PROJECT OPEN BOOK
The Field Investigator's Guide to UFOs
Part Two: Finding a Case
by Dennis Stacy
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In order to investigate a UFO case, you must, of course, first find one. Despite the perceived plethora of sightings, this is not always as easy as it seems. For one thing, the overwhelming majority of UFO sightings are never reported. The reason for this failure to report sightings is fairly straightforward: fear of ridicule. Hynek lamented this situation in a letter written to the magazine Physics Today, in which he solicited UFO reports from scientifically trained observers. "It has been my estimate over the past 20 years," Hynek noted, "that for every UFO report made, there were at least 10 that went unreported. Evidence for this comes from the Gallup Poll, the many UFO reports I subsequently learned of that were not reported to the Air Force, and from my own queries. There has always been a great reluctance to report in the face of almost certain ridicule. It would seem that the more trained and sophisticated the observer, the less prone he is to report unless he could be assured of anonymity as well as respect for his report."
Many respondents only reinforced Hynek's fears. One man, who is now a professional astronomer, waited 11 years to report a sighting, precisely because of a reluctance to face the embarrassment of ridicule by peers — and this despite the fact that his own sighting was corroborated by several other credible witnesses, including at least two police officers. In the summer of 1960, near Walkerton, Ontario, the story went, the man had observed a ball of light hovering near a tree. As he and several of his relatives approached to take a picture, "It noticed us, and noiselessly accelerating at a very high rate, headed almost directly south, disappearing over the horizon in about two and a half seconds." Yet another astronomer failed to report a pertinent observation out of embarrassment. To sustain his self-image as the ultimate scientist, he "preferred to regard his sighting as being of an unusual physical phenomenon," according to Hynek, "rather than admit the possibility, perhaps even to himself, that it was a genuinely new empirical observation." Given the embarrassment that seizes the best, most respectable UFO witnesses, any investigator worth his or her salt must learn to cope with the "ridicule factor" before an investigation can begin. But given the right circumstances, the right individual, and the right approach, the curtain of ridicule can be overcome, as the large response to Hynek's letter in Physics Today clearly indicates. For this to happen, the witness/reporter must have confidence in his or her confidante, as Physics Today respondents clearly did in Hynek after seeing his credentials. Even with such confidence, moreover, the UFO witness often must still be drawn out. Few of those embarrassed by a close encounter, after all, will volunteer the information unless asked to do so. Given the ridicule factor, the UFO hunter in search of a case to investigate must follow two basic rules: First, to learn about someone's UFO experience, it's best to ask. Even a lifelong friend may be reluctant to broach the subject of a UFO sighting unless drawn out. And second, when you do ask, ask those who have the most confidence in you — your family members and closest friends. A complete stranger is likely to react with serious reservation when another stranger arrives suddenly on his doorstep, asking questions about UFOs. (The more unusual the UFO experience this subject has had, moreover, the higher his or her resistance will be.) An example from my own experience may be instructive. In the early 1980s, I was hired to write a weekly column for the San Antonio Express-News about unusual events that had taken place in the state of Texas over the years. The first 6 months or so went well enough, but inevitably the scramble for material, or at least significantly different material, set in. By October (the series had begun the previous December), I was asking friends and acquaintances — except for "Rudy" — if anything strange or unusual had ever happened to them. My reasons for not asking Rudy were obvious. He taught history at a local community college, and the shelves of his personal library in a prominent neighborhood on the north side of town were overburdened with straight literature, including some 10,000 historical biographies. I had worked with him on several occasions and was well aware of his disdain for anything unusual — typified by his attitudes toward mysticism, astrology, and anything else that remotely smacked of the occult. I assumed this would naturally include flying saucers and UFOs, too. But I also knew that he had been a B-24 bombardier during World War II and the heyday of the so-called "foo-fighter" phenomenon, in which glowing balls of light had perplexed both Allied and Axis air crews during the closing nights of the war.
On the extremely remote possibility that he might have encountered a foo-fighter, I asked Rudy if anything strange had ever happened to him during his flying days in the war. "No, nothing ever did," he said matter-of-factly, and that, I assumed, was that. After a brief pause, though, he said, "But last November, I was driving back from Austin Rudy first became aware of something visible in the upper portion of his windshield, but continued driving while leaning forward to look up through the curved glass. To his amazement, he told me, what looked like a flying saucer flew into view, traveling slowly southward and directly over the righthand lane he was in. He pulled off onto the shoulder — the only car to do so — stopped, and stepped outside for a better view. The object was underneath the overcast, probably 800 or 900 feet overhead. "I can see it clear as daylight now," he said, a year after the fact. "It was perfectly circular and just under 100 feet in diameter. The outer rim consisted of a broad flange divided into what might be flaps or at least individual segments. An antenna hung down from the middle of the object, and the central portion, the area inside the flaps or flanges, slowly rotated on its own axis as the whole continued southward down the highway." A short distance away, Rudy told me, the vehicle initiated a sharp U-turn and started back up the north side of the highway, slowly rising as it did. Eventually it entered the clouds and disappeared from view. Rudy waited a few more minutes to see if it would reappear. When it didn't, he got in his car and drove home. "All the way home," he said, "I kept thinking. Well, that's it. I'll get up in the morning and the headline will read `UFO Mystery Solved!' " But if anyone else had seen or reported Rudy's UFO it certainly wasn't in the San Antonio papers, and it was almost certainly nothing Rudy himself would ever bring up in casual cocktail or coffee conversation unless directly confronted. Almost as remarkable as the sighting itself, perhaps, was Rudy's reaction to it. True, it was unusual and unexpected, apparently a flying craft of technology radically different from his old B-24 Liberator — but also nothing to lose a night's sleep over. Class was tomorrow night, and life went on. Besides, who does the average citizen call to report a UFO, especially when that UFO has already disappeared into the clouds? One might say, then, that the UFO investigation begins at home. Ask your parents, your husband or wife, your aunts and uncles, your cousins, your neighbors and acquaintances. Many of these cases may only be anecdotal; others may involve data — such as the names of other witnesses and a possible paper trail — that can be used to fill in and corroborate the historical record, if nothing else. If the witness you wish to approach is a total stranger, we suggest you do so with kid gloves. It would help if you had some credentials — say, a few UFO cases you have investigated in the past — to boost your credibility. Otherwise, you should utilize what, in the vernacular of the nineties, we call "networking." For instance, if a friend has witnessed something unusual, and then refers you to a second witness, the second witness, knowing your connection to the case, may be more willing to talk. Above all, do not approach potential witnesses, especially strangers, with theories involving aliens and extraterrestrial ships. You will be far more likely to gain confidence if you say, simply, "I understand the other night you witnessed something a bit out of the ordinary. I've been collecting some information on this and wonder if I could speak to you as well." (This will be covered in greater detail in an upcoming chapter on interviewing witnesses.)
If you find it hard to get your leads from people, you may be interested to learn that a countless variety of fascinating cases — most merely reported but not thoroughly investigated — are described in print. Coverage of UFO sightings by the nation's major daily newspapers tends to vary widely, depending on whether UFOs are in vogue at a particular time. A much more consistent source of UFO sighting reports is the small community daily or weekly newspaper. So many sightings have been reported in the Gulf Breeze, Florida, area in recent years, for example, that the local paper, The Islander (P.O. Box 292, Gulf Breeze, Florida 32562), has been offering mail subscriptions to investigators. Another excellent source of current UFO sightings in localities around the United States is the U.F.O. Newsclipping Service, edited and published by Lucius Farish, Route 1, Box 220, Plumerville, Arkansas 72127. Each 20-page issue consists of copies of newspaper clippings submitted by Farish's far-flung web of correspondents and clippers. It regularly includes Canadian and English newspaper clippings, as well as articles translated from foreign-language papers. Numerous annual national and regional UFO conferences also provide a rich source of contemporary reports — and often the original witnesses themselves. To find out about local conferences and newsletters that may alert you to cases open for investigation in your area, you may contact:
If you can't find a suitable case in periodical literature, at conferences, or online, you might try digging around in the past. "Consult your local library or the major archives," advises Jan Aldrich, a UFO researcher recently retired from the military. "You'll probably be surprised by the treasure trove of uninvestigated cases." With a grant from the Maryland-based Fund for UFO Research, Aldrich is presently reexamining UFO press clippings from the year 1947, popularly perceived by the public as the year the modern UFO era began, following the sighting by pilot Kenneth Arnold of nine silvery, crescent-shaped objects near Mount Rainier, Washington, on June 24, 1947. Much of Aldrich's present work replicates an earlier 1967 study done by investigator Ted Bloecher while he was with the now-defunct National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena. Bloecher's "Report on the UFO Wave of 1947" was essentially a collection and analysis of press clippings demonstrating that Arnold was hardly alone in his experience. In fact, UFOs were being seen and reported in large numbers up and down the country, from Washington to Maine. But Aldrich's ongoing investigation delves even further. "Good as Bloecher's study was," says Aldrich, "it wasn't complete. For example, he didn't include any newspapers from Montana or from many provinces inCanada." By examining the Helena, Montana Independent Record, Aldrich discovered that a local flurry of UFO sightings was just getting underway, even as the national flap spurred by Arnold's sighting was fading in other areas of the country. Aldrich also discovered that UFOs continued to be reported in Canada in great numbers. "In fact," he notes, "the Canadian wave was even more pronounced in terms of population density than what was happening in the United States." From a microfilm copy of Project Blue Book files scheduled to be destroyed but inadvertently discovered at the last minute by a university researcher, Aldrich was able to locate another unpublished discovery: 2,000 to 3,000 letters written by U.S. citizens in the wake of an April 1952 article about UFOs by Bob Ginna published in Life magazine. "Blue Book was swamped at the time," says Aldrich, "and then-director Edward Ruppelt apparently didn't care about the letters or trying to follow them up. They were just stuffed into a file, which, fortunately, someone put on microfilm." The majority of the letters, says Aldrich, consist of individual theories or explanations for the UFO phenomenon, "but about 20 percent were personal case reports,the earliest dating back to 1913." Interestingly, letters addressed simply "Flying Saucers, Washington, D.C.," eventually found their way into the file. In toto, the letters indicate that, although Arnold may have gotten the headlines and generated the furor, the UFO phenomenon itself was arguably around much earlier. It also proves that one individual, armed with nothing more than a microfilm reader, can still make a difference in our eventual understanding of what may well be one of this century's most misunderstood mysteries.
As a UFO investigator, you will soon find that, with the right approach and the right reading material, you will unearth endless instances of reported UFOs. But the truth of the matter is, not all reports are created equal.For instance, you may want to delve into the past, but if all the witnesses to a given sighting have died, and if there is little documentation, there may not be much you can do. A UFO reported by your friend, a college student, while drunk and staring at the stars, is not as compelling as a UFO reported by three separate individuals — such as a police officer, an astronomy professor, and a teacher — while stone sober. If the second UFO has left any physical evidence — from a burnt area of land to some blips on the airport's radar screen — so much the better. As you hunt down UFO cases you wish to investigate, you will also find it is better to pursue those closer to home. Indeed, a thorough UFO investigation is time-intensive. It often requires multiple interviews with multiple witnesses. You may need to visit the site of the report at various times of the day and year, sometimes with specialists in tow. What's more, the input of those well versed in local habits, history, geography, and atmospheric phenomena may be invaluable to your research. For instance, a few years back, hundreds of witnesses reported a weird, boomerang-shaped UFO over Westchester County and other parts of New York. It later turned out that at least some of the reports were made when pilot-hoaxers using a local airport in the town of Stormville decided to fly in boomerang formation. Someone making a few phone calls from London could not have learned about the hoax as easily — if at all — as the local investigators on the scene who ultimately did. The take-home message is this: If you live in New Jersey, it makes more sense to investigate cases in Newark or Asbury Park than in Santa Barbara.
This chapter has given you enough material to get started. We suggest that you empty a file drawer, get a few folders out, and start collecting. We'd like you to spend the next few weeks just keeping your eyes and ears open. Speak to friends and relatives. Read the local paper. Scour the Internet. Anytime something of interest enters your field of vision, clip it, load it onto a disk, or jot it down, and put it in your drawer. At the end of this period, you may have a case — a completely original case, never before investigated by anyone — you feel is worthy of your time and effort. |
This story copyright © 1997 by Dennis Stacy. Used by permission. All rights reserved.