember arguing with him all the way home, but it was all I did remember.
“I went up to (my girl friend’s) house again in October, this time for her other daughter’s…birthday, and again we went to bingo. On the way home from bingo that night, we went along the same road, and as we passed a certain spot I just got this incredible feeling of terror go through me, I mean absolute terror. All of a sudden I just started remembering, and by the next morning I had remembered just about everything that happened, except there’s still missing time that I can’t.
“What we had actually done, we had driven…into the light, but the road curved, and the light we had thought was in front of us was actually to our right-hand side. It was in the field, and it was massive…(Estimates put the possible diameter of the UFO at the “size of a house” or perhaps close to 5O meters.) So it was very big. Why I knew it was very big was because we could have driven for five minutes. The road sort of wound around this part.
“You could have driven for five minutes and not had it out of your sight the whole time”.
Cahill and her husband had a clear, uninterrupted view of a craft of enormous size -far larger than the UFO they had seen a few minutes earlier: and this one was at ground level in the field at the bottom of a gully area.
“I asked him to stop the car, and we both got out. I remembered leaning back in, actually on the floor, to pick up my handbag, because I didn’t go anywhere without my handbag. And that’s one of the sort of things that triggered off a lot of these memories, doing that. The other thing was telling myself, “You are conscious. This is real! This is happening! This is real!”
“For a while it was just absolutely terrifying, but you can’t help it because it sounds really wacky. I mean this is not the way it’s supposed to happen at all. . . .
“We crossed over the road. We jumped the gutter, and we walked up…I looked down the road, and there was another car–a light blue car–pulled up. Some people got out and went across the road. I only thought it was two, but it was actually three, but I didn’t pay much attention. They must have been at least a hundred meters down the road from us. When you’ve got something like that in front of you, and you’ we got people down the road…well, I was more interested in what was in front of me than them, so I didn’t get any detail…
“I’m standing there, and we are looking at this thing (for about 30 seconds). All of a sudden there is a black figure on the field. It’s about seven foot tall…I knew it was really tall at the time”.
Cahill was startled by the entity as she had expected to see a human being but this was far from being human. She tried to use thought as a means of communication but was immediately overwhelmed with fear and the entity’s eyes seemed to turn to a red fire and even at a distance of about 150 meters they possessed an extraordinary luminosity. Cahill continued:
“It started coming towards us, only slowly, and it had big red eyes. It sounds stupid, but it had great big round red eyes, like huge flies’ eyes and they were red like, not like a reflection of red, but like burning red, like…fluorescent stop lights, I suppose, that sort of real burning red. All of a sudden I started screaming out (to my husband). Now this has really got me baffled because of the fact that a human being doesn’t know this, so I don’t even know how I came out with this, but I started saying, “They’ve got no souls.” And then I started screaming, “THEY’VE GOT NO SOULS!” Then all of a sudden there were heaps of them in the field, not just one, a whole heap of them, and they started coming towards us…faster than a man could run, and they were gliding off the ground. They got halfway across the field.
“They split up. Some of them went towards the other people (two or three, she had thought) and some of them (the rest) came towards us”.
Cahill now found herself screaming to the other people down the road: “They’re evil! They’re going to kill us!”
“The next thing I know, I felt this oomph! in my stomach, right across here like I was winded, but I was thrown right back, and I was on my back on the ground. I sat up, with my head between my knees. Here, I’m trying to stay conscious. I couldn’t see. My eyes…It was all black…I’m screaming out to (my husband). But the next thing I heard him saying, “Let go of me.” His voice was all sort of cracked up with fear, and I’d never heard that from my husband. He’s not frightened or afraid of anything…
“Then this male voice said, “We (don’t) mean you any harm.” And then he said, “Why did you hit Kelly then?” That’s the last I heard of (my husband). No one else talked except me. I heard the male voice. Then I heard myself saying, “Oh, God, I’m going to be sick.” I’ve got my head between my knees, and I just felt, like, violently nauseous. Then I must have blacked out for a little while.
“I don’t remember being sick. Then I remember hearing talk about being a peaceful people, and I started screaming out, I said, “Don’t believe them! They’re going to steal your souls!” I know it sounds so ridiculous now, but at the time I was hysterically terrified…I had never felt terror like that. Not even in my worst nightmares had I experienced terror like that…
“Oh, there’s one thing I remember that he said: “I wouldn’t harm her. She’s my daughter.” Now when I first saw the — on the way up to (my girl friend’s) in the field, the first thing I did was pray. And I took it as sarcasm straight away. And it sounded like sarcasm…It sounded like there was even a small laugh after that. I don’t know — it just wasn’t good to me”
It seems that for Cahill a strong faith in God often involved an ability to get answers to many of life’s situations, albeit sometimes in the most subtle and unlikely ways. For her the brief observation of a UFO on the way to her friend’s had been a glimpse of one of life’s mysteries and perhaps even a lesson from God. It was for this reason that she made a silent prayer which began with “Father.” She thought for a moment, “Wait for me. I’ll be back down this way in a few hours.” Therefore, given her brief prayer and use of the word “Father” for clarification on the nature of the UFO event a she thought that the voice was mocking her when it said “She is my daughter.”
“Anyway, I started screaming and going on about demons trying to steal people’s souls…I like not to admit that it came from my mouth, but it did…But I’m going to tell it the way it is.
“Next thing I hear him saying, “Would somebody do something about her?” And I felt a hand . . . touch my shoulder. It wasn’t hard. It was quite gentle. That’s when I absolutely cracked! I’m still sitting on the ground, and I couldn’t see a thing, but I made sure that my eyes were just fierce…Something snapped in me. Before that I was crying. All of a sudden something snapped in me, and I got so angry . Then I started screaming out, “How dare you do this to these innocent people?” Like it was my fault. Because I was on a big spiritual search, and I really got the impression that it was my fault. And I thought, why involve other people? I felt like, almost like there was a fight for me. Like it was something I had to do…Anyway, I started screaming out stupid things, told them to go back where they came from. Next thing I remember I was sitting in the car. I’ve still got missing time”.
Sitting in the car, her last memory was of driving into the light.
Sleeping that night resulted in a bizarre dream in which Cahill is at the roadside with her head between her knees and becomes aware that she can see again. She sees an entity leading her husband down the slope into the field. Throughout this dream she is unable to see the entities above the level of their elbows –their limbs seem long and thin. Cahill is inexplicably convinced that the entity with her husband is a female and she tackles it and then blacks out. As the dream continues she once again regains consciousness only to find herself on the extreme right of the field with the UFO further away and to the left. She sees on the ground in front of her a still body and at first it looks non-human before changing to a human. Further along the field is a middle-aged woman who is screaming “Murderess! Murderess!” at her and Cahill is overcome with grief but with no awareness of having killed anyone.
A hand on her shoulder leads her and she follows obediently and eventually becomes aware that she is in a small room with only a small table and an entity is standing before her. This entity explains that she did not kill anyone but that they had to use her sense of morality to overcome her fear. Cahill had a profound feeling that she knew this being and on a table behind the entity is a Bible – one of her own that had disappeared a few weeks earlier. The entity gave her a rather strange choice and it is this that deepens her suspicion of the entities’ motives: she is told she can go with them but must leave the Bible behind –the entity then gives her the Bible. At that point the dream ends.
A few days after the encounter her husband found the missing Bible in the car.
There were other dreams that followed and these were probably partial recollections of the encounter intermixed with her own subconscious fears and mind trying to cope with what had happened. There can be no arguing that such an event would shatter the world view of a lot of people and challenge their religious faith if they had such –the Bible episode seems to suggest this strongly. The following sounds like partial recollection intermixed with a waking dream:
“I had another dream, and these dreams seemed very physical. I know I’m dreaming, and I’ve got to wake up out of them…
“In this particular one, I felt as if my legs were being pulled off the bed, and it was like I was paralysed from my waist down, and my legs were being pulled over to the side; yet I could almost use the top of my body. Then I’m grabbing a pillow, trying to hit my husband, to wake him up…I’m fighting this. I’m not going to let this thing drag me off the bed by my legs. Then I woke up and saw it standing there again! This time the hood covered the eyes, and it didn’t scare me…I was still terrified, but it didn’t scare me quite as much, because each time it scared me, it was that same power like I felt out in the field that night.
“When I was sitting on the ground, it was like something, almost like a frequency or a sound vibration or something. And it’s getting right into my head! And I couldn’t get it together. Like I was trying to get my logical thoughts together, not logical, almost conscious thoughts, and I was fighting it the whole time, which is probably why I seemed to remember more than my husband or even the other people”.
The third of what was referred to as “dreamings” took place at a friend’s home on the 23rd October. At this time Kelly had experienced the flood of recollections. According to Chalker:
“The two earlier “dreamings” took on an added significance, especially given the presence of the beings after Kelly had awakened from her “dreamings.” This time she wakes from a “dreaming” which seems to take the form of a “peak experience” (as psychologist Abraham Maslow calls it; Richard Maurice Bucke defined it as the sense of “cosmic consciousness”).* She sees apparently the same creature as before; but unlike earlier manifestations, it is naked and leaning over her as if about to kiss her navel area. It is tall, with a head much larger than normal, long and thin arms, with an abdomen out of proportion to its thin frame, like a child’s stomach suffering from malnutrition. Its skin is like gray-black plasticine. Kelly’s screams turn into an “uninterrupted stream of hysteria” and words”.
There were what Chalker describes as numerous “psychic” events and “electrical disturbances”; the Cahill car started up when no one was inside it –the vehicle had a kill switch which rendered these events even more startling and curious. Kelly also believed she had developed enhanced psychic powers. By January, 1994 the electrical events and the psychic incidents ended.
There are things in the case that are, naturally, mentioned by the investigators such as from July through September, 1993 small orange “fireballs” that were about the size of tennis balls frequently hit the windows of the house; Kelly, her husband and her mother witnessed the phenomena.
This type of phenomenon should not be immediately linked in some way with the UFO abduction experience as I have a huge listing of such reports and they seem fairly “common” and it was not until years after an incident that one friend mentioned that his then girl friend had suddenly seen coloured balls of light appear on the stairs in her house –he heard her call out and rushed out in time to see them as they began to vanish. Another person I knew casually mentioned one day that his mother had gone downstairs during the night to see such spheres appear up out of the floor before vanishing. This seems to be a form of UNP but nothing to do with “extra terrestrials”.
Some two-and-a-half years before her UFO encounter, Cahill was at Lalor, and had a peculiar dream in which she moved through a flesh-like hourglass apparatus. It is noted that the same night she experienced a “vision” of opening their back door and seeing a light for a few seconds before blacking-out and claimed to have experienced the same sense of power she felt in the field in August 1993.
The mind plays tricks. A dream in 1991 and a “vision”, or another dream, really cannot be connected to the 1993 UFO encounter; if Cahill had physically seen a light and passed out then that seems to be more physiological related –a temporary health issue, perhaps. There is a valid point to all of this of course. In my 2017 book UFO Contact? I referred to “Ruth Syndrome” and these past experiences could be used to indicate that Cahill fell into that category of reports –or as with former policeman Alan Godfrey that a witness could be fantasy prone to a degree. However there were five other percipients involved in her encounter so this is all ruled out.
After the encounter and up until July, 1994, the Cahill house was allegedly the scene of fleeting observations of tall “shadows” –seen by both Kelly and her husband. Memory flash-backs need not be dragged into this since fleeting glimpses of shadows, usually in the observer’s peripheral vision are quite common. For instance the “flash of light” or small arc-like momentary flashes of light in the peripheral vision are commonly experienced during vitreous separation. This is when the vitreous pulls on the retina which makes one think they are seeing a light but it is caused by movement of the retina. Seeing movement out of the corner of the eye is also a sign of anxiety and considering the experiences of the couple this seems far more likely an explanation.
A bad smell occasionally permeated the house and seemed to move around –I have experienced this as have many others and the explanations can be wide-ranging from dead mice or rats to damp patches and so on.
Kelly had told Chalker that apart from her husband with her in the car, she was aware of another vehicle farther down the hill from their position and that this car contained at least two persons, a man and a woman –later identified by PRA as Bill, Jan, and Glenda. At the time she had paid little heed to them since she and her husband had their attention focussed on a massive UFO which had landed in the field opposite them. The PRA had worked quickly and by the 17th November they had located the couple that Kelly had seen and it turned out that the couple also had a friend (a woman) with them. This trio took Auchettl to the encounter site and to a spot that was consistent with Cahill’s description. But better was to come as the drawings made by this trio of the UFO and entities closely matched Cahill’s own.
At this point a real investigator would be keeping a poker-face but thinking “This is too good to be true. Is this a con?” Checks made showed that none of the trio knew Cahill or her husband and vice versa. Here was the Ufologists dream case: two groups of people unknown to each other and seeing the same UFO and entities but also experienced missing time–and who had no contact before or after the event. These percipients were able to provide information that enabled investigators to cross-check and find correlations. Added to this were the range of apparently related physical traces which included ground traces, a magnetic anomaly and physiological effects and markings on some of the percipients.
Any real investigator would look at this and realise that they would never get a case so complete and convincing but there was a cherry on top of the cherry on the cake! The second group of percipients had described seeing another car which was parked farther back down from theirs and appeared to contain one male who seemed to be gazing fixedly toward the UFO and entities. Three cars present: the Cahill’s near the top of the hill, the one with Bill, Jan, and Glenda 150 meters further down the hill and 25-30 metres behind them was car three and its one occupant. The first two cars were parked with their lights off while the other had its lights on and this probably explained how Cahill was able to glance down and spot the second car with what to her seemed only two persons (in fact three) yet the trio could not see Cahill, her husband or their car. It was a dark and cloudy night and Cahill could only see the second car because it was back-lit by the headlights of the third car.
From the testimony of Bill, Jan, and Glenda the investigators determined the location of this third car from which the man was looking at the UFO through a break in the vegetation cover. This combined with Cahill’s evidence allowed for triangulation of the position of the UFO which matched with anomalies found there. .
Typically witnesses to UFO events or involved in abductions are known to each other but Cahill only learnt of Bill, Jan, and Glenda through Auchettl while they knew nothing of her existence until much later. Cahill had tried hard to persuade Auchettl to give her the names of the witnesses but he refused in order to maintain the integrity of the testimony. Only when the investigation was completed did the three learn what Kelly had reported and at the time that Chalker wrote his piece they had not attempted to contact her. The PRA uncovered no evidence of a previous connection between the Cahills and the other group.
After the encounter Kelly Cahill’s recollections faded from conscious memory and this despite the animated discussions about it with her husband in the immediate wake of the incident. Her husband only remembered the UFO encounter but not the entities and would not acknowledge the missing time; his reference to the 8th August incident at a barbecue on the 16th September is what led to Kelly’s initial confused attempts to reconcile this troubling situation. She had found this temporary amnesia troubling since she has vivid memories going all the way back to age two.
Other events now had a more sinister connotation which is quite natural given the situation and Cahill became more alarmed and sought help from universities and aviation authorities. The aviation authority gave her two UFO contact numbers, one of which was that of Bill Chalker whom she contacted after having little help from a Victoria based UFO group.
What follows is the transcript of an interview Kelly gave to Robb Tilley, an associate of Chalker, on the 21st March, 1994 and the details were consistent with those given Chalker on the 4th October, 1993. Kelly Cahill has always been consistent and has not added extra details or claims over the years. If the 8th August encounter had involved only Cahill –or if we believed her husband that they had only seen a UFO— then the case would receive a low rating for credibility. As noted in the book UFO Contact?, I have spoken to people (Mrs C. being a good example) who have been with someone and seen an entity that was as real as could be and these people were fully aware of everything going on around them –including noting the time on a car clock. But no one else saw anything.
Above: Kelly Cahill ©K. Cahill
The presence of the other percipients witnesses – the married couple and their friend, plus a possible other observer in a third car — kicks the case out of the “imagine” category into the one that argues for it having been a real encounter. And I tried to look at this case from different angles in an effort to find a flaw or something that just did not “gel” and failed. As far as the PRA is concerned the focus of the incident was not Kelly Cahill but the two other women.
The females in the other group seemed to play a dominant role rather like Kelly in hers: Bill, like Kelly’s husband, appears to have had only a limited involvement. Jan and Glenda consciously recalled being aboard the UFO and the tall black beings; their description of the entities only varies in that they did not feature the red eyes.
The experience for Jan, Glenda and Bob apparently started when they approached the site and all three could hear a strange noise and suddenly felt ill –Bill actually thought that he was going to pass out and lost control of the car and ran off the road, striking a pole. After checks were made for damage they drove off but a few minutes later a speeding car with its high beams on shot past them. Then another car passed. They then came to a bridge with an almost immediate sharp turn after it and further along this section they stopped the car. Bill’s vision was impaired although he had some limited vision as he was driving. He was, however, unable to remember seeing the UFO yet his two companions recalled it clearly –and their descriptions closely match Kelly’s.
It appears that, in some unexplained way, Bill had been isolated from the actual experience but he had conscious recall of smells and sounds and he remembered that a lot of activity was going on. Yet he did not recall seeing anything. He did later undergo hypnosis and this did expand his apparent recollections of having been aboard the UFO but only through the senses of smell and hearing only. There are similar cases in Ufology were the male percipient seems not to be the main focus but it has to be pointed out that these experiences can be traumatic and with –it seems- memory blocks being somehow imposed on percipients we have to be very careful with drawing conclusions.
Jan and Glenda did not think of theirs as an “abduction” experience and claim that they “felt as if they had exercised free will all through it”. That seems well and good but you have to then remember that the principal element of their on board experience was a form of examination and that this could not be visually remembered and yet other parts of their onboard experience exist in visual images and conscious memory. Hypnosis in their cases appears to have only reinforced what they recall already and that is important because they did not retrieve memories under the influence of hypnosis nor of a hypnotist who might lead them with questions.
According to both Jan and Glenda the entities did not speak and also provided very little in the way of information. Neither woman saw one another -or any of the other percipients- while on board the UFO. This is Curious because Jan was aware of what was happening to Glenda and vice versa “ostensibly through psychic means”. Jan, Glenda and Bob apparently did not have the complex background experiences as described by Kelly and their experience seems to have been limited to the 8th August encounter.
The PRA found a possible related ground trace and low-level magnetic anomaly at the encounter site. In October, 1994 John Auchettl and PRA were to release a comprehensive report on the affair or that was what was stated. The problem is that after a decade John Auchettl and PRA had not released their report –only a few fragments of information. Chalker now considers his decision to pass Cahill and her case along to the PRA to have been a big mistake. According to Chalker, referring to his previous article on the case:
“John Auchettl and PRA, whose investigative thoroughness is to be commended”, was based entirely on conversations with Auchettl and discussions with Kelly Cahill at the time (1993-1994), and in retrospect should have been qualified more accurately. While Auchettl & PRA may well have been thorough in their investigation, in reality there has been no way to absolutely verify this, because of their unwillingness to release their report and data on the case. PRA have offered some seemingly unusual and convoluted explanations for this lack of sharing.
“I have long encouraged openness and sharing in UFO research (my web site is in part an expression of my position on this matter). My attempts to encourage PRA in this direction, from my perspective, have been very disappointing, and have instead lead me to not to refer cases to John Auchettl and PRA. Unless PRA changes their apparent lack of transparency and openness, researchers and witnesses should carefully consider the wisdom of cooperating with Phenomena Research Australia (PRA)”.
In fact, in 2021 no one has seen the report and that includes Chalker and Cahill. It is also possible that the PRA claiming that Jan and Glenda were the main focus of the encounter and Kelly Cahill was not really of significance may stem from a personal grudge on the PRA’s part. Initially, the group had said it had delayed releasing the report on legal grounds and it turned out that this involved the outright naming of Cahill and her husband in the report –something that led to a great deal of friction between the two. As far as the PRA were concerned they could publish the names so this was really a case of, once again, Ufologists breaching witness confidentiality. Chalker talked to the PRA but got nowhere. Jan, Glenda and Bob were not and have never been, as far as I can ascertain, publicly identified.
Above: The pronounced marks found on the thighs of Jan, Glenda and Kelly Credit:PRA
Various photographs of physical marks on the thighs of the women have been released and these are on several internet sites but carry no copyright or source of origin. I assume these were from the PRA: they include a photograph of the mark below Kelly’s navel and marks of restraining straps (?) used on Glenda. There was more to come, though. In Hair of the Alien, Chalker refers to the occupant of the third car that night:
“A third independent witness came forward via an anonymous letter sent to Who magazine, a popular weekly Australian publication, during October 1996. The wife of the supposed witness wrote the letter. She indicated that her husband, apparently an employee of the Victorian government Law Department, was reluctant to be identified. However, the letter described some unique and unusual information –specifically a red dragon logo on the spare wheel cover on the back of his vehicle, which one of the women in the second car (not Kelly) had mentioned seeing –that confirmed that the man was indeed present at the scene of the encounter.
“This witness also claims to have had ankle ligature marks similar to those reported by one of the women in the second car…”
Anyone can write an anonymous letter but they cannot include details that only the investigator and those involved would know. Chalker goes on to write:
“But further developments, independent of PRA’s own investigations and still not fully elaborated, suggest that perhaps the focus of this extraordinary encounter had not been Kelly or the second (or indeed the third) party on the road that night. Someone else (totally unrelated to the other parties) on the road had apparently also experienced an abduction. In fact, this person’s whole family had been subjected to an ongoing alien intrusion. The parties on the road were, it seems, in the wrong place at the wrong time, innocent bystanders in a much larger alien tableau…”
Those involved did want their part in the encounter disclosed “for the time being”. I am really not buying into this since nothing new has appeared on this supposed case since 2005. I have emailed and messaged Chalker on his Face Book page and heard nothing back. The PRA, it seems, just have no interest in talking to anyone. Personally, I believe from what has been revealed that if a genuine alien abduction experience took place that night it was opportunistic as so many of these events appear to be. No one person was singled out and the others just “unlucky”.
When it comes to the claim –without any substantiation since 2005 that I can find—that the real targets for abduction that night was another family I do wonder whether this was the speeding car with its lights on; though another car had passed Cahill and her husband so it may just be coincidence. The claim is nothing but a rumour and to date any ‘evidence’ for generational abductions has fallen apart on close examination. At times it almost seems as though Ufologists do not think that one UFO abduction case is sensational enough –when Budd Hopkins veered from straight forward regression hypnosis to then believing there were screen images it opened up a couple of decades of time wasting that has literally destroyed Ufology.
The resemblance of the entities seen during this abduction and those in the Anders sighting is striking and yet there was no evidence of abduction in the latter case. The fact that this case was covered in the International UFO Reporter makes it somewhat alarming that it is fairly low level in Ufology otherwise it might be assumed that “leading Ufologists” would be aware of black entities. Had this case taken place in the United States it would be flooding the internet UFO sites and You Tube videos.
One thing I have noted while looking at this case is that it is hailed as “The Kelly Cahill Abduction case” and site after site notes how it is the first time that there were “other witnesses to someone’s abduction”. Have these people read the report? It is quite clear that Cahill and five other persons were abducted that night and they have the same markings, etc as Cahill. We have Kelly, her husband, Janet, Glenda, Bob and the driver of the third car –I would normally dismiss anonymous letters but if the writer provided information that only those there on the night and the investigators knew about then it adds credibility and I did wonder whether the letter writer might have been the person involved but decided to relate what happened to “somebody else” –that is not unknown and I have encountered this myself when dealing with UFO witnesses.
Above: triangular mark found below Kelly Cahill’s navel Credit: PRA
It is easy enough to write that these entities showed no “complete control” over the situation that night as in other recorded UFO abductions where the road is quiet and no other vehicles are seen and where the UFO suddenly rises from cover or swoops down on a car: or even where the vehicle is stopped somehow. In this case there were three vehicles and those in them saw the UFO and stopped to get a better look and the more curious (in car 1 and car 2) got out to cross the road and get a much better look –we seem to have nothing on the “man” in the third card getting out at that point. Only when the two groups get to the fence and observe do the entities appear (Cahill estimates after 30 seconds or so).
I have come across case after case where the person involved has thought to themselves that they would like to know more about UFOs or meet whoever “is inside” during a sighting and even persons who wondered “whether whoever was in the UFO could read my thoughts” and asked them to show themselves –and they did. Cahill wanted to know more about the UFO mystery and perhaps that thought was picked up on? That is pure speculation and to be honest I personally doubt it. But my old Gran used to say “Be careful what you wish for!”
It seems that Cahill was expecting to see what most people expected to see appear from out of a UFO –humanoids. Well, humanoid in form but not in appearance and this seems to have made her panic. Why? Well, she was, at the time, looking at various religions and beliefs and it is possible that subconsciously she recalled the “occult significance” of the colour red –the ancient Celts and others saw it as a bad omen and even people with “red” hair were victimised as witches just for hair colouration. Whatever the reason –even actually coming face-to-face with real aliens which is a lot different than thinking about them— she panicked and started screaming and we will probably never know what happened to throw her to the ground. Too much speculation leads away from the facts we know.
Below: Kelly Cahill’s sketch of the entity head Credit: PRA
That Jan and Glenda did not treat the encounter as being one of abduction is interesting from a psychological standpoint because they had no conversation with the entities and learnt nothing from them (that they recall). Neither do they recall much of what went on and I never really saw “meet and greet the neighbours” as not communicating, strapping them down and then carrying out tests –that on one person led to hospitalisation- and wiping their memories. The “psychic” nature of Jan sensing what was happening to Glenda and vice versa can be explained away as both women probably being in close proximity but if memories were wiped then total recall can lead to false conclusions. After all, why could the women not sense what was happening to Bob –or even Kelly or her husband?
It is how an individual’s mind perceives what happened to them to make it not as bad as it probably was. Bob and Kelly’s husband had no real part to play in the encounter and cannot recall much. Yet, if it was a man in car 3 why does he have the ankle restraint markings because that suggests “he” underwent something similar to Kelly, Jan and Glenda –which is why I wonder about the “wife” who wrote to Who magazine. Then again, if we are dealing with entities that can induce memory blocks in humans it could just be that Bob and Kelly’s husband are only recalling what they want or can.
This appears to have been a one off encounter and if we note the Cahills earlier sighting of a UFO it could just be that the UFO landed for other reasons but three cars stopping on a quiet road was too good an opportunity to pass by. Basically, for everyone involved it was a case of wrong time and wrong place. Although Kelly Cahill has become more active in Ufology her book saw print and then did not see a reprinting which is ludicrous. No abductions since and we think the same applies to Jan, Glenda and Bob.
Various images appear online that are either credited to the PRA or carry no credits and I have reproduced these giving credit to the PRA. However, having not released their full report after 26 years raises many questions and it is certainly not scientific and certainly challenges the credibility of the PRA. This is Ufology at its very worst because it would certainly be a very powerful case for the sceptics/debunkers to challenge.
Everything seems to indicate that the Dandenong encounter is a credible case and only the failure to publish the report or offer copies to those involved prevents me from giving it a High Strangeness rating of 10 –the highest possible.
Above: Jan (left) and Glenda’s drawings of the entities. Credit: PRA
Below: Kelly Cahill’s drawing of the UFO. Credit:PRA
Even if we are making assumptions that certain entities appear to be strikingly similar we are still dealing with unusual types. I have no problem in excluding these reports from anything to do with shadow people which will probably be replaced by a newer trend in ghost mythology in a few years. The idea that these entities originate “from the multiverse” or a “dimension higher than ours” is wholly unsupported by any anecdotal evidence let alone scientific proof. Theory is well and good but practically of no use -I recall a person who decided to work in Theoretical Physics “because it’s all theory -you don’t have to prove anything!”
Jacques Vallee and others have used the lack of solid evidence to swerve the subject away from nuts and bolts research and into a world multidimensional entities and origins because “extra terrestrial would be boring” which are the words of someone who just is not doing the work and opts for the theoretical because “you don’t have to prove anything.” Opting for the belief – belief – that both UFOs and alien entities are some kind of modern day version of the goblin and fairy myths or whatever was behind that updating its deception is fun at times but not to be taken seriously.
If I wanted to draw a connection between fairy law and UFOs and particularly black entities then all I need cite as an example is the Welsh Pwca. Look at the drawing of a Pwca sat on a rock made in the 1800s and then look at the Aylen entities.
We can go even further by looking at illustrations from old books such as The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies (1691) by the Rev. Robert Kirk. Henry Justice Ford was a wonderfully imaginative artist and one drawing in particular hangs on a wall of mine. It shows a sleeping woman being escorted from her home by an array of small people and has been completely missed by Ufologists.
Above: Henry Justice Ford’s illustration of a young woman being whisked off by strange little entities as she “sleeps”. Kirk’s book was published in 1691 well before “UFOs” and alien abductions.
When we look at these reports then we need to assess them on the here and now and any modern influences rather than centuries’ old tales that many do not even know about. We need to base our judgement on physical trace evidence if there is any as well as physiological and psychological effects affecting the witness/percipients after their encounter and for which there is no reasonable or possible explanation. If the accounts of those involved hold up after investigation then, even if no physical evidence left by an object, we have to draw conclusions, look for similar events and then all we can conclude id whether the case appears to us to be genuine.
It does not matter that any entity encountered claims that it comes from this or that planet or system. We can only go by what we know and until an abductee successfully steals an alien from a craft that can be analysed we cannot claim 100% that we are dealing with extra terrestrials. Though no other possibility presents itself.
References
Haunted Skies Project https://www.facebook.com/groups/3272617712989097
Arc-Sous-Cicon
(1) The Little Singing Creatures At Arc-Sous-Cicon, Mesnard, Joel, Flying Saucer
Review, Vol. 19, No.1, 1967
(2) Phenomenes Spatiaux, September, 1967
(3) Strange Creatures At Arc-Sous-Cicon, Spacelink vol. 6, No. 3, June, 1970
(4) Lumieres Dans La Nuit (LDLN) No. 95, July, 1968
Cussac
(1) Spacelink (Lionel Beer) Vol. 6, No. 2, March, 1968
(2) Ditto “ “ , Vol. 6, No. 4, July, 1968
(3) Encounter With “Devils”, Mesnard, J. & Pavy, C., Flying Saucer Review
Vol. 14 No. 5, September/October, 1968
(4) Report on the Scientific Council - GEPAN, t. 4, National Centre for Space
Studies, 140, June 1978 No. 68.
(5) Encounters With UFO Occupants, Lorenzen, J. & C.: pp. 162, 224
Anders & Madame X
(1) Flying Saucer Review 24/5, March, 1979
(2) Observation of Unusual Entities In Devon, 1977, Hooper, Terry: SITU
(Society for the Investigation of The Unknown) Report 07-08/77/D [1979]
NB: a copy of the above report was sent to/received by: The Plymouth UFO Investigation Centre, Plymouth UFO Investigation/Research Group as well as
British UFO Studies Centre & FSR
(3) The A-- Case: Two Entities Seen Near Exeter In 1977, Hooper, Terry, AOP
Journal 1/2, 1995
(4) The Crack In The Universe, Bourret, Jean-Claude, Neville Spearman,
London, 1978: pp. 88-92
Pauline Berger
(1) The Disappearing Scarecrow, Mail Bag, Flying Saucer Review volume 15,
No. 1, January/February, 1969: p. 29
Saint-Sauveur-la-Sagne, Puy-de-Dôme.
(1) Garreau, Charles and Lavier, Raymond, "Face Aux Extra-Terrestres", Delarge,
France, 1975: pp, 205-206, 1975.
(2) Figuet, Michel and Ruchon, Jean Louis, "OVNI, Premier Dossier Complet des
Rencontres Rapprochées en France", Lefeuvre, France, 1979: pp. 71-72
NB: there are many other French language sources but these all quote the Garreau and Lavier account. J. Bernard Delair does list the account in the "UFO Register", Contact (UK) Data Research, Oxford, 1976.
Suddards
(1) Ibson, Jack, Flying Saucer News, vol. 1 no. 10, Autumn, 1955.
(2) Constance, Arthur, The Inexplicable Sky, Citadel Press publisher, NY. 1956
P. 222
(3) Vallee, Jacques, Passport to Magonia - On UFOs, Folklore, and Parallel
Worlds", Contemporary Books publisher, NY, 1969. pp; 250-251
(4) "UFO Landing Reports - Investigation, Research and Hypotheses" MUFORG
Bulletin, December, 1966. MUFORG -Merseyside Unidentified Flying Objects
Research Group.
(5) Hanson, John & Holloway, Dawn, Haunted Skies: The Encyclopaedia of
British UFOs, vol. 1 (1st edition), 2010. pp. 179-181
Bardney
(1) Watson, Nigel, Close Encounter Incidents and Children, BUFORA Bulletin
No. 7/8, 1982/1983: pp. 12-18 (case cited on p. 12)
Schenectady
(1) Schenectady Gazette 11th October, 1951
(2) Vallee, Jacques, A Descriptive Study of the Entities associated with Type 1
Sightings, Flying Saucer Review Vol. 19, No. 1, January/February, 1964:
pp. 6-10
(3) Gross, Loren, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse UFOs: History 1957
October 1st – November 2nd Supplemental Notes. 2003; p. 7
Kelly Cahill
(1) Chalker, Bill, An Extraordinary Encounter In The Dandenong Foothills, International UFO Reporter, Sept/Oct 1994, Vol. 19, No 5
(2) “Kelly Cahill Abduction”, The Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters ed. by Ronald Story (2001), pg. 291-293 –this was also published as The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters in the UK (2002).
(3) Chalker, B. Hair of the Alien: DNA and Other Forensic Evidence of Alien Abductions, Gallery Books, 2005: pp. 49-67
(4) Cahill, Kelly, Encounter, Harper Collins, 1997
220 pages
A4
perfect bound
paperback
Fully illustrated with photographs and illustrations
£20.00 (excl. VAT)
A must read for those with a serious interest in UFOs Some of the contents:
The Nottinghamshire UFO Crash of 1987…or 1988
The Llandrillo ‘Saucer’ and
Strange
UFO Abductees and Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome
The UFO That Landed On
My Encounters With The Men In Black
A Previously Un-noted Alien Entity Type
Early 20th Century
Close Encounter with a Boggart
Some Odd and Unusual Cases
Rosa Lotti and the Happy Entities
The Strange Case of the Woollaton Gnomes and the Mince-pie Martians
What Happened on the
The ‘Lost’ Belgian UFO Landing Case
Strange Aliens from Outer Space?
Encounter with Black Aliens and Landed UFO