Part One

Introduction – ‘Ostentation and Dodge’

The Mystery of Elusiveness

In early 2025, during the initial research for this project, something appeared and which promised to galvanize UFOlogy: or, at the very least, to take it in fresh and exciting directions. It wasn’t a wave of new sightings, nor a set of startling new ‘landing’ claims, nor even a clutch of newly-announced official ‘enquiries.’ It was, in fact, a single essay. And because it has a significant bearing on much of what follows I intend to begin by examining it as I introduce the aims of this project overall.

The essay, by veteran researcher Bertrand Méheust, was entitled The Mystery of Elusiveness and began with a simple recognition that will itself be recognised by anybody with even a passing interest in UFOlogy, the paranormal, or Forteana generally. This recognition is that the phenomena with which we have to deal in these and related fields are elusive.[1]

At this point, the reader may feel a sense of déjà vu coupled with frustration, for not only is this recognition already well-established but it has also been frequently viewed as a perennial obstacle to UFOlogical understanding: a point that Méheust was most concerned to challenge. For what, he wrote, if instead of seeing elusiveness as a barrier preventing more detailed UFOlogical enquiry it is seen as a ‘way in’? More, what if we view it as the key feature which promises to unlock the whole UFO mystery? What then?

For Méheust, a number of things follow from this single, repeated, recognition of the elusiveness that UFOs – I shall use this initialism throughout – consistently display: not least the fact it is so often accompanied by a second, paradoxical ‘twin’ – ostentation. This, he notes, is a ‘strange paradox’ indeed, for it suggests that the ‘[UFO] only shows itself the better to evade detection.’ This paradox goes to the heart of Méheust’s paper and will have much to say to us as this project unfolds.[2]

Throughout his essay, Méheust says more about elusiveness than he does about its paradoxical ‘other.’ And yet the combination of both, for him, leads to a profound conclusion; viz, that ‘we are not dealing with natural phenomena but with the intentional manifestation of a psyche’ and, moreover, with a psyche whose nature, ‘as things stand, remains undetermined.’ (Emphasis mine).[3]

Skeptics might conclude from this that the phenomenon actually does not exist at all and that its elusiveness strongly hints at this fact but Méheust is unconvinced by this. For him, such a conclusion would simply destroy the object of study and this we cannot do. After all, what do we do with the mass of case material, particularly High Strangeness case material, that actually exists? Pretend that it doesn’t? Far better to press on in search of a fresh paradigm that promises to explain it better. And this, throughout, is what he seeks to do, eschewing the view of ‘mainstream science’ that we can only be dealing with some sort of structured, interstellar, ‘craft’ – if, indeed, we are dealing with anything at all – in search of a way of understanding that considers other possibilities.

It seems to me that Méheust’s genius here lies in viewing elusiveness not as an obstacle but as a vital clue to what UFOs are. And in this regard, for him, all bets are off. What if taking this route were to lead us not to evidence for spaceships of any kind but to evidence of a psyche that operates in set, characteristic ways: concealing and revealing itself for reasons which we cannot yet understand but can at least recognise? In short: what if the UFOs are not craft containing intelligences but the intelligences themselves? Playing hide and seek, perhaps: or, more precisely, hide and reveal?

Following the elusiveness ‘trail’ leads Méheust to a number of conclusions and questions. This aspect, he notes, affects every aspect of UFO phenomenology: location, size, duration, number of witnesses, behaviour, and so on. It is, he observes, as if these things cannot – or, we might surmise, will not – exceed a certain threshold or will only ‘play’ to certain audiences. After all, why is it that ‘UFO repair’ cases only ever take place in the presence of two or three witnesses but never dozens? Why are these things so ‘camera shy’? Why this continual interplay of ostentation and dodge? Why such ‘elusive theatricality’? Is this the phenomenon writing its own signature, and if it is, what might that signature be revealing? In short: what might this signed display be showing us about the true nature of the intelligence(s) behind the phenomenon?

There is more to Méheust’s paper than this – he notes, for example, the same paradox of ostentation and dodge in poltergeist and other contexts – but the conclusion it leads us to is stark. There is intentionality, here; which, of course, is a characteristic of thinking beings. Might, then, the UFOs be nothing less than the beings themselves rather than some natural phenomenon as-yet poorly understood? This question will undergird much of what follows in the current work.

UFOs and Olfaction

Throughout this project I will be concerned to explore an area that has been largely ignored within the otherwise rich history of UFOlogy: UFO reports containing olfactory elements in which those elements play a significant or fundamental role and which seem somehow to be associated with the UFOs themselves. How common are such reports? Are they a rarity or are they commonplace? Is there any kind of pattern to them? What effects on witnesses do UFO odours have? Do UFOs smell fresh, stale, pleasant, foul, or a combination of such? And, crucially, might the true, underlying nature of the UFO phenomenon be inferred in any way from the way it smells?

This final question is, for me, the $64000 one and I will be returning to it over and again. But why concentrate on the olfaction motif at all?

Well, in a sense, why not? It is, as I have alluded to above, a very under-researched feature within UFO reports: a fact that goes some way to explaining why the next chapter’s review of extant ‘UFO smell’ research runs to fewer than 7,500 words. And as the most recent UFO olfaction study to be examined is itself ten years old the time is surely ripe for a return to a re-examination of it. Time moves on and UFOlogy, hopefully, does too. Perhaps the last decade or so of research has thrown up fresh perspectives from which to view this still under-researched aspect of the phenomenon overall. Méheust’s paper gives a strong suggestion that it has.

Yet, at first sight, it still seems a curious choice of subject-area. Part of the reason for this may lie in the fact that UFO reports containing olfactory elements continue to be, and historically have been, so rare. In his ever-expanding CUFOS database encompassing the entirety of UFOlogical history, UFOs and Intelligence: A Timeline, aggregating researcher George M. Eberhart has presented UFO scholars with a rolling reference document which as of the time of writing contains over 1200 pages and over a million words: a truly impressive achievement of breath-taking and ever-expanding scope. Yet it contains only 71 UFO cases in which a varied word search reveals odours to be a reported feature.[4]

Of course, such a remarkably small number – the timeline begins at 597 AD and continues up, literally, to the present -day – makes the UFO researcher’s job both easier and harder: easier in the sense that the amount of case material to be studied is not overwhelming but harder in the sense that he or she has so little to go on, even after all this time. The problem is compounded by the fact that all databases have limitations – whether word-searched or not – and Eberhart’s is no exception. This is something that has hampered enquiries of the kind I will be attempting here and we shall have need to return to it too.

All of these caveats notwithstanding, there is another advantage to concentrating on odour as a ‘way in’ to UFO understanding. UFOs are indeed camera-shy, as Méheust and many, many others have noted. And until recent times most of us did not walk round with HD-quality cameras constantly in our pockets. How, then, might we share what a witness actually saw? What empirically-accessible trace might the encounter possibly leave, save the trace as reproduced in testimony? The same with sound, come to that. Or sensation. Or inner feeling.

But smell is different. Odours leave traces. Or, at least, they can do. You don’t need a camera for these. Or a microphone. The clothes you were wearing when the experience occurred might suffice: if the odour was strong enough to permeate them. And, as we shall see, such an empirically-accessible trace, accessed by several others after the event, occurred in at least one of the historical cases we will be examining: a celebrated one from 1967 which I will be revisiting in search of fresh understanding.

Pro-Backtracking

I anticipate an immediate objection here, for the experience in question – that of Stephen Michalak near Falcon Lake, Manitoba, on May 20^th 1967 – is an old one and much-discussed. Too much discussed, according to UFO Conjectures blog, which takes researchers to task for continuing to debate it, opining that an ‘old UFO report (or hoax), debated ad infinitum, ad perpetuam, ad nauseum, gets us nowhere’ and adding that ‘We’ve moved along since AATIP. UFOs are. Finding just exactly what they are is where we need to continue to go, not backtrack to musty UFO tales that are now fables.’[5]

This set of strongly-expressed opinions might be well-meant but it raises many questions; not least those surrounding how best we should ‘continue to go.’ For it is a fact, one which we shall look at in detail in future chapters of this study, that the incidence of High Strangeness cases such as that involving Stephen Michalak has declined precipitously in recent decades. Amid all the talk of congressional enquiries, newly-funded studies and whatnot, we might be fooled into thinking that UFO activity has never been higher whereas some key statistics show otherwise, particularly those relating to the kind of extreme oddity cases which this study will seek to examine and which are still commonly referred to under the various ‘Close Encounters’ categories. Certainly as regards UFO cases with distinct olfactory elements there are few – if any – cases to be found in recent years; reinforcing, perhaps, the elusiveness ‘angle’ highlighted in Méheust’s recent analysis. I talk about the precipitous decline in the number of these kinds of cases in Part Three and suggest some possible reasons (a) why it should be and (b) how it might actually help explain what UFOs, essentially, are.

In the meantime, and in such a situation of lack, I propose what might be called a ‘pro-backtrack’ position: one in which by taking fresh perspectives and asking new questions of old cases contemporary research might actually seek to go backwards in time in order to go forwards in understanding. This will require detailed, qualitative analysis of historic cases in which the element of olfaction has been prominent and will allow us to re-visit some ‘classics’ along the way in search of new clues to their meaning. One unexpected bonus, here, might also be the unearthing of some long-forgotten cases which, whilst not regarded as classics, may nonetheless have much to teach us – particularly when viewed primarily in terms of their olfactory elements. One of these, that of Harry J Sturdevant, will be explored in detail in Part Two and proved, for me as researcher, to be one of the most fascinating aspects of the entire enterprise. Examined alongside near-legendary UFO Close Encounter claimants such as Stephen Michalak and Robert Taylor it may at first glance appear that Harry Sturdevant is very much the ‘odd man out’ but analysis will actually reveal that he isn’t – and wasn’t. Certainly not as far as olfaction cases are concerned. In fact, a concentration on precisely those elements will allow us to appreciate that fact and turns out to actually reinforce the veracity of his claims.

It is time, now, to turn to the first task of any new enquiry: a review of studies already made and conclusions already drawn with a view to ascertaining what elusive things might remain to be uncovered and explored.

(For consistency, the spelling ‘sulphur’ has been retained throughout except where quoting sources in which an alternative spelling is used. American spellings have been retained in all quoted material).

Mark Fox, Easter 2026

Chapter 1– A Concise History of UFO Olfaction Studies

Rarities

Whilst it may be the case that UFO witnesses ‘rarely report an odour’, it is certainly the case that studies of UFO odours are themselves a rarity. In a wide-ranging examination of paranormal odours which we will examine in this study, for example, Fortean writer Joshua Cutchin comparatively recently devoted eighty-three pages to ‘UFO smells’ but his chapter on the history of such studies occupied only seven of these: a statistic that is revealing in itself. Thin on the ground though they may be, however, no study of olfactory elements within reported UFO encounters would be complete without an overview and critique of the very few extant studies that do exist and hence we begin with these. As will become clear, the overview will be roughly chronological but not completely so and I will end by examining the best study to date rather than the most recent.

‘Early’ Studies

In the earliest post-Arnoldian years of Flying Saucer studies there was a scattering of references to claimed UFO encounters featuring odours: most notably in books by Gray Barker (1956), Ivan T. Sanderson (1969) and, somewhat later, John Keel (1975). All three include references to cases from the early-mid 1950s: cases involving Sonny Desvergers at West Palm Beach, Florida (August 19^th 1952), several residents at Flatwoods, West Virginia (12^th September 1952) and Harry J Sturdevant at Trenton, New Jersey (October 2^nd 1956). To these must be added, of course, the burgeoning number of UFO special-interest magazines such as The Saucerian, Fate, and many others.

No less an authority than one-time head of the US Air Force’s Project Blue Book Edward J. Ruppelt devoted nearly an entire chapter to the Desvergers case in his classic 1956 study The Report on Unidentified Objects and as it predates the Flatwoods case by less than a month I will examine it first. Fuller consideration of the Sturdevant case will be reserved for the chapters that follow. Notable in all of these studies is the scarcity of reported UFO encounters involving odours: a fact that surely contributes to the scarcity of studies of UFO odours per se.

‘Sonny’ Desvergers

Ruppelt presents us with far and away the most detailed treatment of the Desvergers case and the way in which his own view of it changed over time but other evaluations of the case have contributed much also. The subject, D.S (Dunham Sanborn) ‘Sonny’ Desvergers, 30, was a scoutmaster driving three boy scouts home from a meeting at approximately 9.45 on the evening of August 19th 1952 along Military Trail, ten miles inland from the West Palm Beach coastal road, when he – and they – witnessed something strange descend at a forty-five degree angle into a palmetto thicket a distance away from the road. Later comparison of the boys’ testimonies with Desvergers’ own would reveal some notable discrepancies but what is not in doubt is that after some hesitation Desvergers decided to leave the car in order to check out what they all had seen: thinking, perhaps, that they had witnessed a plane crash and that people therefore might be in need of assistance. He told the boys to wait ten minutes and if he hadn’t returned to go to a house a little way along the road and get the residents to contact the local sheriff.

Reconstructing events from this point using Desvergers’ own testimony together with interview material conducted by Ruppelt and later interviews conducted by others reveals the interesting sequence of events that followed. Orienting himself by the stars, carrying two torches and picking his way gingerly through the terrain, Desvergers reached a clearing where he experienced the first truly unusual aspect of his claimed encounter, albeit one which did not fully register with him at the time: an unusual odour accompanied by the ‘feeling [that] somebody or something was watching me.’ He kept going ‘and began to feel heat, like walking close to an oven’ and then became more fully aware of the odour again, describing it later as ‘worse than rotten eggs, and something like burning flesh.’ In common with others who have claimed to have smelled UFO odours Desvergers would struggle to describe the odour exactly, admitting that ‘Somehow I mean human flesh, though I’ve never smelled it burn. I suppose you think I’m all confused, and I suppose I am – I guess I meant to say I’ve really never smelled anything like it. It seemed to grip my throat and cut off my breath.’[6]

Given the sheer oddity of what was to come, some examinations of Desvergers’ own accounts of what happened to him have tended to gloss over the olfactory elements but Ruppelt’s own account of his interviews with him contains the interesting observation that he ‘repeatedly mentioned the unusual odor near the UFO’ and that he described it ‘as being ‘sharp’ or ‘pungent.’ Other descriptors that he would use during interviews included ‘acute’, ‘sickening’, ‘nauseating’ and as making him feel ‘woozy’ but the ‘repeatedly mentioned’ comment is particularly interesting in its strong suggestion that the witness himself reported the odour as a key part of his experience to the extent that Ruppelt wanted to draw attention to it also. Ruppelt, too, would note carefully Desvergers’ claim that in addition to the odour and the heating of the air he ‘got a horrible feeling that somebody was watching him.’[7]

As odd as all of this might be it was followed by something even more extraordinary, for, as Desvergers would later claim, having taken some steps backwards to escape the increasingly oppressive heat he looked up to see the sky obscured by a large dark circular shape, domed and ‘like half a tennis ball’, hovering some thirty feet above him. Feeling anger and wanting to harm what was there, he next heard a sound ‘like the opening of a well-oiled safe door’, one of ‘metal against metal’ which he interpreted as revealing that ‘someone was going to watch me.’[8]

This accumulation of motifs is interesting: odour, heat, the sensation of being watched and the appearance of the UFO. Yet two more are no less noteworthy. Firstly, Desvergers’ own account as transcribed by Ruppelt is notable for the number of references to fright and fear that it contains: ‘I felt for my flashlight in my back pocket and thought of throwing it [at the object], but was too scared…I tried to run but froze, I was so scared…They seemed to be as scared of me as I was of them…I couldn’t move or yell, I was so scared.’ [Emphasis in the original]. In addition, everything that happened prior to the opening of the ‘door’ appears to have been the prelude to some kind of assault, for as Desvergers would go on to claim, after hearing the sound of the door a ball of red fire began to drift towards him which expanded into a red mist, making him pass out. ‘It wasn’t a solid substance,’ he would say, ‘more like a hot gust of air…blinding me momentarily and smelling something awful.’[9]

When he came to he was ‘standing next to a tree, I think…I couldn’t see and my eyes burned.’ Staggering back to the road he came upon Deputy Sheriff Mott N. Partin and Lake Worth Constable Louis Carroll who had arrived in separate cars after the scouts, alarmed by Desvergers’ non-reappearance after the agreed time, had gone to the nearby house to raise the alarm. Partin would later claim that Desvergers looked ‘like a wild man’ and that ‘In all my 19 years of law enforcement work, I’ve never seen anyone as terrified as he was.’[10]

Partin, Carroll and Desvergers then went back to the clearing where one of Desvergers’ torches was found (the other one was never located) and an area of flattened grass the shape of a man was observed. Partin marked the location and the three then went back to the road.

En route to the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office – and later – Desvergers would claim that he was burned on his forearms and inside his nose. In addition, a cap that he was wearing also showed signs of being burned although the scouts would claim that they had been playing with it earlier in the evening at which point it had been undamaged. Ruppelt was contacted very shortly after the claimed encounter and went to Florida with Second Lieutenant Robert M. Olsson where he interviewed all of the major participants, including Desvergers himself, at length. Interviews with the boy scouts proved problematic and generally inconclusive. Grass at the scene was later found with unusual charring: the roots were burned but the grass blades were not except where they had contact with the ground.

History has not been kind to the Desvergers case – to put it mildly – and in his own account of events Ruppelt himself would express doubts by the end. Initially, he would write in his Report that having arrived in Florida and having interviewed Desvergers ‘I had the immediate impression he was telling the truth.’ Later, six persons including Ruppelt, Olsson, their two pilots, an intelligence officer and his sergeant would fail to catch Desvergers out in his retelling of the story and Ruppelt was forced to remark: ‘His story sounded good to all of us.’ Candidly, and comparatively late on in his retelling of the case and its aftermath, Ruppelt would add that: ‘To be very honest, we were trying to prove that this was a hoax, but were having absolutely no success. Every new lead we dug up pointed to the same thing, a true story.’ Yet at the very end of his telling of the tale Ruppelt states that ‘[W]e wrote off the incident as a hoax. The best hoax in UFO history.’[11]

Quite a volte face. So what happened to change those early investigators’ views of the case? Simply stated: Desvergers himself. A later embellishment of his encounter in which he claimed to have actually fought with the humanoid occupants of the alleged craft would in time do his credibility no good but comparatively early on it emerged that he had had a less than honourable end to his earlier career in the Marines, being discharged for being AWOL and stealing a car (the car case was later dropped).[12] Further enquiries in the neighbourhood revealed to Ruppelt further problems with Desvergers himself, unspecified in the Report but damning enough to force the admission that ‘we were convinced that the whole incident was a hoax.’ A second trip to Florida revealed to Ruppelt and Olsson ‘story after story about the man’s aptitude for dreaming up tall tales’ with one man telling them that ‘”If he told me the sun was shining, I’d look up to make sure.’’’ Yet even here there is a sense that Ruppelt wasn’t quite sure about this, admitting even in the face of this apparent counter-evidence that ‘[W]e didn’t make step one in proving the incident to be a hoax. We thought up dozens of ways that the man could have set up the hoax but couldn’t prove one.’ In more recent years Karl Pflock has presented a detailed overview of the case – including the reasons for doubting Desvergers as a witness[13] – and Jerome Clark has asserted that the case ‘may be the ufologist’s worst nightmare: a real experience which happened to an unreliable individual’, concluding that ‘[T]he Florida scoutmaster case seems destined always to be shrouded in ambiguity.’[14]

And there the matter rests. Perhaps this study’s concentration on UFO cases containing olfactory elements will enable a judgement to be made one way or the other regarding what really happened to Sonny Desvergers. This will be for future chapters to show and we will return to the examination of the Desvergers case later on. For now, we turn to another early ‘UFO smells’ case which occurred less than a month after Desvergers’ own claimed encounter and which also attracted the attention of several of the early UFO researchers: that involving the so-called Flatwoods monster.

The Flatwoods Monster

Occurring just twenty-four days after Sonny Desvergers’ odd experience in the palmetto clearing at Florida’s West Palm Beach, the so-called Flatwoods Monster episode of Braxton County, West Virginia, generated considerably more publicity at the time and remains much talked-about to this day. It received detailed examination early on in Ivan T Sanderson’s book Uninvited Visitors, by which time it had also featured heavily in the Braxton local press, Fate magazine and a burgeoning number of UFO magazines including The Saucerian. In recent years it has been the subject of a documentary, with two of the original witnesses being interviewed at first hand.

Sanderson’s book holds the interesting distinction of having devoted close attention to UFO odours within the context of at least one early, claimed, close encounter – the Flatwoods Monster case – making it one of the very first full-length UFOlogical studies to have attempted this. Calling them ‘chemi-effluents’ or ‘stinks’, Sanderson noted in Uninvited Visitors that reported UFO smells fell broadly into three broad ‘types’: ‘metallic, aromatic, and others such as ‘sulphurous.’’ Characterising the reported smell at Flatwoods, an unassuming town in Braxton Country, as that of ‘hot metal’, he noted that such a reported odour had ‘cropped up all over the world in recent years’, having seemingly taken over from ‘sulphurous’ which he considered may itself have been ‘a hangover from ‘fire and brimstone’ beliefs, since it was most often reported in conjunction with large and dangerous-looking occupants.’[15]

For Sanderson, ‘metallic stinks would seem definitely to indicate metal, and thus machines’, although he did not fail to consider the other reported odours also. Hence, he observed that the ‘sulphurous stench’ within UFO reports ‘usually meant the rotten-egg effluvium of sulphurated hydrogen which, be it noted, is another product of life-forms.’ This comment was interesting. Was he leaving open the possibility that UFOs might be, somehow, both metallic and living? His additional observations concerning other reported UFO smells appear to point to this, particularly his assertion that ‘[T]here are the even more nauseating stenches of rotting cabbage, of whale oil, and above all of rotting human flesh, which is utterly sickening…Thus, two of the three classes of stenches…[of UFOs] are not exclusive to machines…’[16] By the ‘two…classes’, here, he seems to have meant both the ‘aromatic’ and ‘sulphurous’ smells included in his three category ‘taxonomy’, noting that UFO encounters, in common with some manifestations encountered within spiritualism, sometimes included reference to scents such as those found in the natural world: violets and such. It sounds somewhat bewildering that a living entity could be both metallic and organic and Sanderson appears to have anticipated a degree of opposition to such an assertion, writing: ‘The possibility that a living entity could be made of metal brings a ready laugh from chemists, but iron, for instance, does have some funny properties, and there are some other enigmas connected with this that will crop up later.’ One such enigma, in fact, he would draw detailed attention to: that of the Flatwoods Monster.

In his examination of this unusual case Sanderson enjoyed the same advantage that Ruppelt enjoyed with regard to the Desvergers case: his actual attendance at the scene within a very short time of the alleged episode actually occurring. This was something he shared in common with another early UFO researcher, Gray Barker, who was also on the scene very shortly after the September 12^th events. The two, in fact, spent some time together in Flatwoods interviewing witnesses – Sanderson would later claim to have spoken to ‘hundreds’ – although it is not clear if they had known each other previously.

In his book They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers (1956), Barker recounts the first time he heard of the events at Flatwoods, reproducing the news story that piqued his interest just days after the event occurred. Entitled ‘Police Say Braxton Monster Product Of Mass Hysteria’, the Braxton Democrat story of September 14^th would go on to report:

‘Seven Braxton County residents vowed today that a Frankenstein monster with B.O drove them from a hill-top near here, but police figured the smelly boogie-man was the product of ‘mass hysteria.’

The thing, described by witnesses as ‘half man, half dragon,’ had not been reported seen since Friday night but residents of the area said a foul odor still clung to the hill-top yesterday.

All of this started when Mrs. Kathleen May of Flatwoods said she and six boys, one a 17 year-old national guardsman, climbed the hill to investigate her two small sons’ report that a ‘flying saucer’ had landed there.

She said they found a ‘fire breathing monster, 10 feet tall with a bright green body and a blood-red face,’ that waddled toward them with ‘a bouncing, floating’ motion and sent them scurrying down the hillside.

…she said the monster exuded an overpowering odor, ‘like metal,’ that so sickened them they vomited for hours afterward.

‘It looked worse than Frankenstein,’ said Mrs May. ‘It couldn’t have been human.’[17]

It is striking how this very first newspaper report of the incident lays such a heavy emphasis on the reported odour. The ‘Frankenstein monster’ is reported as having ‘B.O’. He was a ‘smelly boogie-man’ whose ‘foul odor still clung to the hill-top’ next day and who at the time of his first appearance exuded an ‘overpowering odor ‘like metal’…that so sickened them they vomited for hours afterward.’

The first reporter on the scene, Mr A. Lee Stewart, son of the newspaper’s owner and the likely writer of the September 14^th story, might well be expected to have reproduced in his story the emphases as presented to him by the witnesses whom he interviewed within hours of their encounter. Further, his assertion that the smell persisted into the next day was based on his own personal experience, for he would later report that he returned to the site at 7 a.m the next day and found that ‘The odor still persisted on the grass when you got close to the ground…’[18]

Sanderson, together with an assistant, left for Flatwoods on the evening of September 18^th and arrived the following day. His composite reconstruction of the events of September 12^th, as recorded in Uninvited Visitors and based in large part on his own interviews, begins with the appearance of an object, glowing bright red and the size of a ‘small outhouse’, which was seen by several boys as it rounded a hill, crossed a valley, and paused before dropping behind the crest of a hill where an orange light briefly flared before fading away into ‘a dull, cherry-red glow.’ The boys headed off in that direction, joined part-way by the Mrs May quoted in the Braxton Democrat story, a visiting neighbour of Mrs May’s named Eugene Lemon, and Lemon’s dog which ran out in front of the party before apparently fleeing back past them in fright as they approached the last bend in the path en route to the landing site. ‘At the same time,’ writes Sanderson, ‘they noticed an unnatural mist that had spread all over the ground. As they entered this mist, an atrocious, sickly, ‘warm’, smell like that of hot, greased metal – but overpowering – assailed them…a peculiar nauseating odor that had a tendency to burn their nostrils and throats…Their eyes began to water and their noses smarted.’[19]

As they rounded that last bend, Mrs May called out that she could see a pair of eyes in an oak tree up ahead. She asked one of the boys to shine his torch in that direction and the group were later in broad agreement that they saw an enormous entity with an ‘ace of spades’ shaped head which had a ‘large circular window in it.’ The entity began to glide in the direction of an object which lay ‘pulsing in the tall grass nearby’ and Lemon apparently passed out as the entity moved toward them ‘with a gliding motion as if afloat in midair.’ Some of the boys hauled Lemon to his feet before the whole party fled to the May house where the stricken man was revived. A posse of local adults was formed and went to the hill – where nothing was found. Two hours later the local sheriff arrived who, scoffing, refused to go up the hill, followed three hours later by the Braxton Democrat’s A. Lee Stewart who, together with another local reporter went to the site of the alleged event, saw nothing, but smelled the odour: which he also did the following day.[20]

Sanderson’s assembly of early news reports was presented in Uninvited Visitors as an accompaniment to his interview-driven reconstruction of the main events and he included some presentation and discussion of other local UFO reports from around the same time: none including purported odours. Others, however, would later present some other local reports which did contain claims of noxious odours: claims which we will examine below.

Given the apparent centrality of the odour to the purported events at Flatwoods, together with the way it seems to fit with Sanderson’s three-fold UFO smell ‘taxonomy’, it might be expected that he would make a lot of it. Oddly, however, the opposite was the case: certainly at the time of the writing of Uninvited Visitors. Instead, he would write of his visit: ‘Everybody drew our attention to a strange smell in the grass. I still cannot place it, but it is a fairly common odor in organic chemistry laboratories and is surely derived from a kind of grass that abounds in the area. We found this grass growing all over the county and it always smelt the same, though not perhaps as strongly.’ In his own account of his enquiries in Flatwoods, Barker says nothing of any attempts of his own to account for the claimed odours but reinforces the fact that those at the centre of the events made detailed reference to them, writing that ‘Originally the group said the strange nauseous odour resembled burning metal, or burning sulphur. Under questioning none could remember having encountered anything similar. It was finally described only as sickening, irritating to the throat and nasal passages. “It seemed to grip you in the throat and suffocate you.”’

Keel would devote most of a chapter to the Flatwood events in The Eighth Tower, covering much the same ground as Sanderson and Barker and making reference to the reported odours whilst improvising some dialogue between the witnesses and adding the hitherto unreported ‘detail’ that the terrified dog was found ‘stretched out at the foot of the hill, vomiting.’ He also added another locally reported testimony of an event from the day following, from Frametown, West Virginia, in which a Mr and Mrs George Snitkowski and their daughter reported a serious of strange evening events including a bright light, ‘electrical pricklings’, and a ‘ten-foot-tall human shaped entity.’ According to Keel, their first apprehension that something might be amiss was the stalling of their car and ‘a strong sulphurous smell in the air’ with the episode ending as the terrified Snitkowskis locked themselves inside their vehicle whilst the entity allegedly circled it before ‘a brilliant sphere of light rose from the trees and soared away, leaving a luminous trail.’[21]

History has been somewhat kinder to the claims of the Flatwoods witnesses than those of Desvergers at West Palm Beach.[22] It has been kinder to the witnesses themselves, too, with all of those who interviewed them testifying to their sincerity, confusion, and fear. Predictably, skeptical responses have focussed on prosaic, wholly naturalistic explanations for their claims, including that they saw nothing more than meteors, a light from a plane beacon and a female barn owl protecting her young. The proximity in time of the Desvergers and Flatwoods sightings merits at least a mention, suggesting as it does the possibility of accounts of the former influencing the latter, although a review of the differences of detail – including some descriptions of the odour – would tend to weaken this somewhat. Summer 1952 was a ‘flap’ time for US UFO sightings and this may also have primed the experients in both cases to misinterpret mundane events in otherworldly terms – although other than this there is no obvious link between them. At the very least, however, what both cases clearly demonstrate is that within five years or so of Kenneth Arnold’s seminal 1947 Mount Rainier sighting UFO witnesses were reporting powerful – and in some cases temporarily disabling – odours in the vicinity of their alleged close encounters. It would not be long before at least some attention was turned to this curious characteristic.

James McCampbell and UFOlogy

It may be argued that James McCampbell was the first UFO researcher to coin the term ‘UFOlogy’, the title of his 1973 book on the subject and one in which he drew attention to a variety of reported features of UFO close encounters including reported odours. Certainly I am unaware of its appearance before this point. And despite his admirable attempt at presenting a quantitative analysis of reports in UFOlogy, McCampbell also showed himself well-aware of their qualitative aspects too, noting the researcher’s overwhelming reliance on testimony – ‘This reservoir must obviously be tapped if further insights are to be developed ‘[23] – and showing the need for researchers to be on the lookout in particular for descriptive correlations across reports.

These were telling observations, as was his breakdown of the different types of odours reported across the eighteen odour cases he examined, with descriptions of ‘sulphur’ or ‘sulphurous’, either exclusively or in combination with something related such as ‘rotten eggs’, topping his list at seven. ‘Burning’ was next with four cases, tying with ‘strong’ or ‘powerful’ also on four. He also noted that ‘benzene and its derivatives’ appeared in some reports too, speculating in his overall analysis that ‘oxidation of atmospheric sulphur to sulphur dioxide could well be responsible for the commonly-reported sulphurous odors.’[24] We will have occasion to return to this interesting hypothesis in our analysis of Antonio Rullán’s work later in this chapter and hence for now we merely note it.

Ahead of his time though McCampbell might have been, his treatment of UFO odours suffered from a lack of cases upon which to base his all-too-brief analysis. Eighteen cases was hardly a big number, and closer analysis of his work in UFOlogy reveals that all of these were culled from Appendix A of Jacques Vallee’s Passport to Magonia where none are described in anything like the amount of detail needed to draw any detailed conclusions about their purported olfactory elements (or, indeed, anything else). I surmise that this is why UFO odours are given such brief treatment in UFOlogy. The limitation of McCampbell’s database certainly weakens his conclusions somewhat, particularly when Vallee’s own work in Appendix A omits certain key episodes – such as the 1956 Harry Sturdevant case to be examined later – and makes rather basic mistakes in what it does contain (spelling ‘Michalak’ as ‘Michalac’ in its all-too-brief summary of the famed 1967 Falcon Lake close encounter case, for example).

These limitations notwithstanding, McCampbell showed early on that ‘sulphur’ or ‘sulphurous’ were likely common descriptors for future researchers to focus on: and perhaps to explain also. Several years would pass, however, before this potentially revealing approach to the UFO enigma was to be taken again.

Thomas Bullard

Whilst not dealing specifically with UFO odours, Thomas Bullard’s late-eighties classic study of UFO abductions, UFO Abductions: The Measure of a Mystery (1987) contained some analysis of the comparatively few abductee reports in which a smell was cited: usually as part of the atmosphere within the ‘craft.’

Early on in this study Bullard showed himself averse to interpreting UFO abduction claims as mere hoaxes, writing ‘A hoaxer would not necessarily fabricate this kind of abduction story without knowledge of similar stories. In fact, to guess some of the key elements as regularly as narrators do would be more surprising than aliens on the prowl.’[25] So what, according to Bullard’s research, did these prowling aliens smell of? Interestingly, of the 312 cases he collected and meticulously analysed, only eleven contained a reported odour of any kind, with the list topped by ‘ozone…or something described in similar terms – sulphurous…pine-like…or rain like.’ It seems odd that Bullard would group these smells together – with the exception, perhaps, of ozone and sulphur – listing as ‘exceptions’ smells such as ‘burnt-sugar smell’, ‘a smell like chicken’, ‘something burnt’, or ‘simply a bad odour.’ After presenting his brief list, he also suggested that ‘[t]hese smells may contribute to breathing difficulties mentioned in several cases.’ Indeed, writing of abductions generally, he noted how their aftermath, too, may include deleterious effects on abductees, citing as examples unusual thirst, equilibrium problems, headache/nervous difficulties, gastrointestinal upsets, cuts or burns, and ‘mental or emotional consequences including ‘a desire to bathe’.’ [26]It will be interesting to see how many of these clearly negative effects are mentioned by the subjects whose experiences form the basis for this, current, study. For now, we move forward in time once more to a study of anomalistic experiences including unusual odours presented within some much more recent research: that of Joshua Cutchin.

Joshua Cutchin

With Cutchin we are brought much more closely to the present day. In a substantial section of his book The Brimstone Deceit, a study examining UFO smells together with those reported during spiritualist settings, Sasquatch encounters and other anomalistic contexts, he cites a wide range of UFO odours under various headings including ‘sulfur’, ‘ozone’, ‘chemicals’ and ‘burning odours.’ What might link them all? Part-way through, he writes: ‘The consistency of the combustion motif is striking: sulfur is odorless until burnt, ozone smells like burnt electrical wiring, Bakelite smells when heated. It is a mystery why such odors should prevail. Intuitively, combustion smells imply a release of energy or an effort to disinfect. Burning sulfur was used as a fumigant in antiquity, ozone is a modern antimicrobial, and, in general, combustion has historically been an excellent means of removing odors – consider how we light matches or candles to combat unpleasant odors.’[27] In a final chapter, ‘UFO Smells: Misidentification and Speculation’, he considers a range of theories to account for the range of reported UFO odours including misidentification of conventional aircraft and natural phenomena, neurology, unconventional aircraft and extraterrestrials but ultimately plumps for none of them definitively. And anyway, he concludes: ‘Regardless of what lies behind the UFO phenomenon, its mystery will endure after a consensus “solution” is reached.’[28] One which, it may be added, we are nowhere near reaching.

Apart from the ‘combustion’ odours, Cutchin also presents a range of miscellaneous odours he has encountered whilst examining UFO reports including cheese, cinnamon, cardboard, nuts, sweets, fruits and flowers, but lest the reader despair of finding any commonality across reports, the bulk of the analysis ultimately points to two relatively consistently reported odours: those of sulphur and ozone. Subsequent chapters examining chemical and burning odours add some smells that his analysis has not previously covered, including ammonia, lighter fluid, benzene, burnt rubber, cardboard and human flesh, but overall it is clear from Cutchin’s analysis that sulphur smells dominate UFO odour reports, with ozone a somewhat distant – if notable – second.

A key strength of Cutchin’s 83-page overview of UFO smells is its diversity of analysis. Yet herein lies its key weakness too. Cases are piled up one after the other under the various headings but none is examined in any real detail, with many simply bullet-pointed and offering no real opportunities for deeper examination. Voluminous notes – including references to these cases – are included at the end of the book but these frequently lack page references, thus making the task of obtaining additional information more difficult still. Occasionally, fictional cases are included in his ‘database’ as well and where key cases are cited, such as that of Stephen Michalak still to be examined, there are some basic inaccuracies which raise some questions about his handling of material overall.[29]

One additional key strength of his analysis, however, is his pointing up of one other piece of UFO odour research that promises to bear significantly greater fruit than any that has gone before: specifically, that of Antonio F. Rullán. Indeed, a key take-away from Cutchin’s own work is how impressed he is with Rullán’s work, describing it as ‘the finest scholarship on the subject…’ In fact, it was via Cutchin that I came to Rullán – and via them both, to the whole subject – and hence I will move on to a description and analysis of his work now. We will have cause to return to Cutchin in later chapters, not least because his study also points up intriguing parallels between UFO odours and those reported in spiritualist and Sasquatch literature. Overall, his analysis of odours reported in the UFO literature, whilst impressively wide-ranging, sacrifices depth for breadth, and is as notable, ironically, for what it omits as well as for what it includes. On page 123 of The Brimstone Deceit, for example, he writes that ‘sulfur-exuding aliens certainly open the door to misidentification as demons, or vice versa’ but gives no reason(s) for why he has concluded this. It remains for this study to examine whether there is any value to such – and, perhaps, to related – research avenues and this will be one of the tasks for future chapters to address. For now, we turn to an examination of the research that so impressed Cutchin: that of Antonio F. Rullán.

Antonio F. Rullán.

Rullán’s study, ‘Odors from UFOs: Deducing Odorant Chemistry and Causation from Available Data’, appeared in 2000 as an extended essay detailing a wide range of factors relating to UFO odours, with many having been previously overlooked or given scant treatment by researchers. At first sight the study promises little, with only 26 cases forming the database and with most of these, as with McCampbell’s study examined above, drawn from other published sources such as Jacques Vallee’s Passport To Magonia. Rullán’s criteria for case inclusion were that all cases should hail from the US and nineteen such cases are dutifully included from Vallee’s work, being supplemented by others from wider databases, specifically those of Larry Hatch and Mark Cashman. As with other researchers keen to examine UFO odours, the paucity of cases including reported smells was clearly a problem for Rullán, and his essay duly cites as an example Larry Hatch’s worldwide database of 17,660 UFO cases where only 53 of the total included odour descriptions as of the year 2000.[30]

Rullán’s study also highlights – and suffers from – some other problems facing any investigator keen to examine UFO odours, not least those to do with the shortcomings of questionnaires that have historically been given to UFO witnesses. Many of these, the study notes, have failed entirely to include questions relating to smells – such as the US’s famed Project Blue Book from the 1960s and early 1970s – and hence have elicited no descriptions of such. In addition, the study cites issues to do with the frequent inability of witnesses to properly describe the odours they smelled, with their past experiences of defining odours together with their medical conditions at the time of their claimed encounters featuring as key factors in setting limits on the accuracy or otherwise of their descriptions.[31]

These issues notwithstanding, in Odors from UFOs Rullán was still able to do an admirable job of quantifying the few reports that he did have in this by-now 26 year-old study – one which remains largely unsurpassed to this day within the annals of UFOlogy. Finding no ‘common pattern’ within his reports, Rullán still found some relatively frequently-encountered characteristics within them. Nine cases within his collated database included some kind of physiological effect on witnesses including nausea, dizziness, burning nose and eyes and tiredness and nine included a reported sound including whirring, hissing, beeping, humming and loud crackling, whilst seven included various electrical effects on cars: although this latter feature may have been overrepresented because Mark Cashman’s database upon which Rullán drew is primarily a database for ‘Electromagnetic Interference Effects’ on UFOs.[32]

The paper cites a range of actual odour descriptors present in UFO cases, several of which we have already uncovered in this study, and including ‘burnt/smoky’, ‘etherish’, ‘like ammonia’, ‘sickening’, ‘sharp/pungent/acid’, ‘camphor-like’, ‘metallic’, ‘sulphidic’, ‘putrid/foul/decayed’, ‘burnt rubber-like’, and ‘chemical.’[33] Rullán’s study further noted that a total of 38 separate descriptors were used across the 26 cases examined with the three most common being ‘sulphidic’ appearing in ten cases, ‘foul/noxious (including skunk and offensive bad garbage)’ appearing in six cases, and ‘pungent ‘appearing in five. One additional case, which might conceivably have been placed in the ‘sulphidic’ category, was that of ‘rotten egg’, and Rullán drew attention to the fact that other UFO odours which might also reasonably have been placed under the ‘sulphidic descriptor’ included ‘burned match smell’, ‘burned rubber smell’, and the smell of ‘burned gasoline.’ As an additional insight into the descriptors used, he noted that ‘some sulfur containing molecules [have an] odor profile [which] will cover many of the descriptors found in UFO odors.’[34]

Of additional interest are the reported distances from the UFO in the cases examined, with 50% of witnesses being 100 feet or more from the object(s), implying, for Rullán, that the odorant was easily transported in the air and was thus most likely a gas, rather than a liquid, vapour. Within this context, it is of note that Rullán’s study cites other variables which might affect details within witness reports including the concentrations of the odourants at witness locations; concentrations which might themselves have been affected by other potential variables such as wind direction, wind velocity, distance, ambient temperature and the volume of odourants at witness locations.[35]

It will be apparent by now that Rullán’s 2000 study pushed research into UFO odours way beyond where it had previously been. Yet we have still to consider its most notable achievements. Foremost amongst these were the four options the author presented as to how the sulphur odour might best be evaluated and hence these will be given detailed treatment here.

Firstly, he noted, there is the possibility that the sulphidic odour was simply a product of the witness’s own environment – perhaps as a result of industrial waste, emissions, plant/animal decay, volcanic action, ball lightning, flooded ground and so on – and nothing to do with the reported UFO. Factors such as wind or diffusion might have carried the odour from the source to the witness but was nothing to do with the actual object the witness claimed to have seen. Rullán dubbed this with the classification EE: standing for Environmental Source, Environmental Cause. In sum, and according to this position, the presence of the reported UFO was irrelevant to the odour reported.[36]

Secondly, there is the possibility that the sulphur was already in the witness’s environment – perhaps as a result of air pollution or some such – and that the odorant was created by energy emissions from the object interacting with this. In other words, the presence and activity of the UFO caused a chemical reaction by acting on components already in the local atmosphere that raised the smell or smells above odour threshold levels sufficient to be experienced and later reported by the witness. Rullán considered several possible outcomes of this, noting that whilst sulphur does not smell, sulphur compounds such as sulphur dioxide do. Hence, when a subject reports smelling ‘sulphur’ he or she is really reporting a compound created by the interaction of the object with the witness’s immediate environment. Rullán gave this the classification EO: standing for Environmental Source, Object Cause.[37]

The third possibility is a variant of this, in which the sulphur-containing molecule can be seen as being emitted by the UFO and producing a subsequent odourant when reacting with the air environment of the witness. As Rullán noted, this possibility – which he dubbed OE as standing for Object Source, Environmental Cause – is similar to the second one by dint of the fact that an odourant is seen to be the product of a reaction created by the object and the environment but in this case the sulphur containing molecules are created by the object itself. Of course, we do not know what these molecules might be. Exhaust gas? A leak of the UFO’s ‘internal atmosphere’? The very ontology of the UFO itself, perhaps. Regardless, the point is clear: the ‘UFO odour’ is the result of some kind of interaction involving the UFO and the environment of the witness, with the UFO contributing the actual ‘component.’ [38]

The fourth possibility collapses the distinction presented in the second and third possibilities and was dubbed by Rullán as OO, standing for Object Source, Object Cause. Here, the object acts as both sulphur source and odour cause. No chemical reactions with the atmosphere are involved and the UFO simply emits the reported odour. Again, we do not know why and can only speculate. Rullán suggested a range of possibilities, all tentative, ranging from the UFO’s fuel to some kind of nourishment for its occupants.[39]

It is not clear why Rullán failed to include a fifth possibility – that the reported odour was a hoax or the product of a process internal to the witness such as that produced by an olfactory hallucination and brought on by something like a fit – but the sophistication of what he does include is evident and raises all kinds of intriguing questions: particularly to do with the nature of the UFOs themselves. We will return to consider these in more detail in future chapters but Rullán’s own conclusions are of special note before we proceed, for centrally within them he made clear that the reported odour cases themselves ‘did not have enough information and in-depth investigation’ to allow for any effective discrimination between the four hypotheses he set out. Hence, we are returned both to the paucity of odour cases within databases and the lack of detail in those we do have as obstacles to further understanding. As things stood at the conclusion of his study, Rullán was overall forced to conclude that ‘There is a strong likelihood that sulphur is present in the odorant detected by the UFO witnesses’ but that ‘The source of the sulphur molecule and the creation of the odorant are not known.’[40]

Conclusions

Despite the detailed treatment it devotes to the issues surrounding the mystery of UFO odours there is a strong sense that Rullán’s study returns us to where we started at the beginning of this chapter: with more questions than answers. Indeed, twenty-six years ago his own study ended on a questioning note and many of the questions he raised remain unanswered still. Why are there so few reported UFO close encounter reports in which odours are described? Why are they the exception rather than the rule? How do odour cases from the US cases compare with cases elsewhere? What about odour cases where entities are reported but not UFOs?

Indeed, we might add a few more. In particular: what might be giving rise to the actual compounds and chemical reactions that create the reported smells? Rullán refrains from speculating overmuch in this regard but it is clear that more work needs to be done. I will consider one possibility in detail in future chapters of this study where I will also take up and address some of the other still-unanswered questions.

Part Two

Chapter 2: Going Backwards To Go Forwards (1): Case Histories (1)

Introduction

Chapter One set out this study’s aims and methodology and provided the reasons behind the chosen case-study selection. Some of these historical cases were highlighted and examined in Chapter Two’s literature survey and it is time, now, to consider some more. Exploration of such testimony and testimony-related material must surely be the beating heart of any UFOlogical investigation and hence I make no apology for the detail included in this part of the current investigation. I present the cases chronologically, beginning with an often neglected case from 1956 which deserves a wider audience than it has sometimes received and which has been aptly-described as one of the ‘Saucers That Time Forgot.’[41]

Harry J. Sturdevant

I first came across Harry J. Sturdevant’s curious, life-changing encounter in John Keel’s The Cosmic Question where Keel devoted a short paragraph to it. My attention was piqued when Keel quoted Sturdevant as claiming that the object ‘gave me the greatest shock of my life. There was a smell like sulfur or brimstone, but it was different. I don’t know what it was really except it was very nauseating and it made me sick. I lost my sense of taste and smell; my throat would not swallow properly. My stomach felt worse than the time I was overcome with mustard gas in France in World War One. I collapsed in pain and lay there on the ground for half an hour before I was able to drive.’[42]

Given that his experience occurred approximately seventy years ago and is seldom referenced in UFOlogical literature at any real length there is a surprising amount of detail that can be reconstructed about this curious episode.[43] Sturdevant was interviewed within twenty-four hours of his encounter by both police and a local journalist and the resulting testimony-material appeared quickly in local papers and, later, in a subsequent issue of Fate magazine. It was also the subject of a detailed questionnaire sent to Sturdevant by the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) and there are also court transcripts concerning the case and its aftermath: for reasons that will become clearer, later. The detailed description of his experience that follows – which includes its unusual aftermath – is reconstructed from these primary sources.

At the time of his experience, the early hours of October 2^nd 1956, Harry Sturdevant was employed as a night watchman by Herbert Elkins Incorporated, a construction firm engaged in a freeway construction project on the bank of the Delaware River in Trenton, New Jersey, at an extension of the East-West Highway. Part of Sturdevant’s job was to ensure the safeguarding of construction materials and he operated out of a trailer at the end of Riverside Drive facing the river. As part of his rounds he had driven a short distance from the trailer and was out of his car, on the river bank, facing Rotary Island which was approximately one hundred yards from the shore. His reason for being out of the car at this point was because he was sharing a sandwich with a hungry dog which his headlights had picked out in the road as he was making his way along. The time was 3.45 a.m and his shift, which had begun at 6.00 p.m was due to finish at 6.00 a.m. At the time of his encounter he was living, with his wife, at 539 Edgewood Avenue, Trenton, New Jersey.

From this point in the current analysis Harry Sturdevant’s experience will be given as far as possible in his own words, for accuracy, and it is immediately of note that the first recorded extant interview with him occurred on the night following his experience, in his kerosene-heated trailer where he was still deeply and visibly distressed by what had happened to him. It took place in the presence of Emil Slaboda, a crime reporter for the local Trentonian newspaper, United Press photographer Louis Gunkel, and Peter Tonti, a prominent local restaurant owner. It is not clear why Tonti was there but the resulting article, written by Sloboda and including some of Gunkel’s photographs, would later be incorporated into an article which appeared in the June 1957 edition of Fate magazine. Sloboda had himself arranged the interview after two Trenton detectives, Lt Adolph Miller and Lt Ernest Louis, had previously questioned Sturdevant, presumably sometime on October 3^rd, and had come away convinced that he was telling the truth. According to Sloboda, during his interview with Sturdevant on the night of the 3^rd the witness broke into tears ‘as he relived the experience of the night before.’[44] Following the interview Sturdevant would not go to the sighting site with the other three men but claimed that the UFO passed between him and Rotary Island: hence as being approximately fifty yards from where he was when his experience occurred.

Sloboda was clearly impressed: both with the testimony itself and with Sturdevant as a witness. Sometime later, in a letter dated June 25^th 1958 to one Alexander D. Mebane of Civilian Saucer Intelligence, he would write that ‘During my eight years as a crime reporter on The Trentonian I have run into many instances where a hoax was perpetrated or attempted. But never have I found any person as overwrought as Mr. Sturdevant was that night. His state was such that tears actually were streaming from his eyes. Something terrified him, whether it was real or in his mind.’[45]

It is notable that in his initial interview with Emil Slaboda Harry Sturdevant gave no description of the smell: a description that featured heavily in the quote reproduced by Keel with which we began this chapter. It is, however, something which Sturdevant would lay emphasis upon elsewhere. In a report for NICAP, dated 6^th of February 1958 and filled out on the third of February 1958, he would write that the object ‘gave off a terrible odor…so rank it turned my stomach upside down with very sharp pains that caused me to vomit violently…When the odor did leave my nose and mouth I found out that I had lost my sense of smell and taste…’[46]

Before examining the curious medical postscript to Sturdevant’s experience it will be necessary to reconstruct the entire eight-second encounter using his own claims in order to do so. It was a ‘bright, moonlit, night.’ The moon was ‘almost overhead, a little to the east’, and the moon and stars were very bright.’ He looked to the West, seeing a red light in the sky which he first assumed was an aircraft light. Then, in his own words again, the object approached from upriver in the direction of Lambertville, and ‘[b]efore I could say my name it swooped down to the river and then went to the tree tops and vanished in thin air…it just vanished at treetop level, it did not give off any smoke, but a gas or something that I have never smelled before.’  The object itself was ‘solid, having a red glowing light over its full length, not revolving, [with] no fins or wings [or] tail or rudder, [being] sharp at both ends or pointed.’ It ‘gave off a red glow, a little on the bright red’ and was self-luminous with no dull finish, reflective, and non-transparent. He estimated it as being ‘about sixty to a hundred feet long and about fifteen feet in diameter, shaped like a cigar’ and he could discern ‘no propulsion from it except a hissing sound like escaping steam.’ It moved with incredible speed, ‘faster than anything I ever saw.’[47]

The longer-term repercussions of the encounter, including the lingering effects of the noxious odour, are the parts of Harry Sturdevant’s curious encounter which have passed into UFOlogical lore, but at this point it is interesting to note that he returned to the sighting site the next day at 5 p.m and ‘found the vomit on the stone steps [but the] food gone…I went to the waters [sic] edge and found the leaves that as far as I could see had burned and fallen to the ground like burned tissue paper for about five feet from the water’s edge…I had been there before and they weren’t that way…’ The implication here is that heat was somehow generated by the object to the extent that it affected plant life on the river’s edge. Perhaps that may go some way to explaining the stench also: something which we have yet to determine. At this point, however, it is also interesting to note that in his NICAP report Sturdevant would claim that his face was burned during the encounter and that consequently he could not shave for two weeks. In addition, he reported some hearing loss in his right ear and was overall rendered unable to work to the extent that he submitted himself to his doctor’s care.[48]

The language which Sturdevant variously used to describe the effect on him of the encounter is particularly of note. In his own words again: ‘It was the first time in my life I’ve ever really been scared. I got terrible pains in my stomach. It began to churn and I started to vomit. I fell to the ground and crawled to my car. I don’t remember getting in or driving back to the trailer office…I stayed there for half an hour before I was competent to drive.’[49] Clearly distressed in the immediate aftermath by the entire episode, Sturdevant would later tellingly assert that ‘it was the odor that bothered me most of all.’[50] Over time, he was left with swallowing problems, and the loss of smell, hearing and taste already noted along with the burning problems. And like many such subjects of UFO close encounters, Sturdevant’s own experience led him to a classic ‘before and after situation. Before the event he hadn’t believed in UFOs – ‘I thought it was all a joke’ – but his experience made him feel ‘like an outcast.’ Agnostic as to the correct interpretation as to what happened to him, he would go on to say: ‘I don’t know what I saw. All I know is that it was a flying object and it moved at terrific speed. I tell my story to people and they think I’m crazy. If someone told me this story I don’t know if I’d believe them either.’[51]

As odd as this whole, brief episode may sound, the longer-term aftermath is of especial note. Having been incapacitated by whatever it was that happened to him, he found after a few days that he could no longer work. Six weeks after his encounter referee Leonard B. Willits of the New Jersey State Workmen’s Board sat in a hearing between Sturdevant and his employer, Herbert Elkins Incorporated, and upheld the plaintiff’s claim for medical injuries caused by the UFO. The Elkins Company representative at the hearing disputed Sturdevant’s bid, saying that the trouble ‘might be with his imagination, not his eyes, ears and nose.’ Nonetheless Willits upheld Sturdevant’s claim, asserting that it was his duty as the employee to investigate and that is what he did. On April 21st 1958 Roger Kelly, Director of the State Workmen’s Compensation Division, overturned the previous decision that had been made in Sturdevant’s favour, asserting that the UFO ‘developed within his own mental processes.’[52] The quote used by John Keel in The Cosmic Question with which this chapter began was taken from the original hearing and Keel does not mention that the ruling was subsequently overturned

Harry J. Sturdevant died on December 18^th 1965. It is not known if the cause of his death was related to his UFO encounter of nine years prior.

Stephen Michalak

Unlike Harry Sturdevant’s almost forgotten encounter on the bank of the Delaware River, Stephen Michalak’s life-changing experience whilst prospecting at Falcon Lake, East Manitoba, on May 20^th 1967 has been part of UFOlogical ‘lore’ for nearly sixty years. As part-preparation for his classic study, The Canadian UFO Report, leading Canadian UFOlogist Chris Rutkowski conducted a poll of Canadian UFO researchers and investigators in order to ascertain what they considered to have been the strangest Canadian UFO reports and Michalak’s bizarre encounter turned out to feature amongst the top ten, prompting Rutkowski’s observation that it ranks amongst the most significantly unusual cases on record.[53]

As with Harry Sturdevant’s own significantly unusual encounter, there are various sources, including first person accounts, which allow us to reconstruct the events of the case with a high degree of accuracy. Primarily, we have Michalak’s own initially self-published account of his experience, My Encounter With The UFO, written shortly after the event as a way of responding to the high degree of public interest in what happened to him. We also have his son’s, Stan’s, account of the effect the encounter had on his father and the household in general together with its aftermath. And we have various reports filed by members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Air Force, including a report made by a member of the RCMP detailing his encounter with Michalak in the immediate aftermath of the event together with interview notes compiled by other police and military personnel based on visits to his home in the days immediately following. As previously, in what follows I will draw on the subject’s own first person testimony wherever possible, highlighting the olfactory elements in keeping with the aims of this project overall.

On the day of his experience Stephen Michalak, aged fifty, set out to prospect for minerals in the area around Falcon Lake. Spring was the most favourable time for prospecting in the terrain of East Manitoba and he set out on Friday May 19^th by Greyhound bus in order to begin prospecting early the next day, staying overnight at a motel. On the 20^th he started out on foot with a map, compass, paper, pencil, some food, his prospecting equipment, a hat and a light jacket, crossing the Trans-Canada Highway and making his way into the bush and pine forest which he had selected for the day’s activities. By 9 a.m he had found a rock formation which interested him and he set about his work. His arrival startled a flock of geese but these had settled down long before he sat down to eat his lunch at 11 a.m and he worked on a quartz vein until 12.15. The sun was high, with a few clouds to the west.

His first inkling of anything unusual was a disturbance amongst the geese: an ‘uncanny cackle’ as he would later describe it and one which showed that ‘something had obviously frightened them…’ It was at this point that he saw ‘[t]wo cigar-shaped objects with humps on them’ which ‘appeared to be descending and glowing with an intense scarlet glare…’ One stopped dead in the air before lifting away but the other landed on a rock approximately 160 feet away from him. It was changing in colour as he looked at it, ‘turning from red to grey-red to light grey and then to the colour of hot stainless steel, with a golden glow around it.’ In addition, a ‘flood of light…poured out’ from the object’s upper part, of a purple hue and eclipsing the sunlight in the immediate area. ‘I was forced to continually turn my eyes away from the light’, he would later write, ‘which made red dots appear before my eyes every time I looked away.’ Fearing to approach, Michalak continued to work on the rock, aware of ‘wafts of warm air that seemed to come out in waves from the craft, accompanied by the pungent odour of sulphur.’ He sketched the object with his pencil and paper, aware of ‘a soft murmur, like the whirl of a tiny electric motor running very fast…[and] a hissing sound as if air had been sucked into the interior of the craft.’ His initial thought was that it was some kind of US space project.[54]

Overcoming his initial fear he decided to approach the whatever-it-was. When he was sixty feet away he heard voices coming from it, indistinct but with one voice at a higher pitch than the other. Being multi-lingual he called out in English, Russian, German, Italian, French and Ukrainian for the occupants to come out and, receiving no response, moved closer. After having hailed the occupants three times in various languages he moved closer still, placing green lenses over his goggles and looking inside.

As he would later describe it, the sight that met him was bizarre: ‘The inside was a maze of lights. Direct beams running in horizontal and diagonal paths and a series of flashing lights, it seemed to me, were working in a random fashion, with no particular order or sequence.’

Aside from his initial fear, and as bizarre as the object’s interior might have appeared to him, its effect on Michalek up to this point seems to have been somewhat benign. It was at this point, however, that things started to change as the object began to move, two panels having slid over the opening and a third piece moving downwards to complete the closing. Michalak later reported having noticed something else at this point too; something that would add a significant element of controversy to his account many years later: ‘I noticed a small screen pattern on the side of the craft. It seemed to be some sort of ventilation system. The screen openings appeared to be about 3/16 of an inch in diameter.’

Newly emboldened, Michalak approached the craft again, touching the side, feeling heat, and burning his glove. Then:

‘All of a sudden the craft tilted slightly westward. I turned and felt a scorching pain around my chest; my shirt and my undershirt were afire. A sharp beam of heat had shot from the craft. I tore off my shirt and undershirt and threw them to the ground. My chest was severely burned…The craft was rising above the treetops. It began to change colour and shape, following much the same pattern as its sister ship when it returned to the sky. Soon the craft had disappeared, gone without a trace.’[55]

Michalak was now in distress and his later description of the aftermath of the encounter contains repeated references to this, together with descriptions of the sulphurous odour that would torment him so. Despite the departure of the object, he wrote, ‘The odour, that reminded me of an odour of burning electric motor mixed with a strong smell of sulphur, still hung in the air.’ The combination of smells is interesting here, as if Michalak either smelled both things or could not decide between the two.[56]

It is also noteworthy to list the immediate after-effects of the experience as he would later state them. In his 1967 account he wrote of nausea, a headache, vomiting, weakness, visual impairment, burning to his chest, and the presence of red marks ‘where the blast from the craft touched me and burned my shirt.’ Indeed, there are repeated references to his extreme discomfort together with the ever-present stench. Losing the desire to continue prospecting he decided to inspect the landing site but his symptoms rapidly mounted and he decided to go back to the highway. ‘I had not gone far’, he wrote, ‘when I was forced to stop and vomit. Again and again my stomach heaved and swayed. My mouth was hot and dry. The pain in my head got worse. All the food I consumed was gone from my stomach, but I continued to vomit green bile.’ And throughout, the smell: ‘The odour of “burning electric motor” and sulphur lingered about me, constantly bringing back to my mind the things I had seen.’ And later: ‘With every breath, the stench of sulphur returned. I took a deep breath trying to rid myself of the foul smell and the nausea it brought about, but it didn’t help. The odour seemed to come from within me and I could not escape it.’[57]

Reaching the Trans-Canada Highway at last, Michalak tried to flag down an RCMP officer but was initially unsuccessful. Later, one called to him as he staggered along and he tried to explain what had happened only to be met with what he perceived to be disbelief and a lack of help. ‘He, apparently, did not believe a word I told him’ Michalak would later write, ‘Otherwise he would have acted differently.’[58] This disbelief is partly borne out by the officer’s own statement, for Constable G. A Solotki of the Falcon Beach Highway Patrol, to whom he tried to tell his story, would later write in his report that ‘It appeared to me that Michalak had taken a black substance, possibly wood ashes, and rubbed it on his chest.’ He also alluded to Michalak’s ‘reluctance to co-operate’ although qualified this somewhat with his final comment that the reluctance ‘may have been intentional or due to circumstances beyond his control.’[59] The reluctance might also be explained, at least in part, by Michalak’s own reluctance to get too close to the officer for fear of contaminating him with radiation; something Solotki also referred to in an earlier part of his report and a fear which Michalak made reference to in his own account of events.[60]

Eventually Michalak made it back to the motel and from there to the bus station where he was still ‘suffering pain and the stench and the coloured spots all around.’ His son Mark met him at the Winnepeg bus depot later that evening and took him to the Misericordia Hospital where he was examined by a doctor to whom he decided not to relate his experience, As he would later explain: ‘I was thinking how to get home as soon as possible, without any delay that my true revelation might have caused. Besides, the pain I was suffering was too much for me to go through it all again.’

Back home, Michalak’s symptoms lingered. Next day, ‘The pain was just as bad, the awful stench still lingered in my lungs and the dots still danced in front of my eyes. The vomiting had stopped. It was quite a relief. Strangely, I was not hungry. I realised that I had not eaten since I had seen the craft in the woods the day before. Efforts to drink a little tea proved useless. No sooner had I swallowed it when I began to vomit again.’[61]

Of all the striking details of this extraordinary series of events, one is particularly noteworthy at this point. It is impossible to share what another person actually sees, save through photographic and/or video evidence they may provide or in written form at second hand via a testimony – as with Stephen Michalak – which they later provide. Sharing what a person hears is also limited: either to an audio recording or via testimony, at second hand, again. An experience of touch is even more elusive, shareable only via testimony, as is a person’s subjective experience of a taste.

But smell is different inasmuch as it can permeate, say, a person or their clothing and can hence be experienced – in a sense directly – by others. And in this regard Michalak’s experience of the awful stench was, indeed, shared by others. Writing of the aftermath of his father’s experience in his book When They Appeared, Stan Michalak writes of a visit to his father’s bedroom on the day after his return from Falcon Lake as follows:

‘The curtain was drawn back to let in some daylight and the room was brighter than it had been yesterday. Dad was propped up on some pillows with a glass of tea in his hand. On the nightstand, a jar of cream, a bottle of pills, a box of tissues and a plate with some cold rye toast competed for space. He was wearing striped blue pyjamas and his face was drawn and pale.

‘When I walked in to the bedroom, a wall of odour struck me so hard I stopped in my tracks. It was the stink of sulphur overlain with ozone – the smell that comes out of a burning electric motor that has overheated. Together they formed a miasma of sickness, of wrongness – so much so that I froze in place. Dad opened his eyes, noticed me and gestured that I should come closer. He patted the bed – an invitation for me to sit. His voice was hoarse and I spotted bandages on his upper chest. The smell seemed to be coming from him – from the very pores of his skin.’[62]

Additional description – together with verification –  of the smell comes via the Royal Canadian Police Reports of visits to Michalek’s home in the days following his encounter. On 24^th May, just four days after the event, he was visited and interviewed by Corporal Gerry Davies of the RCMP and the odour was discussed. Talking of the aftermath of his experience, Michalak described in broken English the smell, saying ‘from inside my body was coming smell of burning, that smell of the motors, the wire, the cables, burning like a wire or electric motor when it burns, the smell.’ Davies returned to this at the very end of the interview, with the Q and A proceeding as follows:

Davies: Steve, I want to talk to you about this smell. Is there any smell in the area?

Michalak: It smells like you enter a big, large room where there is nothing but electrical equipment running and you can feel it.

Davies: Yes, with all that electrical equipment running.

Michalak: That’s right.

Davies: Did this smell remain after the machine left, or would you know?

Michalak: Well, I can’t tell you. It still smell a little bit.[63]

Confirmation that the smell was still detectable came, in fact, the day before, when Michalak was visited by Davies again in the company of Captain John (or Jack) Zacharias, also of the RCMP, at the instruction of RCMP Inspector R.J Ross. Prior to the visit Davies had spoken by telephone with Constable Solotki whom Michalak had encountered on the Trans-Canada Highway immediately after the incident and who revealed to Davies during the call that Michalak ‘appeared to have been on a drunk and was suffering from a hangover.’[64] During the call, according to Davies, Solotki confirmed that Michalak ‘backed away and would seem unco-operative’ on the highway. Perhaps this explains why at no point did he ever indicate he could smell anything like sulphur and/or burned wiring on Michalak. In his subsequent report Davies revealed that during the visit on May 23^rd Michalak said that ‘he had a taste in his mouth’ after the incident, ‘a taste that seemed to go through his entire system and [which] was like burned wiring or insulation and this was bothering him a great deal.’[65] During the same visit, Michalak produced the undershirt he had been wearing when his encounter took place which Davies and Zacharias inspected, leading Davies to remark in his subsequent report that ‘it smelled like burned electrical wiring or insulation to both of us.’[66] I find this both significant and important, because taken together with the testimony of Michalak’s son Stan it gives us three persons who all affirmed a smell either in Michalak’s immediate vicinity or on his clothes subsequent to the UFO event consistent with what Michalak himself claimed. A skeptic might argue that Michalak somehow hoaxed the whole thing together with its aftermath but would this really extend to the ‘planting’ of such an odour on his person and/or clothes which was discernible by three other people in the days following?

Robert Taylor

As with Harry Sturdevant and Stephen Michalak we are fortunate in having first-person testimony from Robert Taylor together with additional interview material for our reconstruction of his bizarre encounter and its aftermath: all from the days immediately following the initial occurrence.

On the morning of 9^th November 1979, just after 10 a.m, Robert Taylor was doing his job as a Foreman forester for the Forestry Department of Livingston Development Corporation. This was in a heavily-wooded area of forest known as Dechmont Law and Taylor, in his own words, was ‘checking gates to see if they were shut to keep cattle or sheep out of the woodlands.’ With him was his red setter Lara: the only ‘witness’ to what would shortly transpire. The ground was muddy and he was forced at one point to leave his truck and proceed on foot. The weather was bright but not sunny and he reached a grass clearing between four separate plantations of conifers, measuring about 100 feet by 60 feet and with grasses about five inches high.  It was 10.10 a.m.

Then it happened. In an interview with UFO researcher Malcolm Robinson conducted just two days after the event he would describe how ‘I walked down this forestry ride [and] I came out into a clearing and this spaceship was sitting there.’[67]

Robert Taylor’s description of the ‘spaceship’ has been the subject of much discussion and illustrative reconstruction in the years following his encounter and in his interview with Robinson he described how ‘I stood and watched it for a few seconds at least. I don’t know how long I watched it but it was definitely a sphere shaped ship with a flange right round about it and these propeller things sticking up from the flange.’ Its height was approximately nine feet and its width was approximately seventeen feet and the propellers were mounted on vertical rods which stuck up vertically from the flange and which were spaced an even distance from each other. He never noted any movement of any of the propellers but there appeared to be a row of portholes just above the flange.

This initial description seems, on the surface at least, palpably absurd, but Taylor would stick to it in the weeks, months, and years following, never wavering. It was originally ‘a dark grey colour’, he told Robinson, and whilst it didn’t change colour ‘it just seemed that parts of it seemed to disappear.’ This assertion seems extremely odd but he would later develop it, stating toward the end of the interview that ‘You could see it all, then parts of it seemed to be hidden. Maybe the right side or the centre was or the left side would be away.’ During an interview a few days later on 27^th November he would tell UFO researcher Steuart Campbell that it was as if the object was trying to camouflage itself.[68]

The strangest aspect of the case, however, was yet to come, for as he watched, two additional objects emerged, ‘shaped like sea mines with about six legs attached thereto’ as he would state in his police interview. They were of the same colour as the main object and made sucking or plopping noises in the grass as they moved. ‘[T]hey certainly came out from underneath,’ he told Robinson, and were themselves about four to five feet in width, including the ‘legs’ that they were ‘rolling’ on. Their movement was the only thing he could hear, but he quickly became aware of another sensory impression, telling Robinson that the spike-objects ‘came out very fast from underneath and right up beside me and the first thing I remember was a terrible smell, a heavy choking sort of smell. And these two things, they definitely grabbed me on either side.’

The police would subsequently treat this incident as an assault, visiting the site and sending Bob Taylor’s clothing away for analysis in accordance with standard procedure for this kind of reported crime. This certainly sounds like an apt characterisation for what happened next for at this point, as he told Robinson, ‘they pulled me and I landed flat down and I remember my dog barking furiously.’ As for the ‘heavy choking sort of smell’, he said that he hadn’t really smelled anything like it before. ‘The nearest that I could put it to would be a ferodo, a ferodo burning smell,’ he told Robinson, ‘you know what like brakes are, a clutch, that sort of smell.’[69]  He would later tell police that at the point at which the spheres ‘arrived at my side…I was aware of a strong pungent smell which was overpowering.’[70] In later conversation at his home where Robinson was present, Taylor would refer to the odour as a ‘taste’ or ‘smell in the mouth’; ‘a very heavy odour’ that was overpowering and chocking [sic].’[71] Several years later Ian Wark, a Detective Sergeant who worked on the case, would reveal that Robert Taylor claimed that the smell came from the two objects themselves.[72]

When the objects reached him, pulling him to the ground, Taylor lost consciousness and when he came round twenty minutes later they and the larger object had gone, although he was aware of ‘a sort of ‘swishing’ noise.’[73] (In a later interview with the police he would state that he was unsure if this noise occurred before or after he lost consciousness).[74] Conscious again, he quickly found that he couldn’t speak, couldn’t walk, had a very dry throat and felt sick. In addition, there was a burning sensation on his chin. As he would later tell police: ‘I felt extremely weak and unsteady on my feet. I dragged myself up and half crawled, half staggered to my vehicle [and] tried to use the radio but I could not speak. I tried to drive…but could not coordinate my actions and as a result of my attempts I got the vehicle bogged down. I then walked home in a dazed condition…’[75]

Struggling though fields and woods he arrived back at his house at approximately 11.15 a.m and from this point onwards we are fortunate, via a subsequent police interview, to have detailed testimony from Mary Taylor, his wife, of the events immediately following his return. Her immediate impression was that ‘there had been an accident’ but he denied this, saying, ‘No, I’ve been attacked.’ Mary asked him who by – ‘By men?’ – and he said ‘No, a spaceship thing.’ She told him, ‘There’s no such thing and I’ll phone for the doctor.’[76] He told her that there was no need and seemed insistent about having a bath. This might indeed have been to get rid of the smell for Mary would later tell police that ‘He was going on about a smell and said that he would need a bath…’ There seems to have been some urgency – or at least priority – about this, because in his own police testimony the smell and the bath are the first things he mentions, stating, ‘[W]hen I got to my house I spoke to my wife about the smell and she ran a bath for me and I had a bath.’ His wife, having run his bath, phoned his boss Mr Drummond who arrived and actually spoke to him while he was still in the bath. His wife’s observations of the state of Taylor’s clothing upon his return certainly reinforce the strong sense that he was the victim of some kind of assault: ‘[H]is jersey had dirt on the front of it as did his trousers. His trousers were also torn on either side near to the pockets. My husband complained of a graze mark on his left leg and a graze under his chin. He was very pale, drained, and exhausted when he came home.’[77] Interestingly, neither she nor his doctor – who later examined him – reported any odour attaching to either Robert Taylor or his clothes with his doctor’s report confining itself to observations of normal blood pressure, slight shock, a graze under his chin, and no head injury or other neurological disorder. This omission is slightly odd, given that, according to Malcolm Robinson, it was apparently present both after the experience and into the early evening. From Robinson we also learn that Robert Taylor suffered from intense thirst for two days after the event and a loss of appetite for five days afterwards: something which bears comparison with the experience of Stephen Michalak.

Subsequent police analysis of the damage to the trousers would reveal the very real possibility of the sort of ‘grabbing’ consistent with Robert Taylor’s description of the actions of the mine-things and subsequent visits to the clearing site would reveal impressions on the ground consistent with both the presence of the larger object and the reported movements of the two smaller objects. This is potentially important as regards potential third-person verification of what Robert Taylor claimed had happened and I will thus reserve further comment on both clothes and site for the following chapter: for it is time, now, to move on to a deeper discussion and comparative analysis of the three experiences of Harry J. Sturdevant, Stephen Michalak, and Robert Taylor, and to make an initial attempt at determining what might have been the underlying cause(s) of their frightening encounters, paying particular attention to the odours reported within them.

Chapter 3 – Going Backwards To Go Forwards (2): Case Histories (2)

Looking For Patterns

What conclusions can be drawn from the three detailed ‘case studies’ examined in the previous chapter together with those outlined in Part One? Are we any nearer to explaining why the subjects smelled the odours that they did and why they were affected by them in the ways that they were? In this chapter we will pause to consider what patterning, if any, has emerged in the testimony-material examined so far: with a view to establishing what it might be revealing about the nature of the phenomenon overall. At least three conclusions can be drawn with a reasonable degree of certainty and these are as follows:

• The subject was trustworthy and telling the truth

As regards Harry Sturdevant’s experience on the bank of the Delaware River, very little needs to be said above and beyond what we have already noted. He was seen and interviewed by police, a local reporter, and others in the twenty four hours following his episode and all were impressed by the way his experience had deeply affected him. At no point was any doubt raised as to the truthfulness of his assertions: however odd and/or unusual they may have been perceived to be. In fact, the only shred of doubt I have been able to discover regarding the trustworthiness of his claims was expressed in Trentonian News Reporter Emil Sloboda’s letter to Alexander D. Mebane of Civilian Saucer Intelligence on June 25^th 1958 where Sloboda asserted that ‘According to local police officials, Mr Sturdevant is a highly emotional individual. And, in their opinion, the UFO that “sickened” him was just “conjured up out of the air.”’[78] Against this, it should be recalled that everybody else who interviewed him came away impressed by his integrity and convinced by the effect which his encounter had clearly left on him.

In sum: there is little or nothing to count against the conclusion that Harry Sturdevant’s claims were genuinely and truthfully made.

The same can be said regarding the claims made by Robert Taylor. In fact, I have been unable to uncover anything at all that casts any doubt on his integrity in any way. Even the skeptic Steuart Campbell in his chapter on Robert Taylor’s case in his book The UFO Mystery Solved admits that ‘Many told me that they would not have believed the report from anyone else.’[79] His wife, his employer, the police, his friends, various UFO researchers; nobody doubted that he had experienced something extremely odd on the morning of 9^th November 1979. Whilst interpretations of what that ‘something’ might have been would indeed vary, at no point did the actual veracity of the claims become a matter of dispute. As regards Robert Taylor’s honesty, therefore, nothing more needs to be said.

And this has been the case, by and large, with Stephen Michalak’s curious encounter near Falcon Lake on 20^th May 1967. However, unlike the case of Robert Taylor, there have been some dissenting views in Michalak’s case: expressed both in the more-or-less immediate aftermath as well as in more recent years.

As regards the immediate aftermath we recall the report made by RCMP Constable G.A Solotki of the Falcon Beach Highway Patrol of his encounter with Michalak on the Trans-Canada Highway. We have already heard Solotki’s assertion that he thought Michalak had ‘been on a drunk and was suffering from a hangover’ but in his report dated 16^th June 1967 he went further, writing that Michalak would not let him examine his shirt and ‘kept backing away every time I got close to him.’[80] We recall, also, Solotki’s additional assertion that ‘It appeared to me that Michalak had taken a black substance, possibly wood ashes, and rubbed it on his chest’ and that ‘At no time during my conversations with Michalak would he allow me close enough to him to definitely see whether or not he was injured.’[81]

Given how close in time Solotki’s encounter with Michalak was to Michalak’s own claimed encounter with the UFOs these might sound like particularly doubt-casting and daunting observations. However, Michalak’s own assertions regarding his meeting with Solotki are worth re-examining closely at this point. According to him, he warned Solotki ‘not to come too close to me because I feared the possibility of spreading radiation.’[82] Given that at this point – and afterwards – Michalak had no idea what it was he had touched, this seems a fair explanation. The deliberately-induced distance on Michalak’s part might also account, as we have already noted, for the fact that Solotki smelled nothing on Michalak in the way that others, later, would.

Despite being rightly regarded as a classic case, research interest in Michalak’s encounter remained fairly fallow for a number of years until relatively recently when a number of assertions appeared on the Three Dollar Kit website and were subsequently reproduced in part in the Fortean Times. The Three Dollar Kit piece is critical of the case, eschewing claims that it is – or ever was – ‘complicated’ and suggesting that it is a simple case of intention to deceive, basing this on the fact that the ‘grid’ pattern of dots on Michalak’s chest and clearly visible in photographs did not appear until eight months later (when he had made it) and did not match up with the burn on his (preserved) undershirt. ‘If Michalak was truly burned by a UFO,” concludes the article’s writer Charlie Wiser “there was no need for him to deceive.’ The suggestion made in the piece is that Michalak produced the grid pattern via use of a common household kitchen item such as a waffle maker and that in the immediate aftermath of his claimed experience there was no pattern; the first anybody hearing of it being on January 25^th 1968 when he retrofitted it ‘into the story by claiming he kept getting [subsequent] flare ups of the grid pattern.’ Whilst concentrating on the burns and burn pattern in this way the author is also critical of the reports of the smell, wondering why ‘none of the doctors, reporters, or officers of the law or military commented on the terrible smell he claimed to be oozing.’  Overall, writes Wiser, we only have Michalak’s word for his encounter: hence, ‘once we cut through the red herrings’ we’re left with a single eyewitness with burns on his body and clothing.’[83]

Do such critiques succeed in destroying the credibility of Stephen Michalak’s claimed encounter? I would argue otherwise. To begin with, Wiser is clearly wrong about the smell. As we have already had cause to note, this vivid aspect of his experience actually helps to make it shared: for it was reported by his son Stan and by RCMP Constables Davies and Zacharias during the days that followed. The fact that examining doctors did not mention it during examinations following Michalak’s encounter need not be viewed as particularly damning either: they were looking at his burns, after all, and the omission of the smell from their reports does not necessarily imply its absence. In fact, when this crucial aspect of the case is added to comparable aspects of other cases – such as Sturdevant’s and Taylor’s – the emerging, shared, pattern actually lends credibility to Michalak’s own claim (together with the testimonies of Stan Michalak, Davies and Zacharias). It is highly unlikely that Stephen Michalak was aware of Harry Sturdevant’s claimed encounter and modelling the olfactory aspect of his own claimed encounter on it. And it would, of course, have been impossible for him to have known about Robert Taylor’s case. In short: the shared olfactory elements of these three cases – Michalak’s included – provide mutual reinforcement to their credibility and hence their trustworthiness. As for the burn patterns on Michalak’s chest, abdomen and clothes: I note the strength of Wiser’s critique but do not thereby conclude that it invalidates the rest of his claims. Far from it: for the reasons cited above and explored in detail in the previous chapter

Given that the trustworthiness and truth-telling on the part of the witnesses can be affirmed, we can now move on to assertion number two:

• These persons were assaulted

At first glance this may sound like an overdramatic – even shocking – assertion, but the facts of the cases examined to this point do not only amply support it but reveal it as being, if anything, something of an understatement.

The police were in no doubt that Robert Taylor had been assaulted. As Detective Sergeant Ian Wark would tell UFO researcher Malcolm Robinson on 18^th October 1985: ‘[T]echnically speaking it was an assault.’[84] This explains the procedure the police followed in the aftermath of the incident, as Ian Wark again explained to Robinson: ‘So what we done [sic] was what we do in any other case, you’ve got to examine the locus where it happened. Now the first thing we do if it’s a murder or anything else is to photograph things before anyone wanders in. So we photographed the locus…’ Later, as Wark described, they would follow standard assault procedure again by ‘taking possession of the clothes so that we could send them to our forensic lab for examination.’[85] A report on the locus by Police Officer William Douglas who was originally assigned to the case reveals that, in fact, the police considered other possible explanations for what happened to Robert Taylor before discarding them: ‘There was nothing to indicate that he had been involved in an accident and there was nothing on board [sic?] which might give off fumes likely to cause hallucination.’[86]

As regards the immediate aftermath of the case, with Taylor having just returned home on the morning the incident occurred, we remind ourselves again of his wife’s testimony to police in which she reported him as saying ‘”I’ve been attacked”’ and of her own initial conclusion from the distress he was clearly in that ‘he had been assaulted.’ There are also other things to consider: his injuries, the damage to his clothes, and the fact that he suffered for two days from intense thirst. As regards the latter, this is sometimes called ‘shock thirst’ and can be associated with cases involving assault. We might also bear in mind the isolated location of the incident: one that would be ideal if an assault was to be planned and carried out. In this regard, Ian Wark’s interview is once again revealing, with his assertion that ‘The thing about it is, where that [the object] landed it would be impossible for anyone to see it unless they were walking through there. It would be the ideal place for something to land, without being seen from any road or any golf course or anything like that. Especially at that time in the morning. Who is expecting somebody to come walking through a forest at half past seven in the morning?’[87]

All told, it is little wonder that, as things stand, the case of Robert Taylor still has the police status of an unsolved assault case.

Whilst Harry Sturdevant’s experience was never explicitly defined in this way, it also contains several features strongly suggestive of the fact that an assault took place. We recall, for example, the extremely brief duration of the event and the strong sense that whatever it was that so terrified and debilitated him swooped toward him from a distance before affecting him and disappearing. There seems a strong indication of intent, here; a ‘singling out’ which caused the object to streak toward him in a flash with no other purpose than to terrify and harm him. We recall, also, the incapacitation, hearing loss and burning that he experienced, and his fearful refusal to revisit the site afterwards in the company of Emil Slaboda and the other two men. And as with Robert Taylor, it is worth considering both the time and the location of the event. Sturdevant was at an isolated location – the bank of a wide river at the edge of an extensive and unfinished building development – at the kind of extremely unsociable hour when only somebody like a night watchman might be expected to be working outdoors.

All told, then, and as with Robert Taylor, it is more than reasonable to view Harry Sturdevant’s physically and emotionally traumatic experience as being he result of an unprovoked assault.  Unprovoked, that is, save for his being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Stephen Michalak’s experience bears close similarities to those of Taylor and Sturdevant. As with Sturdevant, there is the strong sense of ‘singling out’, particularly in his description of two objects arriving with one departing and one apparently deciding to settle on a rock near to where he was prospecting. As with both Taylor and Sturdevant there are the injuries that the object inflicted: not least the severe burns to his chest and abdomen clearly visible in photographs taken in the immediate aftermath of the event. And in Stephen Michalak’s case it is once again hard to escape the conclusion that the injuries were wilfully inflicted. In fact, could it be that as with Robert Taylor the issue was one of the subject getting too close to the thing that harmed him and provoking a hostile response as a result? It will be recalled that Robert Taylor had entered the clearing when he suffered his assault. Stephen Michalak had gotten even closer to what harmed him: to the extent of touching it and actually putting his head inside. And once again we are confronted, as with the other two cases examined, with the isolated location of the events described. In Stephen Michalak’s case he was far from civilisation, as he himself describes the scene: ‘Crossing the Trans-Canada Highway from the motel on the south side, I made my way into the bush and pine forest on the north side. After travelling some distance I got out my map and compass and oriented myself. By nine o’clock I found an area that particularly fascinated me because of the rock formation near a bog along a stream flowing in a southward direction.’[88] Given that, again by his own description, he had left the motel at 5.30 a.m, this means that he had been walking for three and a half hours before he reached the place where his experience occurred, his nearest neighbours being the geese that were spooked by the objects’ arrival. The length of time that he had taken to reach this extremely remote spot is seldom mentioned in discussions of the case but it is extremely relevant here. Stephen Michalak was in the middle of nowhere. Little wonder that he would have such trouble pinpointing the location subsequently.

Over and against what I have been arguing here it is worth noting that Stephen Michalak did not see what happened to him as being the result of any kind of assault. Almost at the very end of his own account of his encounter he wrote that ‘I would like to say that the burns and suffering I had endured were not caused by any aggressive moves of the craft of [sic] its occupants, as far as I can see. The contact I had with the ship was of my own choosing and I was burned by the exhaust of the craft as it took off. Probably, if I stayed further away from the craft I would not have been burned or suffered in any way.’[89]

As far as I can see. This is a telling phrase, particularly given that he really had no idea what harmed him: seemingly to the end of his life. Indeed, it may be the case that it is only when placed alongside other comparable cases, as the present study has so far sought to do, that this case reveals features and truths hidden even from the experient. For in each case we have seen commonalities strongly suggestive that an assault did, indeed, occur.

In fact, there is more. In English law, ‘assault’ is defined as intentionally or recklessly causing another to apprehend immediate or unlawful violence whilst ‘battery’ is defined as the intentional or reckless infliction of unlawful force, including any infringement of personal autonomy. Whilst assault and battery are technically separate summary offences there are various aggravated forms of assault such as assault occasioning actual bodily harm. The reader does not need me to repeat the long litany of injuries – emotional, psychological, physical – suffered by Harry Sturdevant, Stephen Michalak and Robert Taylor. Nor, at the end of this section, is it necessary to repeat the long list of reasons for supposing that the injuries they sustained were intentionally inflicted upon them. All that remains, in fact, is to view their encounters in the light of the above legal definitions, for viewed in this way they suffered not simply assault but battery also. These are serious crimes: physically, emotionally and legally. And in the next section it will become clear that in each case the reported odour was a key component of the attack that each man suffered.

Hence we are brought to a third key assertion:

• In each case examined, an extremely unpleasant odour was a key component of what caused the subject to suffer.

Harry Sturdevant suffered from a range of ailments as a result of his UFO experience but, as he would later assert, ‘it was the odor that bothered me most of all’, elaborating on this to the New Jersey State Workmen’s Board to the effect that ‘it was very nauseating and made me sick’ and that it affected his stomach ‘worse than the time I was overcome by mustard gas in World War One.’ This is quite some claim but it underscores what, for him, was the worst part of the entire experience both during and after: the smell.

Central as the smell might have been, however, it is notable that Sturdevant struggled to describe just what it was that he did smell. To NICAP he described it as ‘something I have never smelled before’ and likening it to ‘sulfur or brimstone’ to the Workmen’s Board but not equating it with either and actually stating that ‘it was different’ to those and declaring that ‘I don’t know what it was really.’

Might a closer examination of the odour reported in the other two key cases so far examined enable us to be more precise about its precise nature together with the extent to which it was key or central within the experience overall? There is certainly no doubting the extent to which it was fundamental to Stephen Michalak’s experience. Indeed, it dominates his own description of the events of May 20^th 1967, beginning while he worked on the rock before approaching the object – ‘wafts of warm air…seemed to come out in waves from the craft, accompanied by the pungent odour of sulphur’[90] – and continuing in the aftermath. As with Harry Sturdevant, it seems that the smell induced vomiting more-or-less immediately after the experience – ‘I had not gone far when I was forced to stop and vomit’ – and, again as with the watchman, it is clear that Stephen Michalak was uncertain as to its exact identification, vacillating on various occasions between ‘sulphur’ and ‘burning electric motor’; a ‘burning like a wire or electric motor when it burns.’[91] For Stan Michalak, next day, it was ‘the stink of sulphur overlain with ozone…the smell that comes out of a burning motor that has overheated’[92] whilst for Constables Davies and Zacharias shortly after that, having smelled Michalak’s undershirt, it ‘smelled like burned electrical wiring or insulation to both of us.’[93]

As we have also had ample cause to note, Robert Taylor’s experience featured an unpleasant odour as a key component. In his case, however, we are enabled to go a little further with its actual identification than hitherto, as we will shortly see.

Particularly noteworthy in his case is his description of when he first smelled the odour. As he would later tell Malcolm Robinson, the mine-things emerged from the craft: ‘very fast from underneath and the first thing I remember was a terrible smell, a heavy chocking [sic] smell.’ It is tempting here to conclude that the proximity of the things to him – ‘And these two things, they definitely grabbed me on either side’ – was what triggered his apprehension of their overwhelming odour: unless, of course, they were somehow ‘extensions’ of the much larger assemblage, in which case this would equate to a ‘terrible smell’ of the whole ensemble.

Like Sturdevant and Michalak, Taylor would express uncertainty as to what the smell actually was. When asked by Robinson whether or not he had ‘smelt anything like it before’, his answer – ‘I haven’t really, no’ – is close to Harry Sturdevant’s own whilst his description of it as being closest to ‘a ferodo, a ferodo burning smell, you know what brakes are, a clutch, that sort of smell’ is eerily redolent of Stephen Michalak’s ‘burning electric motor’ description.

As with the other key cases, the overwhelming and pungent presence of an odour is central to Robert Taylor’s own descriptions of his encounter and, his wife’s failure to smell it notwithstanding, it is notable that his expressed need to urgently wash the smell off after his return home – ‘He was going on about a smell and that he would need a bath…’ – is a vivid reminder of the urgently-expressed desires of some assault victims to do exactly that. It is also interesting to note at this point that Stephen Michalak took a bath immediately upon his return home as well. Of note, too, is Robert Taylor’s description of the odour as being a ‘taste’ or ‘smell in the mouth’ which is similar to Michalak’s own description of the interiority of the smell: something which, as with Harry Sturdevant, removed his appetite for several days.

But what, exactly, did Robert Taylor smell? According to BUFORA report number 1, at some unspecified time in the aftermath of his experience he was asked to smell four prepared samples of gas – ozone, nitrogen dioxide, hydrogen sulphide and sulphur dioxide – with a view to determining which was closest to what he smelled during his forest encounter. The outcome of this simple experiment was extremely interesting. Whilst he did not think that any one of them was identical to what he had smelled, he declared that sulphur dioxide was the closest.[94]

Comparable Cases

Before this chapter closes, brief mention should be made of the two main cases examined in Chapter Two’s literature survey: those of ‘Sonny’ Desvergers and that involving the witnesses in the Flatwoods Monster encounter. For it will now be hopefully clear that many of the olfaction features in the cases involving Harry Sturdevant, Stephen Michalek and Robert Taylor were involved in those cases also. In the Desvergers case, for example, we have the presence of an unpleasant and overpowering burning odour, (‘something like burning flesh’), a sulphur smell (‘worse than rotten eggs’), the difficulty of actually defining the precise nature of the odour, the effect of the odour on the nose and throat (‘It seemed to grip my throat and cut off my breath’), nausea, assault features (a red fire which became a red mist that rendered him unconscious), and extreme fear (as Deputy Sheriff Mott N. Partin put it: ‘In all my nineteen years of law enforcement work, I’ve never seen anyone as terrified as he was.’). For sure, as Chapter Two also showed, the Desvergers case has long been ‘tainted’ by its own whiff of hoax, but we recall Edward Ruppelt’s own admission that investigators had ‘absolutely no success’ in proving the hoax hypothesis. Overall, the strikingly comparable olfaction features in his testimony when compared to those in the other cases so far examined in this chapter suggests that it may be time for Desvergers’ claims to be taken more seriously, the unfavourable character references notwithstanding.

The Flatwoods Monster case also invites comparison at this point, for here also we encountered the by-now familiar features of odour foulness including combustion descriptors (‘hot, greased metal’; ‘burning sulphur’), the effect of the odour on the nose and throat, vomiting, extreme fear, and the later smelling of the odour by others not present at the initial encounter (recall the ‘burned electrical wiring’ smell as recounted by the two RCMP officers three days after the Stephen Michalak encounter).

Those with an academic bent might appeal to intertexuality as an explanation for these testimony parallels – that is, the compositional influence of one testimony upon another – but all of the evidence so far examined appears stacked against this. It is highly questionable, for example, whether the detail of Sonny Desvergers’ encounter could have had any influence of the Flatwoods Monster testimonies given less than a month later: particularly as such detail only emerged after subsequent questioning and would not have appeared in print in any substantive form by that point. Harry Sturdevant seems unlikely to have been influenced by – or even to have been familiar with – the detail of either case (or other cases), particularly in view of the fact that prior to his own experience he had thought the subject of UFOs to have been ‘all a joke.’ Stephen Michalak is somewhat different in that he admitted in his own account of his encounter that prior to his own UFO experience he had ‘read about them’ but it is worth noting that he immediately qualified this by asserting that ‘they meant to me about as much as the Loch Ness monster…[and]…I had never been seriously concerned about them.’ Much has been made in some quarters of the possible influence of a prior episode of Dr. Who on Robert Taylor’s own description of the object he sighted but it is of note that when it has appeared this argument has been applied to shape only and to none of the other features of his encounter – including the olfactory ones. In addition, and prior to his own experience, there is no evidence that he had ever shown any interest in the subject of UFOs.

In sum, a patterning has emerged within several key UFO cases which extends particularly to their olfactory features and which does not seem to be explicable in terms of intertextuality. After a brief interlude we will turn to examine what might account for this, with a view to penetrating to the very core of the UFO mystery itself.

Interim Report

This study has already covered a lot of ground: indeed, it has turned out to be somewhat longer and more wide-ranging than I had initially anticipated. It is hoped, however, that the conclusions already drawn will have gone some way to achieving its initial aims whilst justifying the methodology used. Before moving on to some final thoughts and reflections I now pause to offer a four-point ‘interim report’: one summarising where we have been on the journey so far and where we have yet to go.

1. The study began with an acknowledgement of some key recent contentions of Parapsychological researcher Bertrand Méheust to the effect that whatever else they may be, UFOs are elusive. More, that this elusiveness, far from being an obstacle to understanding, might better be seen as a possible focus of UFOlogical enquiry: one ‘twinned’, paradoxically, with ostentation. Combined, this paradox of ‘ostentation and dodge’ has led Méheust to a recognition that when dealing with UFOs we are dealing with ‘the intentional manifestation of a psyche.’ Whilst this psyche remains undetermined, what we do know suggests intelligence, sentience, or – as Méheust puts it – intentionality. In short, and for him: UFOs exhibit traits associated with thinking beings;

• One ‘way in’ to examining – and, perhaps, explaining – the nature of these beings might be via olfaction: more precisely, via an examination of the smells associated with UFOs as disclosed in UFO reports and testimonies. This has been a comparatively neglected area within UFOlogy; one, moreover, which is ripe for re-examination. However, the relative paucity of UFO case reports containing olfactory descriptors – as revealed, for example, in ongoing UFO databases – creates obvious problems for any researcher. One possible way around these is to backtrack: but only in order to advance. Thus, a possible way forward in our understanding of the UFO phenomenon might be to return to some old UFO cases but to examine them in a new way: or, at least, to explore them via an approach that prioritises a key feature hitherto underexamined; that of odour. Such a methodology may at first blush appear selective, but it is deliberately so;

• The few extant studies devoted in the main or in part to UFO smells have drawn attention to a number of distinctive odours that commonly occur in UFO reports. Foremost amongst these are those indicative of harshness, unpleasantness and combustion; that is, odours suggestive of (in no particular order) burning, heating, pungency, sharpness, foulness, sickness, the presence of something fearful, heated metal, ozone, burned electrical wiring and chemical effluents. This is by means exhaustive, as we have already had cause to note, but it is generally representative and may go some way to explaining the generally unpleasant nature of some of the encounter aftereffects reported by subjects such as dizziness, disorientation, incapacitation, burns, burning eyes, nausea and vomiting. Overall, one reported odour appears to stand out above all others: that of sulphur. This descriptor, as we have also seen, is neither invariant nor without problems but it is one which recurs, in various forms, within extant UFO odour studies and testimonies;

• This study’s deliberate and detailed backtrack in search of new lessons to be learned from old cases has revealed much whilst allowing confirmation of insights already arrived at elsewhere. It has also served to reinforce the contentions with which we began – see (1), above – whilst allowing us to go further. For example, it has revealed a strong suggestion that in some ‘classic’ UFO odour cases – such as those of Harry J. Sturdevant, Stephen Michalak and Robert Taylor – the subject was trustworthy and telling the truth, was physically assaulted by the phenomenon he encountered, and that the reported odour was, itself, part of the assault that each subject was forced to endure. The ‘assault’ motif is especially interesting and was reinforced by other cases examined in previous chapters, as were other olfactory elements contained within the various reports. Taken together, these features support the contention that UFOs exhibit sentience in acting with intent. Indeed, such cases say something about the ostentation with which otherwise elusive UFOs appear to operate: it is extreme, tipping over into actual violence according to a number of apparently trustworthy close encounter claims involving odours. In such cases, it is as if the appearance is a prelude to an actual attack; one including odour as a kind of ‘weapon.’ What might this say, then, about the nature of the assailant?

And with that final intriguing question the matter, currently, rests. How, then, might we go further still? As I set out at the beginning, one key objective of this already long study has been to suggest avenues for further study. In what follows, therefore, I will suggest one such: one which may allow researchers not simply to conclude that the UFOs are, indeed, the beings themselves but one which may also allow them to go further in order to deduce what ‘type’ or nature of beings they may turn out to be.

Part Three:

Chapter 4 – Something in the Air

Three Hypotheses

Within the last three years numerous major studies of UFOs have been announced, conducted and concluded: by NASA, US Congress, and the US military – amongst others – and some are still ongoing. Most newspapers and other media outlets in the UK and elsewhere have carried stories on these developments, suggesting that whatever they may or may not be, UFOs remain big news. However, if we were to step back in order to get a much broader and longer historical perspective, what might that disclose?

Over the last several decades three, broad, explanatory positions have emerged with regard to UFOs: the first two currently somewhat more popular than the third.

The first position is sometimes referred to as the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis: or ETH for short. This is the view that UFOs are interplanetary craft piloted by aliens: perhaps with a view to ‘mapping earth’, making contact with humankind, or some such activity. Given that reported sightings of UFOs have been occurring for decades it might be expected that cast iron evidence of such ‘nuts and bolts’ extraterrestrial visitations would have emerged by now: good photographic evidence, unambiguous attempts at contact, genuinely otherworldly ‘debris’ and the like. That such has not been the case – at least, not in a way as to put the matter beyond reasonable doubt – has damaged the ETH considerably and in so doing has helped give rise to a second view: one sometimes referred to as the Psychosocial Hypothesis (or PSH).

The PSH is the view that some underlying ‘UFO reality’ is ‘clothed’ by the popular cultural, social and linguistic mores, beliefs and paradigms of any given culture or society. Associated with researchers such as veteran UFOlogist Jacques Vallee, this position asserts that today’s ‘UFOnauts’ are comparable to the beings of folklore and mythology of previous times. Hence, for example, for Vallee the ‘fairy folk’ of yesteryear are today’s aliens.[95] In each case we are confronted with otherworldly beings who arrive from somewhere else and who behave in similar ways: playing ‘hide and seek’ with humans, for example, or presenting as odd and anomalous creatures and their ‘craft’; even, perhaps  ‘abducting’ unwitting victims in isolated places. What has changed – and this is crucial – is the way in which such beings, their modes of arrival and their activities have been identified in accordance with the belief-systems, interpretive ‘lenses’ and expectations of our own (scientific) age and culture. In fact, a more extreme (not to mention reductive) view of this position posits that the phenomena themselves are entirely cultural and linguistic creations: that currently popular paradigms do not actually ‘clothe’ any underlying reality – fairy, alien or otherwise – but actually create it.

Both of these positions have dominated UFO discourse and debate for decades but it is worth noting that a third position has existed alongside them: one which, whilst nowhere near as popular as the other two, has nonetheless had several notable adherents. This is known as the Ultraterrestrial Hypothesis (UTH) and it posits that UFOs might usefully be considered not as alien ships from other planets or galaxies but as entities akin to spiritual beings: perhaps even malevolent ones. Hence – and crucially – the UTH has it that UFOs are not objects ‘piloted’ by beings but are actually the beings themselves.

This third view is, broadly-speaking, the one with which this chapter will be concerned. What is crucial to note at the outset, however, is that I will be exploring just one of its many forms; for the UTH, perhaps like the phenomena it seeks to explain, has itself been something of a ‘shape-shifter.’ Hence, for example, I will not be examining the form it has taken in the writings of John Keel: the original founder and populariser of the term ‘Ultraterrestrial.’ Indeed, Keel’s own thesis is problematic in various ways, as a glance at his UfOlogical ‘classic’ Operation Trojan Horse will show. Instead, I want to present a tighter, more clearly defined form of the UTH: in this chapter to set out its history and some reasons for choosing a particular form of it and in the chapter that follows to tease out some of the startling implications to which accepting it may lead.

Spirits of the Air

Recently, the position this chapter will be examining has emerged in the writing of Spyridon Bailey, whose Orthodox Christian response to UFOs is given detailed treatment in his book The UFO Deception. For Bailey, whose own thinking on the subject is traceable back to fellow Orthodox theologian Seraphim Rose, UFOs are demons. This is the central tenet of The UFO Deception: a detailed studyin which the subject is explored historically, theologically and consistently in terms of Orthodox belief.

Key to the Bailey/Rose contention is that the UFO-demons are shapeshifters: a point important to this chapter and one to which we will need to return. Hence, Bailey writes, ‘the demons have adapted their appearance and behaviour to fit with contemporary man’s understanding of science and space.’[96] Note carefully where, for him, this contention takes us. It is not that our cultural-linguistic paradigms and expectations have clothed – even less, created – an underlying UFO ‘reality’ (however defined). It is, rather, that the underlying reality itself shifts its form in order to ‘create confusion and lead men away from God’ and hence into ‘forbidden practices.’ Bailey even scents a cover-up, writing that governments know full well what UFOs are, but ‘try to use this knowledge to favour their own agendas.’[97]

The upshot of all this, for Bailey, is that UFOlogy cannot approach what it purports to study in any kind of open, objective and/or empirical way. For its subject-matter is simply not this kind of reality. In this regard he quotes J. Allen Hynek, for many years the scientific consultant to various US Air Force official enquiries into UFOs, to the effect that the ‘objects’ are ‘a phenomenon that undoubtedly has physiological effects but also has the attributes of the psychic world.’[98] Hence, the same something that has ‘spiritual’ or even paranormal mind-influencing properties can also leave circular depressions on the ground and/or burn vegetation at the site of any given ‘landing.’

Viewing UFOs as shapeshifters, for Bailey, locates them in a context shared by angels and demons. For these too, he writes, can and do shapeshift, but for different reasons. Angels do it so that people won’t be overwhelmed and to facilitate communion with human beings – hence the archangel Raphael travelled with Tobias for weeks without anyone suspecting he wasn’t an actual man – but, crucially, demons do it to deceive: hence the title of Bailey’s study. But there’s more to it, even than this, for the ‘domain’ of demons is one they share with UFOs: the air.

As far as I am aware, the aerial location of much of the UFO phenomenon as indicative of its demonic nature is the exclusive provenance of Orthodox theology. At least, I have been unable to locate it anywhere else. To this end, however, Bailey quotes Orthodox theologian Ignatius Brianchaninov (‘The space between heaven and earth, the whole azure expanse of the air which is visible to us under the heavens, serves as the dwelling for the fallen angels who have been cast down from Heaven’[99]) and he later cites Saint Philotheos Kokkinos, fourteen century Patriarch of Constantinople, and Saint Theophan the Recluse as putting forward positions supportive of this. Overall, he writes, seeing UFOs as ‘manifestations of these aerial spirits’ helps us ‘make sense of much of their activity [which] is without meaning, confusing and often bizarre.’[100] And this is, of course, because they are primarily deceivers who ‘threaten, frighten, confuse and mislead.’ In the face of this, Bailey asserts, our task should be one of self-protection and the extent to which we might go to achieve this aim might even match that of Saint Simeon the New Theologian who went so far as to aver that ‘the struggler of prayer should quite rarely look into the sky out of fear of the evil spirits in the air.’[101]

I suspect that much – if not all – of this might well be new to members of ASSAP. It was certainly news to me. But even when we turn our attention to Christian denominations closer to home we find at least some similar positions espoused: although not given theological treatment of anything approaching the same level of sophistication.

The Devil’s Devices

The modern ‘era’ of the UFO phenomenon is widely acknowledged to have begun with a life-changing experience undergone by fire extinguisher salesman and amateur pilot Kenneth Arnold whose sighting of nine gleaming objects in the skies near Mount Rainier, Washington on June 24^th 1947 gave birth to the term ‘Flying Saucer”: an already extant term which had previously been used to denote the targets used in clay pigeon shooting. It would not be long before discussion and debate as to the objects’ place of origin began: with the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis quickly assuming centre stage.

But even back in the early days this was by no means the only hypothesis and other, competing, theories were not slow to emerge, with demons and the devil sometimes taking centre stage within them. As early as 1954, for example, British author Gordon Cove was suggesting that although the aliens were physically real, their home planets – either Mars or Venus – had been seized by the devil who was using them as a staging post for the invasion of Earth.[102] By the 1970s, with the Christian ‘charismatic renewal’ in full swing, the UFOs themselves were being touted as deceiving demonic entities set on misguiding and misleading humanity: a position not a million miles away from the Orthodox position already examined. Representative of this position was a study published in 1975 by John Weldon and Zola Levitt whose charismatic ‘Christian Perspective’ on the UFOs led the authors to conclude that ‘They are a manifestation of demon activity. They are here to misguide the multitudes and they are doing pretty well. They have judiciously utilized their powers through selected people to fascinate the masses, and they have widely promulgated their doctrines.’[103]

Such a view was not just confined to authors such as Weldon and Levitt. Indeed, in a detailed and entertaining chapter in their ‘social history of UFOlogy’, Flying Saucerers, contemporary UK UFOlogists David Clarke and Andy Roberts have documented just how widespread such a position had become across the channel in the UK by this point. Here they list various dramatis personae holding the same or similar views: from the Rev. Ronald Cartmel, rector of Aldridge parish church from 1945 – 1969 who installed a telescope in his back garden (the better to observe such demonic activity) through to the Rev Eric Ingoldsby who claimed to have dealt pastorally with a number of people who had actually become possessed by demons as a result of their interest in UFOs and UFOlogy. By May 1977 there was even a UK-based Christian UFO Research Association (CHRUFORA) which, inspired by a letter from Ingoldsby to The Church Times, actively opposed the then-popular national screening of the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind despite having a membership that never rose above forty.[104]

And lest it be suspected that the UFOs-as-demonic-presences position was the sole province of ‘fringe’ Christian groups it is worth noting that a number of ostensibly secular writers on UFOs during this period held similar views, including editors of the then-prestigious Flying Saucer Review Charles Bowen and Gordon Creighton. By the end of the 1970s they had been joined by Roger Stanway, the founding president of the British UFO Research Association and engineer Graham Knewstub, chairman of the British Flying Saucer Bureau, Britain’s oldest UFO group. Clarke and Roberts use the term ‘peculiar web’ to describe this loose affiliation of believers in UFOs as malign entities but any temptation to see it as a peculiarly ‘British thing’ needs to be tempered by a consideration of how widely the position has been – and continues to be – held. Indeed, even John Keel considered it potentially viable, writing at one point in Operation Trojan Horse of the Ultraterrestrials as ‘The demons, devils, and false angels [which] were recognised as liars and plunderers by early man.’ ‘These same imposters,’ he went on, ‘now appear as long-haired Venusians.’ The conclusion to which his research led him back in the 1970s still sounds stark: ‘We are biochemical robots helplessly controlled by forces that can scramble our brains, destroy our memories and use us in any way they see fit…They have been doing it to us forever.’[105]

Fire Spirits

Paranoid? Idiosyncratic? A product of the pressing into service of a distinctly Christian worldview, both Eastern and Western, in order to uncover the dark reality behind a deceivingly pseudo-technological phenomenon? We might take recourse to any one of these positions – or, conceivably, all three together – to explain how UFOs might have come to be seen as kinds of spirit-beings. But this would fail to account for a somewhat similar explanation found in a context very far removed from those we have so far considered: that of the Islamic view which lends itself to the intriguing possibility of viewing UFOs as jinn.

In his absorbing study of these curious beings, Legends of the Fire Spirits, Robert Lebling notes that the word ‘jinn’ is derived from an Arabic root word which means to ‘conceal’ or to ‘cover with darkness.’ As his analysis proceeds, we learn that Islamic theology has much to say about these ‘hiding’ entities which reveals various possible parallels between them and UFOs. One motif, in particular, stands out: whatever else they do, jinn are pre-eminently shapeshifters. Hence, Lebling quotes the thirteenth century Persian physician, astronomer and geographer Zakariya al-Qazwini who in his study of the universe defined jinn as ‘aerial animals, with transparent bodies, which can assume various forms.’ ‘[T]hese kinds of beings,’ al-Qazwini wrote, ‘are [usually] invisible to men but…they assume what forms they please, and when their form becomes condensed they are visible.’[106]

It is tempting to speculate at this point as to what, if any, essence these shapeshifters might have, and it is interesting to note that Islamic theology has a consistent answer to this. The clue is in the title of Lebling’s book, for, Islamically, jinn are said to be fire-spirits: beings whose ‘substance’ is fire. Here, the detail is somewhat complex, but the gist of the teaching is that Allah created a tripartite division of intelligent beings with varying essences: Angels (made of light), Jinn (made of fire), and Human Beings (made of clay). Lebling cites al-Qazwini in his assertion that some of the Jinn rebelled against God, having ‘transgressed and offended…and [thus] made wickedness to abound in the earth.’[107] Indeed, Islamically-speaking the Devil is said to have originally been a jinn himself whose refusal to bow down to Adam – a ‘lesser’ being because made from ‘mere’ clay – resulted in his banishment from the Garden of Eden. That he was also able to entice some other jinn to accept him as their king meant that Earth is now host to numerous ‘fallen’ jinn: a teaching analogous to the Biblical teaching that there is on Earth a cadre of rebellious angels who, like the Devil, are essentially fallen, supernatural rebels. We will have more to explore in this regard in the next chapter.

As interesting as all of this is, however, there is yet more. For Lebling quotes with approval the view of near-contemporary Islamic theologian Muhammad Assad (1900 – 1992) that the occasional crossing of paths of humans and jinn can ‘give rise to strange – because unexplainable – manifestations, which man’s primitive fantasy has subsequently interpreted as ghosts, demons and other such ‘supernatural’ apparitions.’[108] UFOs don’t make Assad’s list, here, but it is not difficult to see how they might fit.

Like the Biblical seraphim, jinn are sometimes portrayed as hybrid figures. According to Lebling, reliefs from Mesopotamia show a creature with a powerful human body, large wings and a beast’s head: in essence a cross between a bird of prey and a lizard. Might this be in some sense a reference to their essentially shape-shifting nature? Regardless: shapeshifting, invisibility, occasional manifestation, ‘fallenness’ and fire-essence appear consistent features of jinn within Islamic theology. The parallels between at least some of these features and the view of UFOs-as-beings which we have so far examined suggests that there is a consistent, cumulative argument for continuing to pursue the view of UFOs as in some sense creatures: although creatures very different to ourselves.

Shapeshifting UFOs

Whatever else the fallen beings of jinn and demonic lore might do, then, they shapeshift. This, in turn, raises an intriguing question: might UFOs do, essentially, the same thing?

The answer may come as something of a surprise. Because, it seems, they always have and in a recent study of reported UFO shapes throughout history UFO researcher Chris Aubeck has demonstrated this both convincingly and statistically. Hence, and based on his ‘Magonia Exchange’ database of 40,000 accounts of UFOs, he asserts that up to June 24^th 1947 – widely acknowledged as the ‘birth’ of modern-day UFOlogy because of the Kenneth Arnold sighting already mentioned – disc-shaped UFOs constituted less than 1% ‘of all reported sightings from antiquity [onwards]…’ Further, citing data from the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC), he shows that based on the NUFORC database of an impressive 145,500 sightings, disc shapes occur in ‘around 5.9%’ of cases: a percentage figure surpassed by a range of other claims of sightings including those of lights, circles, triangles, fireballs, ‘unknown’ and ‘other.’ Additionally, he cites the webpage of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), a body within the US office of the Secretary of Defence, showing the percentage of sightings of objects said to be disc-shaped standing at 2% and surpassed by ovals (3%), lights (16%), ‘other’ (7%), Ambiguous Sensor Contact (19%) and spheres (47%). Discs are, in fact, way down, in such ‘company’ as Tic Tacs (1%), polygons (1%), squares (1%), rectangles (1%), triangles (2%) and cylinders (2%).[109]

A number of conclusions follow: even from such a cursory statistical overview as Aubeck’s. Firstly, the wide popular perception of UFOs as being ‘typically’ disc- or saucer-shaped is simply not true. Instead, diversity of reported shape is the norm and appears to have been from antiquity up to the present day. Secondly, the oft-encountered argument that UFOs somehow conform, shape-wise, to societal and/or cultural expectation also fails. Given the dominance of the ‘Flying Saucer’ idea within popular discourse – UFOs were even called ‘Flying Saucers’ until ‘UFOs’ and other initialisms such as ‘UAPs’ began to supersede – we might expect saucer- or disc- shapes to have predominated within at least some of the eras contained within the databases cited by Aubeck. That they have not tends to reinforce the view that the UFO shape reported within such claimed sightings does not arise from cultural expectation. In fact, it is remarkable how many different shapes occur within the statistical analyses presented by Aubeck. It is certainly hard to conclude that any dominant or overriding ‘meme’ or set definition could have given rise to such variety. Might this all be down to hoaxing and/or misperception of ‘natural’ or man-made objects? Or might some ‘signal’ be lurking within this ‘noise’ that lends itself to the view that a shapeshifting reality is confronting – and in many cases confounding – us?

‘Transmorphing’ UFOs

Yet there is more, even, than this: for similarly lurking within various UFO databases is a small but nonetheless significant number of cases in which the objects appear to shapeshift as they are being observed. Hence, for example, in a study produced as a result of an analysis of approximately 1,200 taped interviews by the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) we find a number of remarkable accounts of UFOs shifting shape. Typical is an account of an object seen in San Diego California in 1978 in which an object which ‘mostly resembled a shiny brass balloon’ shrunk, expanded, began to move horizontally and then ‘transformed into two beautiful spheres of color with a connecting blinking bridge. The color seemed to be either red or pink, and the other color seemed to be blue…we just watched this and it was like watching a Disneyland fireworks parade.’ Telling, here, is the additional comment made at the time by one of the witnesses, a naval officer: ‘”It’s something…but I don’t know what it is.”’[110]

Compare this account with another from within the CUFOS database given by three security guards in respect of ‘six or seven very large disk-shaped objects flying in loose formation’ which flew silently for a while one night in Nah Tran, Vietnam in June 1968 in front of them and which abruptly ‘became one large disk – became one unit’ and yet another from Shelby, Ohio detailing an object seen on July 20 1952 at night which dropped down and hung over a field, presenting first as an egg-shape until it rotated, dipped down and re-emerged as a narrow crescent Moon before resuming its egg shape and ‘disappearing so fast that you had no feeling of movement. It was just gone.’[111] I could reproduce many such other examples: from the files of CUFOS and elsewhere. Adding to these the number of objects seen to change colour throughout any given sighting – a very, very large number both within the CUFOS database and elsewhere – and the already substantial total increases still further.

A particularly odd case appeared in the UK’s Flying Saucer Review in February 1978.  The incident occurred at 22.20 on May 22^nd 1977. The subject, a young man, had been visiting his girlfriend at Westley Heights, Essex, and was walking home. As he cut across a small green by a footpath that led, as a subway, under Laindon Link road he caught sight of a ‘large yellow sphere’ with a faint aura around its periphery moving soundlessly across the sky. Abruptly it stopped and moved upwards before shooting straight towards the witness who lost sight of it as he entered the 100 ft long subway. 

Emerging from the other side he saw the object again, within 200 ft of him, spinning on its vertical axis. This was followed by a sound all around ‘like the air brakes of a lorry’ and the object disappeared like ‘a light bulb being switched off.

A few seconds later the object reappeared. Now it was a vertical cigar shape with ‘a large deep red pulsating light at the top.’ The cigar was dark in colour but when the light was illuminated a silvery grey colour could be seen in its central area. It also had two distinct outlines at a mid-part of it which looked like windows. Overall the witness judged the size of the cigar to have been smaller than that of the sphere.  At the end of the episode the UFO simply moved off and the witness walked the final four minutes or so home.

The aftereffects of this encounter are of particular note. His mother later recalled that he was ‘physically shocked and frightened and…kept mumbling “It changed, it changed.”’ He was later seen by a doctor who prescribed a sedative.[112]

Why Did the ‘Car Stops’ Stop?

Shapeshifting may take many forms. For example, it need not necessarily be restricted to how UFOs look: as in, actual the shape(s) they assume. It might also be extended to what they do: as in, the ways they act – in some instances in direct relation to witnesses and their circumstances. Hence, it may be instructive at this point go beyond ‘mere’ UFO appearance in order to consider UFO action. Once again, here, the literature is vast and I will therefore confine the analysis to just one intriguing sub-set of UFO cases: those involving Vehicle Interference (VI).

The first major attempt made to catalogue such cases was undertaken by UFO researcher Mark Rodeghier. Published in October 1981, his document contained 441 short summary accounts of alleged UFO interference with vehicle ignition systems and other related functions such as the operation of car radios and headlights: all but three occurring between 1952 and 1980. The accounts cited by Rodeghier include numerous claims that cars were stopped altogether when in the proximity of UFOs and indeed such cases were dubbed ‘Car Stop’ cases for a number of years: a designation that was replaced in later years by ‘Vehicle Interference’ (VI) because it failed to include the fact that a wide range of other vehicles have also purportedly been affected by UFOs including tractors, motorcycles and vans.[113] Some years later, in September 2011, fellow researcher Herbert S. Taylor produced a ‘follow-up’ report citing a further 190 VI cases from the same period that Rodeghier had missed and which took the total recorded between 1952 and 1980 to well over 600.[114] A sample testimony-extract from Taylor’s follow-up piece provides a good example of such a VI case:

‘The strange flying vehicle approached us slowly from a clearing to our right, at an altitude of about 10 metres. At the same moment my engine started to cut out and vibrate. About 100 meters further on, the car stopped completely and the headlights died out. The car radio also went dead…The flying object passed the roadway ahead of us (distance now about 200 meters). It was still at some 10 meters altitude, but then seemed to land to the left of the road, some 75 meters from the roadway.’[115]

After winding down the side windows the occupants – the driver, his wife, and two children – heard ‘a sound like that which comes from a swarm of bees’ and through binoculars the object was seen to be ‘an egg-shaped structure some 10 meters long and a few meters high.’ Interestingly the UFO had by now changed colour from green to white. At this point the driver attempted to start the car but to no avail. He left the vehicle and the object then proceeded to take off with ‘a deafening roar’ and ‘a rocking motion.’ The green colour resumed and the object flew off slowly before ‘it accelerated to an unbelievable speed and disappeared in a thousandth of a second.’ The driver ends his testimony as follows: ‘Shaken by what we had seen, we entered the car and we immediately noted the music playing from the radio. The radio worked and, as I turned the starter key, our car started and there was nothing wrong with the headlights.’[116]

Readers familiar with the already cited film Close Encounters of the Third Kind will recall a scene with many very similar features occurring when the UFO hovered for several minutes over electric linesman Roy Neary’s car. From this point, at least – the film was first screened in 1977 –  the seeming propensity for such objects to interfere with car ignition systems and other electronics had become (or would shortly become) embedded in public consciousness by being included within such popular media.

It is what followed shortly after this date that is, however, relevant here. For in the years following the completion of the 1952 – 1980 VI research the incidence of cases in which UFOs allegedly interfered with vehicles in various ways fell precipitously. Rodeghier himself would later write: ‘It is not an exaggeration to state that almost the moment I completed the research for my study, VI reports, as with all [UFO] close encounters, began to drop dramatically all over the globe, not just in the United States.’[117] By his own admission he noticed this change as it was occurring because the Center for UFO Studies, of which he was a member, was getting this information: or the lack thereof. Based on various sources he would later assert that ‘a reasonable estimate is that the number of VI cases…dropped by about 85% in the period since 1980.’ (Emphasis mine). Furthermore, he would note that other aspects of UFO experiences also declined by a similar proportion at the same time, including claimed encounters with aliens in the presence of allegedly ‘landed’ UFOs.

It is worth noting here that other researchers’ claims have tended to support Rodeghier’s observation. Herbert S. Taylor himself in his follow-up paper notes the same sharp decline, asserting that his own additional research of cases in the post-1980 period up to 2011 produced ‘several dozen’ cases: nothing like the more than 630 cases which his and Rodeghier’s research had uncovered in the almost three decades up to 1980 within a more-or-less directly comparable time span.

What Changed?

What might account for the remarkable decline in VI and other UFO ‘close encounter’ cases in the post-1980 era? As regards the distinct subset of vehicle interference accounts, we might posit changes in the designed and implemented electrical systems of the vehicles themselves: although it is worth noting that no credible research has yet emerged to this effect.

Might the decline be due, therefore, to another factor sometimes cited: the more ready availability of digital cameras and camera phones in the contemporary and near-contemporary eras? In view of the current widespread means of capturing just about any event for posterity – including claimed UFO ‘close encounters’ – the fact that the number of claimed VI and other close-up UFO events has fallen off so dramatically might simply be taken as evidence that they were ever and always hoaxed. For in the era of the ubiquitous camera, the question can easily be posed to the claimant: if the UFO was so close, why didn’t you take a picture? A disincentive to would-be hoaxers, surely: and one which might explain the dramatic drop-off in cases.

It is the dating that confounds such a sceptical objection. The first fully digital camera to be commercially released was the FUJIX DS-X, released by Fujifilm in 1989. The first commercial phone with a colour camera was the Kyocera Visual Phone VP-210 released in Japan in May 1999. And the first iPhone was released in the US on June 29^th 2007. As we have already had cause to note, these ‘milestone’ photographic events significantly post-date the precipitous decline of VI and other UFO ‘close encounter’ cases by years: decades even. Indeed, in view of this simple fact it seems that any link between the ubiquity of personal cameras and the demise of claimed UFO ‘close encounters’ – including VI cases – cannot be established. The question remains, therefore: what is responsible for the radical drop-off in the number of such claimed events?

One possible answer, of course, is that the UFOs themselves have changed their behaviour. That their activity has shapeshifted for reasons unknown to us. Perhaps they saw the ubiquity of digital photography – in all its currently manifold guises – coming from a long way off and prepared accordingly (and well in advance). Or perhaps they are ‘playing’ with us in the same way that jinn and demons have long been said to do. The reader may have concluded by now that the last thing UFOlogy needs is another initialism. But at this point it is tempting to add one more: Something Is Messing With Us. Or SIMWU, for short.

Conclusions

This chapter has sought to provide reinforcement to the view, first encountered in Chapter One via the recent work of Bertrand Méheust, that UFOs, far from being ‘spacecraft’ or psychosocial ‘projections’ are actually the beings themselves. It has sought to do this by concentrating on just one area – that of shapeshifting – in its bid to show that these beings are consistent in their behaviour with the jinn, demons, and quasi-demonic entities encountered within a variety of religions and religious denominations.

In closing this chapter, I would like to add one final thought. For if it is the case that the UFOs themselves are shapeshifting then we are presented with a neat reversal of the psychosocial hypothesis as set out towards the beginning of this chapter. For it would mean that the underlying phenomenon is not diversely ‘clothed’ in accordance with the changing cultural concepts and expectations of the witnesses but rather that the phenomenon itself changes its form: for reasons unknown. To mess with us, perhaps. As, indeed, demons may be expected to do. It is now time to examine this ‘demonic UFO’ position more closely.

Chapter 5 – Worlds in Collision: Sulphur and Saucers

A Chequered History

With only a handful of exceptions, and the previous chapter’s overview notwithstanding, theological contributions to Ufology have been – and remain – somewhat thin on the ground: even some eighty years after the coining of the term ‘Flying Saucer’ itself.  Whilst as already noted there have been a small handful of genuinely-informed theological contributions the vast majority have been, somewhat disappointingly, of the ‘Flying Saucers in the Bible’ and ‘Alien astronauts’ types. When the focus is narrowed to the point where informed theological enquiry is focussed on elements within UfOlogy such as the nature of ‘the alien other’ within UFO reports, contributions fall further still. In this final chapter, I want to attempt to compensate for this shortfall: or, at least, to make a start at correcting it.

This study began by singling out and examining a related cluster of issues from a recent paper by Bertrand Méheust: particularly those centring on his contention that the paradox of ostentation and dodge within UFO reports is indicative of an intelligence at work. Examining the plausibility of the view that UFOs might actually be the shape-shifting beings-themselves – and not their craft or ‘vehicles’ – has led to the consideration of the nature of those beings: one which earlier chapters also attempted to discern via a detailed examination of certain, chiefly olfactory, elements within UFO close encounter reports. Where, then, might we go from here? What final conclusions can be drawn? And where might future studies go to further the direction taken by this one? These are the questions with which this final, concluding, chapter will be concerned.

Sulphur and Sodom

Another way of phrasing these and related final questions might be: what are we missing? And how might this study’s olfaction focus allow us to find it? Could theology itself provide us with some vital clues? The key, even? One key conclusion already drawn has been that reported UFO smells within close encounter reports are those associated with combustion. As Joshua Cutchin has noted: ‘The consistency of the combustion motif [within UFO reports] is striking: sulfur is odorless until burnt, ozone smells like burnt electrical wiring, Bakelite smells when heated.’[118] We have noted the consistency of the sulphur odour itself within many reports and recall that whilst sulphur itself doesn’t smell, burned sulphur does. What might theology have to say about this?

The first task of the theologian must be to stake out his ground. What sub-discipline within theology is he to proceed from? The theological area I will be pre-eminently concerned with here will be biblical theology, one already touched on in the previous chapter. At this point, though, it will be narrowed down; ‘tied’ to sulphur/combustion and related motifs. Doing this, one thing becomes immediately apparent: sulphur itself – including burning sulphur – is theologically ambiguous, at least biblically. When, for example, God brings down destruction on Sodom and Gomorrah we read in Genesis 19: 24 that He ‘rained on Sodom and Gomorrah sulphur and fire from…out of heaven.’[119] This may come as a shock, particularly to those who believe that sulphur is usually associated with demonology and the presence of evil and, to be sure, sulphur smells have been reported in some poltergeist cases and in connection with some Ouija sessions. But in the case of Sodom and Gomorrah it would appear that God uses it to cleanse a place from evil: or, more precisely, to overthrow an evil place or places. ‘Sulphur from heaven’ may cut across any number of preconceptions but it appears to be biblically accurate.

If we fast forward to the end of the Bible to the Book of Revelation we find it again, in a passage that appears to indicate that the apostle John saw, in a vision on the isle of Patmos, an end-of-time scenario in which ‘the devil…was thrown into the lake of fire and sulphur where the beast and the false prophet were, and they will be tormented day and night for ever and ever.’ (Revelation 20: 10). It is not often commented upon that the text separates out fire and sulphur here – typically we hear references to the ‘lake of fire’ only – but John makes a point of mentioning each specifically. Why sulphur? Are the devil and his associates being somehow ‘cleansed’ by being thrown into the lake? The passage suggests otherwise: it is for their torment. A form of punishment, then. But once again it proceeds from God: as was the case with Sodom and Gomorrah.

An examination of the koine Greek in which the New Testament – including Revelation – was written reveals another interesting thing. The word for God, anglicized, is theos, whilst the word for sulphur is theon. What might underlie this remarkable linguistic similarity? Various possibilities exist, including the view that its use in ancient rituals marked out sulphur as a kind of ‘sacred element.’ But clearly sulphur is slippery; tricky. Little wonder, then, that Cutchin has been led to remark that ‘[I]t seems that, from a folkloric perspective, sulfur is possessed of an ever-changing character, shifting like a chemical trickster, echoing the liminal, contradictory phenomena reported by so many paranormal witnesses.’[120] Indeed. Perhaps ‘contextual’ might be a better way to describe sulphur’s presence and role in the bible. Is it a good or a bad thing? Does it cleanse or torment? The answer seems to be: it depends. But there’s more to it even than this, and as so often within theology, there’s a ‘twist.’

Fallen Angels

The twist emerges when we pause to consider who, Biblically, the devil actually was (and is). As ever within biblical studies there are various different suggested identifications and no overall unanimity but one popular suggestion within Christian theology and elsewhere has been that he is a fallen angel. Or, more precisely, a fallen seraph.

Care is needed here. We have one word, ‘angel’, which is often used to describe a range of Biblical, otherworldly, beings. But, as ever, the truth is more complex; as are the Biblical texts, which give us a wide range of terms for otherworldly beings both good and bad: cherubim, seraphim (the plural of seraph), messengers, unclean spirits, watchers, demons, and so on. What we usually refer to as ‘angels’ are the first three of these – cherubim, seraphim and messengers – but it is notable that deeper exegetical digging reveals that in none of these cases does the being look like a baby, play a harp, or have wings. Indeed, messenger angels – the Hebrew plural is malakim – can take a range of forms, from terrifying night-flyers (sometimes en masse, as with an army) to beings virtually indistinguishable from humans. If ‘fallen angel’, then, can mean one of several things, what kind of fallen angel is the devil?

In a wide-ranging study, The Invisible Dimension, theologian Matthew Arnold has recently suggested that the devil is a fallen seraph. The argument is a complex one and the view contested but in essence Arnold draws on a range of Biblical texts to support his position. Hence, he writes: ‘scripture references to the ancient serpent, the devil, Satan, and the great dragon all allude to the seraph who fell from heaven.’ The Old Testament’s Book of Ezekiel chapter 28 is key to this position with its reference to the King of Tyre who is compared to a divine rebel evicted from his heavenly abode and, as it were ‘thrown down.’ Arnold actually asserts that God used a cherub to evict this rebel seraph, producing detailed biblical exegesis to support this position. We do not need to follow this but, instead, to note two crucial points carefully before proceeding.

Firstly, a concentration on some key biblical texts reveals that when the devil was evicted it was not as a solitary being but in common with other rebels. In fact, Christian tradition has it that a third of the angels, essentially, fell when Satan did. Where, then, did they go and what are they doing? Arnold writes in The Invisible Dimension that ‘The scripture suggests that Earth is the current location of these spirit-beings, but their occupation and whereabouts are never specified.’[121] This uncertainty notwithstanding, it is clearly some sort of unholy angelic alliance and, moreover, one which has a clear scriptural basis, as in Matthew 25: 41 where in speaking of the final judgement Jesus gives a vivid description of a final ‘sifting’ where the ‘blessed’ are separated from the ‘cursed’, with the latter being told ‘”Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me”’ (Emphasis mine). We recall, too, our consideration, above, where John saw that the devil had company in the lake of fire and sulphur.

Sulphur and Seraphim

But, of course, the bible passages, whatever their differences, all agree that this is a future state of things: one at the end of the present age. As things are, therefore, Arnold’s questions still stand: where are these spirit-beings now? And what are they doing?

This, in turn, leads us into a second crucial point which can be presented as a related set of questions: if the devil and his angels are fallen seraphim, what exactly are seraphim? And if they are somewhere, somehow, on earth, how might we recognise them? What might their chief characteristics be?

Foremost amongst angelology scholars in recent years has been the late Michael Heiser and so it is no surprise that his work has extended to encompass the realm of fallen angels too. However, his stand-alone treatment of seraphim has been extensive and is worthy of detailed consideration as we proceed. Like Arnold, above, Heiser has drawn detailed attention to the fact that ‘angel’ has historically been somewhat misused as a catch-all descriptor for what is, in reality, a range of different ‘types’ of otherworldy beings. His overview of seraphim provides a good example of just such an oversimplification. Central to it is his treatment of the etymology of seraphim which itself is derived from the Hebrew word sarap meaning ‘to burn’ or, more precisely, ‘to burn fiercely.’ Hence, he suggests, a good translation of seraphim might be, as a plural, ‘fiery ones.’ Like cherubim, their function, biblically, is that of guardians: as in ‘guardianship of the presence of God.’ They are, he asserts, hybrid figures too, often portrayed in theriomorphic images: albeit with an underlying ontology very different to that of mere physical creatures.[122] Perhaps this portrayal is indicative of an ability on their part to shape-shift. Heiser does not assert this and I simply offer it, here, as a possible way of interpreting their traditional portrayal and as an extension of what was examined in the previous chapter. We will need to return to this.

The most sustained Biblical description of seraphim is found in the Old Testament book of Isaiah the prophet. Here, in chapter six, we are given a vivid depiction of an episode involving the prophet within the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem ‘[i]n the year that King Uzziah died.’ The dating is not as important for us here as the location, for the Temple was traditionally seen as the dwelling place of God. Hence here we have his guardians, the seraphim, but it is Isaiah’s description of their appearance and activity that is particularly significant. Firstly, they fly. Hence, having told us that God was ‘high and lifted up’, we read that his guardians were actually, somehow, ‘above Him’; more, that ‘Each had six wings: with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew.’ Secondly: the combustion motif is everywhere apparent, as revealed in the deliberate association throughout the passage of the seraphim with fire. After calling out to each other in praise of God, Isaiah tells us that ‘the house was filled with smoke.’ Isaiah’s response to the unfolding scene is one of terror, for, as he exclaims, ‘”I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips…”’[123]

What is to be done with such a man; particularly one who is about to be called to proclaim God’s message to such a people? The fiery seraphim know. Hence we read: ‘Then one of the seraphim flew to me, having in his hand a burning coal that he had taken with tongs from the altar. And he touched my mouth and said: “Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, and your sin is atoned for.’’[124] The action and the imagery are subtle but unmistakable: the fire-being can, of course, hold a burning something that would otherwise be too hot to touch and he carries it to Isaiah where he proceeds to cleanse him with it, opening the way for his ‘call’ as a prophet in the very next verses. Of course, these beings and their activities are those of unfallen entities doing what they should be doing in the very place they should be doing it. But the association of them with fire is direct and unmistakable; as is their mode of travel.

To be sure, both etymology and activity are not without further complexities. Heiser notes that sarap can also be translated as ‘snake’ and this fact goes some way to explaining why in some biblical art the beings in the Temple with Isaiah have been portrayed as theriomorphic: that is, as burning, flying, snake creatures.[125] Their origin, historically and textually, is also complex and contested, with some – Heiser included – tracing it back to Egyptian throne-room imagery: although even here the seraphim’s guardianship role is uncontested. But this need not detain us. Instead, it will be enough simply to note that there is a strong biblical tradition of a cadre of fallen, flying fire-beings, led by the devil, who are currently on earth. No longer protectors of divine spaces, having been ejected from such elevated roles, they nonetheless continue to exist: presumably retaining their fallen nature as well as their fire-essences and abilities to fly. Other abilities, too, perhaps, including the angelic ability to shapeshift.

Jinn and Seraphim

We recall Arnold’s contention, quoted above, that these beings’ current occupations and whereabouts are never specified within Christian tradition. However, in this regard it is interesting to note the words of God to the devil as spoken by the prophet Ezekiel, a historical contemporary of Isaiah: ‘”I placed you; you were on the holy mountain of God; in the midst of the stones of fire you walked. You were blameless in your ways from the day you were created, till righteousness was found in you. In the abundance of your trade you were filled with violence in your midst, and you sinned; so I cast you as a profane thing from the mountain of God…”’ (Ezekiel 28: 14 – 16). Arnold makes a strong case, as we have seen, for viewing this ‘cast out’ being as a seraph – and not, as in some translations, as a cherub – but it is the description of the violence of the being that I want to draw attention to here. The Hebrew here, ‘chamas’, can be associated with violation, and as we have seen in earlier chapters violence and violation have been very much parts of reported UFO encounters of the kind we have been examining: those involving combustion, sulphur smells and sudden, unexpected, assaults.

We can draw one additional conclusion from the above discussion: the ‘cast out’, flying, fiery, fallen seraphim sound remarkably like the jinn of Islamic theology and folklore. All the way, in fact, to the contention that they fell because they followed the devil – iblis – as their leader. We recall, also, the contention that jinn are inherently shape-shifting beings: something else which this chapter has hinted at as a possible ability of seraphim too. Whilst we cannot straightforwardly conclude from this either that jinn are simply fallen seraphim or that fallen seraphim are simply jinn we might conclude one of two things. Either (a) that they belong to a similar set of theological traditions – with, say, the later Islamic jinn traditions being derived from the earlier biblical ones – or (b) that both jinn and fallen seraphim traditions can be traced back to actual knowledge of (including experiences of) UFOs of the kind that we have been considering in this study, complete with their abilities to shapeshift, their violent tendencies and their extremely unpleasant odours redolent of combustion: all aspects suggestive of fallen fire-beings. We recall, too, the contentions of Eastern Orthodox Christianity considered in the previous chapter that UFOs are essentially demonic beings: entities sharing many of those self-same characteristics as jinn and, as this chapter has shown, fallen seraphim too.

A Still Demon-Haunted World?

Do we still live in a ‘demon-haunted world’, to borrow a phrase from the late, great Carl Sagan? This study, I submit, has provided significant evidence that we do. Evidence, moreover, from somewhat unusual sources: the testimonies of witnesses who have reported close-up encounters with UFOs including particular, distinctive, and at times overpowering odours. Throughout, I have sought to show that a concentration on ‘old accounts’ from fresh perspectives can yield new leads and possibilities. Both odour and theology have been offered here as two of them and whilst I recognise that some of the conclusions I have drawn are shared in common with (a few) others I have sought to place them on firmer footings throughout: both olfactory and theological. This sounds like an unusual dual combination but Part Three of this study has hopefully shown, perhaps surprisingly, that this is not necessarily the case. Besides, the new-old paradigm I am suggesting is itself something of a ‘collision of worlds’ at various points: worlds both theological and scientific, mythological and UfOlogical, ancient and modern. At the very least, I hope I have shown that such collisions provide additional justification for the view that, in UfOlogy, sometimes going back is indeed the way to advance.

Gaps Still To Be Filled

As the end of this study approaches, I freely confess of what I have not done; deliberately leaving such ‘gaps’ for others. Much might be added, for example, by widening the number of Fortean contexts within which particular odours have been reported: those involving sasquatch and other related encounters, for instance. Equally, a concentration on the actual chemical processes involved by which heating produces sulphur compounds in specifically UFO-encounter contexts might extend the findings of my own study and those of Rúllan and others as considered in previous chapters. I have not done this simply because such a concentration stands well outside my areas of academic expertise. Others, though, will have no such limitations. We have also yet to discover the reasons behind the paucity of close-up UFO reports, including those containing claims to have smelled distinctive odours, in the years since the early-eighties. Much could be discovered by concentrating on this ‘testimony gap’: including the possibility that we are, indeed, dealing with fallen beings whose objectives might include the messing with our minds. This might also go some way to unpacking the ‘ostentation and elusiveness’ paradox which Méheust has in recent years dangled before us in his own UFO writing. For there is, of course, another ‘collision’ of sorts here: one with wide-ranging and potentially massive implications for the study and understanding of what UFOs, essentially, are.

An Intriguing Encounter

Approximately half-way through her second book, Encounters, itself partly about UFOs, professor of religious studies D.W Pasulka writes of a visit she took to UFOlogist Jacques Vallee’s apartment. In her book, Pasulka takes a very different and more eclectic approach to UFOs than the one I have taken here. Olfactory elements within UFO close encounters do not concern her and she doesn’t say when she paid Vallee a visit but I consider it likely that it was fairly recently: perhaps between the publication of her first part-UFO book American Cosmic and Encounters.

What I would like to draw attention to as I close is what she writes in that second book about being shown, by Vallee, around his extensive manuscript and book collection. The host-conducted bibliographic tour clearly impressed her – ‘My work has taken me to some of the most famous and wonderful libraries and archives in the world and I recognised the special quality and nature of the books before me’[126] – but she draws especial attention to what wasn’t on display just as much as what was. Clearly expecting to see UFO books – ‘Where are the books about UFOs? I thought, as I turned my head discreetly and looked around’[127] – she is greeted, instead, by the sight of wall upon wall of books about angels, fallen angels and a coffee table book by an order of Carmelite nuns called A History of Satan.

Later, enjoying lunch with friends, Pasulka was clearly still puzzled by what she didn’t see. ‘We all thought I was there to discuss the topic of UFOs,’ she writes, ‘Instead, I was encouraged to read up on angels and fallen angels.’[128]

This relatively newly-encountered anecdote has remained with me, for obvious reasons. Perhaps Vallee, a UFOlogist of exceptionally long-standing and the founding father of psychosocial UFOlogy, thought he was showing his guest something more interesting than his collection of UFO books. After all, what UFOlogist, budding or actual, doesn’t have a collection like that? Perhaps it was a tease. Or perhaps it was something more: for it is clear from Pasulka’s book and elsewhere that Vallee is no stranger to the esoteric and the spiritual.

And perhaps esoteric and spiritual keys are, after all is said and done, the real ones that are needed to unlock the UFO mystery. More specifically, perhaps angelology provides what we need. More specifically still, perhaps that sub-discipline within angelology that deals with fallen angels is the only one that can unlock and hence explain the small number of UFO cases including olfactory elements which are not explicable in terms of hoaxes and misidentifications of natural phenomena: which, of course, upwards of 90% of all UFO cases are. If this ‘branch’ of angelology truly is the one that unlocks the mystery, the conclusions are stark. For it would suggest that fallen angels, or ‘demons’ as they are commonly called, do more than merely haunt our world but that they stalk it, and us within it, still. They may indeed be elusive but ostentation nonetheless remains part of their nature. It’s as if they can’t help themselves.

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Aubeck, Chris. Saucers: Tracing the Origin of Disc-Shaped UFOs. Amazon: 2023.

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——. The UFO Encyclopaedia. 3^rd edition. Michigan: Omnigraphics, 2018.

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————-. The Cosmic Question. St Albans: Granada, 1978.

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Mark Fox is at www.markfox.co.uk

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[1] Méheust, The Mystery of Elusiveness, 23

[2] Ibid.

[3] ibid

[4] https://cufos.org/PDFs/pdfs/UFOsandIntelligence.pdf

[5] ufoconjectures.blogspot.com/2022/11/missing-ufo-forest-for-trees.html

[6] Ruppelt, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, 178-9

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Barker, They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers, 72.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ruppelt, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, 185.

[12] Clark, The UFO Encyclopaedia, 1548

[13] Karl Pflock, ‘The Best Hoax in UFO History?’ www.nicap.org

[14] Clark, The UFO Encyclopaedia, 1548

[15] Sanderson, Uninvited Visitors, 86.

[16] Ibid., 86-7

[17] Barker, They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers, 16.

[18] Ibid, 28.

[19] Sanderson, Uninvited Visitors, 44

[20] Ibid 48 – 50

[21] Keel, The Eighth Tower, 121-2

[22] Although not so kind to Barker’s reporting of events. On this, see, for example, Gabriel McKee’s  The Saucerian (London: MIT Press, 2025), p29, in which – amongst other things – his own account of the detail of his questioning is called into doubt.

[23] McCampbell, UFOlogy, xi

[24] Ibid., 38ff

[25] Bullard, UFO Abductions: The Measure of a Mystery, 69

[26] Ibid., 205ff

[27] Cutchin, The Brimstone Deceit, 159

[28] Ibid., 180

[29] Ibid., 141-2

[30] Rullán, Odors From UFOs , 8-9

[31] Ibid.,8

[32] Ibid.,11

[33] Ibid.,13

[34] Ibid.,17-18

[35] Ibid.,19

[36] Ibid.,29

[37] Ibid.,29-33

[38] Ibid.,33-4

[39] Ibid.,34-5

[40] Ibid.,37

[41] https://thesaucersthattimeforgot.blogspot.com

[42] Keel, The Cosmic Question, 110.

[43] There is not even a file on his encounter in Project Blue Book. Just a single page stating ‘No Case, Information Only’, some typed lines and a clip from a Flying Saucer newsletter. On this, see the saucersthattimeforgot.blogspot.com

[44] Slaboda, ‘He Collected on a Flying Saucer’

[45] NICAP, Strange Effects From UFOs, 9

[46] NICAP report 6/2/58

[47] Ibid.

[48] ibid

[49] New York World Telegram and Sun, 23/4/58

[50] ibid

[51] Ibid.

[52] Canberra Times, April 23^rd, 1958

[53] Rutkowski and Dittman, The Canadian UFO Report, 290

[54] Michalak, My Encounter With The UFO, 15 – 17

[55] Ibid., 19-20

[56] Ibid., 20

[57] Ibid., 22-4

[58] Ibid., 24

[59] Royal Canadian Mounted Police Report, 16/6/67, para 4.

[60] Michalak, My Encounter With The UFO, 23

[61] Ibid., 26

[62] Michalak and Rutkowski, When They Appeared, 48

[63] Ibid., 238 – 9

[64] Royal Canadian Mounted Police Report, 26/5/67, para 1

[65] Ibid., para 4

[66] Ibid., para 7

[67] Robinson, The Dechmont Woods UFO Incident, 19

[68] Campbell, The UFO Mystery Solved, 145

[69] Robinson, The Dechmont Woods UFO Incident, 20

[70] Ibid., 56

[71] Ibid., 32

[72] Ibid., 68

[73] Ibid., 21

[74] Ibid., 60

[75] Ibid

[76] Ibid., 14

[77] Ibid., 61

[78] saucersthattimeforgot.blogspot.com

[79] Campbell, The UFO Mystery Solved, 149

[80] Royal Canadian Mounted Police Report, 16/6/67, para 4

[81] Ibid.

[82] Michalak, My Encounter With The UFO, 23

[83] https://threedollarkit.weebly.com and see Fortean Times, FT427, p 26

[84] Robinson, The Dechmont Woods Incident, 69

[85] Ibid., 69

[86] Ibid., 63

[87] Ibid., 76

[88] Michalak, My Encounter With The UFO, 15

[89] Ibid., 35

[90] Ibid.,17

[91] Compare, for example,  his description given in My Encounter With The UFO (‘sulphur’) with the description given to RCMP Corporal J. Davis on 24/5/67 (‘that smell of the motors…burning like a wire or electric motor when it burns…’).

[92] Michalak and Rutkowski, When They Appeared, 48

[93] Royal Canadian Police Report, 26/5/67 para 7

[94] ‘Encounter at Livingston BUFORA Research Paper No. 1’ section 11

[95] Vallee, Dimensions, 75 – 109

[96] Bailey, The UFO Deception, 258

[97] Ibid., 277

[98] Ibid., 260

[99] Ibid., 264

[100] Ibid., 270

[101] Ibid., 270-1

[102] Clarke and Roberts, Flying Saucerers, 128

[103] Weldon and Levitt, UFOs, 137

[104] Clarke and Roberts, op cit., 124 – 38

[105] Clark, Hidden Realms, 256

[106] Lebling, Legends of the Fire Spirits, 3

[107] Ibid., 7

[108] Ibid., 4

[109] Aubeck, Saucers, 7 – 8

[110] Swords, Grassroots UFOs, 180-1

[111] Ibid., 181-2

[112] Collins, ‘Shape-changing UFO at Laindon’

[113] Rodeghier, ‘UFO Reports Involving Vehicle Interference’

[114] Taylor, ‘An Update on Vehicle Interference Reports, Part 2’

[115] Ibid., 16

[116] Ibid., 17

[117] Rodeghier, ‘Commentary on VI Reports’, 21

[118] Cutchin, The Brimstone Deceit, 159

[119] All Biblical quotations are from the English Standard Version unless otherwise stated.

[120] Cutchin, The Brimstone Deceit, 32

[121] Arnold, The Invisible Dimension, 69

[122] Heiser, Angels, 25 – 7

[123] Isaiah 6: 1 – 5

[124] Isaiah 6: 7

[125] Heiser, Angels, 26

[126] Pasulka, Encounters, 127

[127] Ibid., 129

[128] Ibid., 129 – 30

I would like to thank the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena for kindly part-funding this project and for support and encouragement: particularly in the planning stages.