Alien Encounters

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After UFO sightings, witnesses are often visited by “men-in-black,” who are much more bizarre than any characters Hollywood has created. Take the 1997 case of William Shearer, for example, who was visited by the MIB (as they are called in UFO shorthand) just four days after having an encounter with a UFO.

His wife and daughter were out shopping and he had the house to himself. He’d tried to nap after work, but couldn’t sleep and was on the way to the kitchen to get something to drink when he thought he heard a rap on the front door. As he approached to investigate, he saw a silhouetted figure through the glass and, when he opened the door, he was greeted dourly by a man who was tall enough to play NBA basketball.

“Can I speak to you please?” the man asked in a deep voice that was halting and computer-like, a voice that seemed to come from his chest instead of his mouth.

There was another man standing next to his wife’s car, who seemed to be playing lookout, keeping an eye on the road, watching for signs of trouble. Both were similarly dressed, in what UFO experts have come to recognize as the men-in-black uniform. The man at the door wore a dark gray suit, full length coat, brilliant white shirt and red tie. In his hand he held a brimmed hat, probably black since most reports have MIB wearing black hats with the brim pulled down to shadow their features. He held his head low, so that Shearer couldn’t see his face.

He assumed they were Jehovah’s Witnesses and said, “No. I’m not dressed.”

The man was persistent and asked again. Shearer told him, “Come back later.”

When the tall visitor jerked his head up in response, Shearer could see his face for the first time. He looked sickly, deadly pale, and his lips were artificially red, as if colored with lipstick. For a third time, he asked to enter the house and when he was again turned down, he stiffly twisted around to catch his partner’s gaze. Shearer noted that it was “almost as if the two men were talking to each other, but I couldn't hear them.”

Eventually, he turned back to Shearer and said, “Okay, but we’ll be back later.”

They left in a black car that Shearer said was “like something straight out of a gangster movie, yet it looked brand new.” Since they were in England, it was probably a Jaguar, the standard issue for MIB in that country, the cars-of-choice in America being Buicks and Lincolns. According to UFO lore, whenever a license number from one of their cars is run through the DMV, it always turns-out that the number doesn’t exist.

The MIB kept their promise to return less than a month later, this time at Shearer’’s place of employment. Again, there were two of them, both shorter than the giant who’d stood by the door at his home, and he realized that one of them was the man who’d remained by the car during the earlier visit. This time they called him by his name. They wanted to know about his sighting of a UFO, and they knew all the details, like date, time and location.

William Shearer had never been one of the fanatics, kooks or conspiracy theorists who frequent UFO bulletin boards or who considers The X Files to be fact instead of fiction. His UFO experience had been unexpected, he just happened to be at the wrong place at the right time. Even after the second visit, he had no way of knowing that he’d had a close encounter with the infamous men-in-black, known to all UFO enthusiasts. It’s likely that he’d never even heard of the MIB.

But men-in-black they were.

Most reports on the MIB speak of the computer-like quality of their voices. Their movements are jerky, awkward and machinelike (Shearer had thought they had arthritis), and some people compare their manner with robots. Pale skin and overly red lips are always part of their appearance, as are dark suits that seem to be made of some otherworldly fabric. They’re also creative with their identities, carrying fantastic id cards and posing as telephone repairmen or representatives from UFO organizations. Their overall aura: Jake and Elmo Blues elevated to some sort of weird extraterrestrial plane.

The MIB entered modern UFO mythology in the summer of 1947, after US Harbor patrolmen Harold A. Dahl and Fred L. Crisman sighted a UFO while sailing in Puget Sound. Not long after the incident, Dahl said that he was visited by a “man in black,” who strongly suggested that he not discuss his sighting. From that point on, the MIB began visiting UFO witnesses with increasing regularity. They usually know details of the sighting that should be known only to the witness.

Who or what are these men-in-black? They could be government agents sent to scare witnesses into silence or alien beings sent to make sure that their presence on our planet remains secret. Perhaps they are only the creation of overactive imaginations, a new myth for the technological age. Who knows? I just don’t want one knocking on my door.

©Copyright 2003 by AlternativeApproaches.com

There used to be a Sunday comic strip character, Smokey Stover, who was always saying, “Where there’s foo, there’s fire.” During World War II, when our pilots and sailors began seeing balls of light that could outmaneuver our planes and which followed our ships to sea, some imaginative soldier-fan of the comic strip dubbed the phenomenon “Foo Fighters” and the modern era of UFO sightings began.

The Foo Fighters worried everyone, though nobody really knew what they were. The Germans thought them to be a secret U.S. weapon and established a committee to study them. The Brits figured they were German and created a research group called the “Massey Project.” The Americans had no idea what they were, but had the 8th Army investigate them anyway. They dropped their study when they determined they weren’t German or Japanese.

Throughout the second World War, the Army Air Force would continue to investigate UFO sightings, but didn’t take them very seriously. After all, there was a war going on and since these unidentified flying things didn’t seem to be hostile, they could wait. Things changed after the war. In 1947, when military personnel began reporting sightings of UFOs over Muroc Air Force Base, the White Sands Proving Grounds and other sensitive installations, classified orders were issued requiring all UFO reports to be sent to the Technical Intelligence Division of the Air Material Command at Wright-Patterson Air Field.

These reports of ultrahigh tech flying machines buzzing top secret military sites undoubtedly scared the hell out of the military’s top brass. After all, we’d just lost a third of Europe to the Russians, including half of Germany, and there was considerable concern that these “flying saucers” were the end result of secret research that had been begun by the Germans and brought into actuality by the godless commies in the USSR.

Later that year, after the Air Force had been made an independent branch of the military, the Pentagon requested a report about our knowledge of the “flying disks.” On September 23, after a conference between at least four departments of the Air Force, the Commander of the Air Material Command at Wright-Patterson AFB, General Nathan Twining, sent a secret memo to Brig. General George Schulgen, who was then Chief of the Air Intelligence Requirements Division.

After decades of official Air Force denials on the existence of UFOs, it now seems strange that General Schulgen concluded in his study that “the phenomenon reported is something real and not visionary or fictitious,” even though he did allow that “there is a possibility that some of the incidents may be caused by natural phenomena, such as meteors.”

He went-on to say: “The reported operating characteristics, such as extreme rates of climb, maneuverability, and actions which must be considered evasive when sighted or contacted by friendly aircraft and radar, lend belief to the possibility that some of the objects are controlled either manually, automatically, or remotely.” The memo ended with a request for the Air Force to assign a permanent project to investigate the phenomenon.

About the same time as this memo was going out, U.S. intelligence completed its study of the projects the Germans had been working-on during the war. They found nothing that could account for the UFOs, even with continued development by the Soviets. The Air Force also determined that there were no materials available that could withstand the stresses what would result from the high speeds and fantastic maneuvers of the UFOs.

The Air Force found this so bothersome that, in December of 1947, the Director of Research and Development, Major General L. C. Craigie, issued an order establishing Project Sign, which was also known as Project Saucer. The stated purpose of this project was “...to collect, collate, evaluate and distribute to interested government agencies and contractors, all information concerning sightings and phenomena in the atmosphere which can be construed to be of concern to the national security.”

With the creation of this project, the United States entered 1948 with a firm commitment to get to the bottom of the UFO mystery. According to Loy Lawhon, UFO writer for about.com, “There is reliable testimony that in August, 1948, the Technical Intelligence Division at Wright-Patterson and Project Sign decided to make a formal ‘Estimate of the Situation.’ The ‘Estimate’ was a top secret document that contained unexplained sightings by pilots, scientists, and other reliable witnesses. The report concluded that UFOs were of extraterrestrial origin.”

This document inadvertently sealed the fate of any serious consideration of UFOs by the American military. Upon receiving the manuscript, Air Force Chief of Staff General Hoyt Vandenburg marked-out much of the report and returned it for revision. He later rejected a revised report for lack of evidence and ordered all copies to be destroyed. Needless to say, morale at Project Sign was severely damaged by this action.

On December 16, 1948, Project Sign’s name was changed to Project Grudge and the Air Force began officially regarding those who believed in UFOs as unreliable and unstable. The cover-up had begun.

©Copyright 2003 by AlternativeApproaches.com

Since the 50s, figuring out who to trust about UFO’s has been impossible. We can’t believe the government; they just deny everything and imply that witnesses are somehow un-American. The hundreds of books and thousands of web sites on the subject mostly come with agendas. There’s the National Enquirer, but they only want to titillate the gullible into buying newspapers. Scully and Mulder are fiction.

Then there’s Bill English, who claims to have first-hand knowledge of the government’s real “X” files. As the son of an Arizona state legislator and former Green Beret, he seems credible enough, but you never know in the murky world of alien encounters.

In June of 1977, English was assigned to an RAF “listening post” north of London as an information analyst. As part of his duties, he was asked to prepare an analysis of the Grudge 13 report, the document from the U. S. Air Force’s Projects Grudge and Blue Book that remains classified and unavailable to the public. He says that his study of this document forever changed the direction of his life, so much so that when he returned to the States he continued to investigate UFOs on his own.

Eleven years after his review of Grudge 13, in 1988, he spent two days dictating what he could remember from the report onto two audio cassettes, which were then transcribed into a hand written document by John Lear, who was present during the recording. On the tapes, he begins by clearly describing the diplomatic pouch that contained the document and remembers details such as the pouch’s serial number (JL327D). “Inside was a publication with red tape, which indicated code red security precautions, and an Air Force disposition form,” he says.

If true, what English claims to remember from the report paints a fantastic and disturbing picture. He says that the U.S. government has captured at least three aliens and that in 1981 one was still alive in captivity. More troubling is his claim that “at one point in the early 1950s until the mid 1960s, the Air Force maintained relocation and debriefing colonies for people who had experienced close encounters of the third and fourth kind. They were isolated, for all intents and purposes, for the rest of their lives.” He adds that he doubts these facilities are still in existence.

Among other things, Grudge 13 was rife with detailed case histories of UFO encounters. One that English remembers quite distinctly took place on a rural farm near Darlington, Ohio in October of 1953. A husband, wife and their thirteen year old son were just sitting for dinner when the lights began to dim. Outside, the dogs and farm animals started raising a ruckus, and the boy got up from the table to see what was happening. From the door, he called for his parents to ““come look at the funny lights in the sky.”

As the adults rose from the table, the boy ran into the back yard. His parents went to the front of the house and out onto the porch, just as one of their dogs broke loose from its leash and ran through the front yard into an open field. The boy chased the dog while his parents watched a “round ball of fire” descend from the sky to hover over their son. Almost immediately, the boy began screaming for help. His father grabbed a shotgun from inside the front door and ran into the field, with his wife following close behind.

“When the father got to the field, he saw his son being carried away by what looked like little men, into this huge fiery looking object,” says English. “As it took off, the father fired several rounds at the object, to no avail. They found the dog, its head was crushed, but no sign of the boy or any other footprints of the little men who apparently carried him off.”

The Darlington police concluded that the boy had run into the woods and was merely lost. Within 48 hours, however, the Air Force determined that the family was to be relocated and the parents were picked-up by Air Force Intelligence to be moved to a relocation site. According to English, Grudge 13 indicated there were at least four relocation sites across the United States. At each location, there were extensive medical facilities to deal with medical emergencies, including radiation poisoning. “The report mentioned a site located in the Utah-Nevada area,” he remembers, “but no indication of its purpose or what it was for.”

Is Bill English’s testimony credible, or is he just another misfit adding fuel to The ‘X’ Files and other conspiracy theories? Your guess is as good as mine. Those who’ve met him say that he’s sincere and tend to believe him. His report on “Grudge 13” is available on the Internet at http://rcbbs.com/public/docs/grudge.txt.

©Copyright 2003 by AlternativeApproaches.com