The witnesses added that immediately upon lifting the elk off the ground, the object seemed to begin to “wobble” to an even greater degree than it had exhibited earlier. Also, as the object appeared to increase its altitude, the elk, which was suspended upright directly below it, rotated slowly beneath it, with its head apparently in contact with the ventral surface of the craft.
With the elk suspended below, the object began to ascend slowly up a clear-cut slope to the north, wobbling slowly as moved almost directly away from the witnesses. However, when it reached a stand of tall trees at the end of the clear-cut, it appeared to brush the lower branches of the trees, at which point the object stopped, backed up, and began to rise almost vertically. At this point, the object appeared to wobble back and forth, i.e. begin a rolling motion from left to right, at an even more rapid rate.
It appeared to rise vertically over the trees and continued its “flight” to the north, apparently hugging the contour of the hill below it as it moved. When it crested the top of the rise, it descended into the neighboring valley to the north, and disappeared from the sight of the witnesses for a few seconds. Moments later, they last witnessed the object rising at a steep angle, and at high speed. It continued rising until it simply disappeared from their sight in the northern sky.
The witnesses stated that once the craft had reached the clear-cut to the north, they no longer could see the animal suspended below it. Their presumption was that the elk had somehow been taken into the object, although they never saw any kind of “door” or aperture through which the animal might have been conveyed into the craft.
Although there were slight discrepancies between the witnesses with regard to the appearance of the peculiar object, they agreed that it was relatively small, perhaps not too much longer than the elk itself. Its shape was reminiscent of the heel of a man’s shoe, i.e., roughly U-shaped, and slightly tapered toward the aft end. Also, they agreed that it seemed to exhibit two “stripes,” or patches, running longitudinally along its dorsal side, one of which appeared red, the other white.
The witnesses also stated that following the incident, the herd of elk remained in the same general area, although they remained more closely huddled together than had been the case earlier in the morning. The workers added that they, too, had remained closer to one another during the remainder of the work day, feeling ill at ease about what they had been witness to earlier in the day.
The case was first investigated jointly by Peter B. Davenport, Director of the National UFO Reporting Center, and Robert A. Fairfax, Director of Investigations in Washington State for the Mutual UFO Network. They traveled to the site of the incident on March 5, 1999, examined the body of an adult female elk found to the north of the initial abduction site by the land owner, and interviewed several of the witnesses. The investigation was continued over subsequent months.
The witnesses were deemed by the investigators to be reliable and sober-minded, with little to gain from the event. Some of them had been working for the same company for many years, and were described by their employer to be excellent employees. The witnesses refused all suggestions that they speak with the press, or go public in any way, about the alleged incident.
—PETER B. DAVENPORT
Ellwood, Robert S., Jr. (b. 1933). Dr. Ellwood is retired from the University of Southern California, where he was Professor Emeritus of Religion. A specialist in the history of religions, Ellwood has written more than twenty books; the most important of which are Religious and Spiritual Groups in Modern America (1973), which contains a section on UFO groups, and Many Peoples, Many Faiths (1976), an introductory textbook in world religions, and Alternative Altars—Unconventional and Eastern Spirituality in America (1979).
Address:
997 Athens Street
Altadena, CA 91001
U.S.A.
E-mail:
robert_ellwood
@hotmail.com
Web site:
www.rcf.usc.edu/
~ellwood
POSITION STATEMENT: I have no public position on the physical science aspects of UFOs, since I do not have appropriate competence. I do, however, have an open mind and lively interest in the matter. My professional concern is UFO-inspired religious movements. I do not say that they or any other religion are false; the ultimate origin and meaning of all of humankind’s religious experience and conceptual systems remain too full of mystery for final pronouncements, and in any case, a religious experience and belief can have rich subjective validity for a person regardless of what the facts are about its objective referent. My chief touchstone of interpretation for the evaluation of UFO religious movements would be Carl lung’s concept of the UFO as, for its religious believers, a “technological angel.”
Humanity’s immemorial spiritual quest, and the symbol systems which express its findings, change in outer form as worldviews and perceptions of appropriate guises for the transcendent change. UFO religious movements are interesting and worthy of a certain respect as innovative discoveries of the transcendent in a form congruous with a scientific and technological age. They accept and rejoice in the vast universe of space travel and possible extraterrestrials are given us by modem science rather than compartmentalizing it off as does so much older religion. In this respect the UFO religionists are spiritual adventurers and pioneers—people willing to deal with the profound modem spiritual crisis engendered by our living in the scientific world on the one hand, while remaining creatures with deep needs for subjective meaning and identity on the other. By making sacred the UFO, they have resolved the crisis in one possible way: In their “technological angels” they have given us striking symbols reconciling the universe of modem cosmology and the human need for transcendent points of reference. Like any pioneers, they can take false steps, rush to premature conclusions about the terrain they are exploring, and even lose their bearings altogether. But they have faced a crisis that many chose to ignore. They have dealt with it in their own way even at the cost of being called fools and worse by those who prefer not to perceive that, whether or not their space contacts are real, the modern spiritual conundrum to which the contact answers and to which the contactee is alive is real and must be faced before our culture slips into collective schizophrenia.
—ROBERT ELLWOOD
Elohim The Hebrew word for deity; a plural form translated as “gods” by Hebrew scholars and UFO theorists alike, thus giving rise to the notion that extraterrestrials were involved in humanity’s creation.
The UFO-ET interpretation was first suggested in 1960 by UFOlogist Brinsley Le Poer Trench in his book, The Sky People. Trench, who was called “the evangelist and top theologian of what amounts to a new galactic religion,” claimed that the Hebrew version of the Old Testament refers to the Sky People when it uses the word Elohim; translated as “God” (where it should say “gods”) in the English Bible. He, and Erich von Däniken after him, called attention to certain passages in the English version of the Bible that retain the plural form, particularly Gen. 1: 26: “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” “Why does God speak in the plural?” asks von Däniken. One would think that the one and only God ought to address mankind in the singular, not in the plural.” (Von Däniken, 1970).
According to Vergilius Ferm’s An Encyclopedia of Religion: “Usually Hebrew writers speak of gods (elohim) and Yahweh (their god) before the exile but God (elohim) thereafter.” (Ferm, 1945) However, certain passages of the English version have retained the plural form, such as the passage (1:26) quoted above, and the phrase “Behold the man is become as one of us.” (Gen. 3:22)
More recently, the concept of the Elohim as extraterrestrial creators has been adopted by Zecharia Sitchin in his “Earth Chronicles” series of books and by the Raelian Religion of Claude Vorilhon (a.k.a. “Rael”).
—RONALD D. STORY
References:
Ferm, Vergilius, ed., An Encyclopedia of Religion (Philosophical Library, 1945).
Sitchin, Zecharia. The 12th Planet (Avon, 1976).
________. The Stairway to Heaven (Avon, 1980).
________. The Wars of Gods and ;Men (Avon, 1985).
________. The Lost Realms (Avon, 1990).
________. Genesis Revisited (Avon, 1990).
________. When Time Began (Avon, 1993).
________. Divine Encounters (Avon, 1996).
________. The Cosmic Code (Avon, 1999).
Story, Ronald D. The Space-Gods Revealed (Harper & Row/New English Library, 1976).
________. Guardians of the Universe? (New English Library/St. Martin’s Press, 1980).
Trench, Brinsley LePoer. The Sky People (Neville Spearman, 1960).
Von Däniken, Erich. Chariots of the Gods? (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1970; Bantam Books, 1971).
Elohim of Peace Comparable to “Cosmic Christ,” this term indicates a transcendent spiritual being or universal principle of peace and harmony, which can overshadow or inspire those individuals who are sufficiently evolved, and who seek to be used in the service of cosmic evolution on Earth.
—SCOTT MANDELKER
Encyclopedia of UFOs, The (Doubleday/New English Library, 1980). Compiled and edited by Ronald Story, this was the first UFO encyclopedia ever produced and remains a standard reference on the subject.
Former Fate magazine editor Jerome Clark stated in his review: “…by any standard Encyclopedia is a magnificent achievement. It is, as all of us who awaited its appearance hoped it would be, the essential UFO reference work.” Clark subsequently produced his own UFO Encyclopedia (Apogee Books, 1990; Omnigraphics, 1998).
When combined with the present work (The Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters), readers will have a balanced set of books from which to draw their own conclusions.
—RANDALL FITZGERALD
Ether Ship and Its Solution, The (Borderland Sciences, 1950). Meade Layne has the distinction of being the first author to combine ancient astronaut theory speculations with a clearly metaphysical explanation for UFOs. From the etheric plane, seemingly empty space, these craft and their etheric pilots have materialized for thousands of years to help accelerate the evolution of human consciousness. Nine years before Carl Jung tried to tailor (in print) the UFO phenomenon to his theories of the collective unconscious, Layne was using a Jungian approach by explaining how these manifestations from the etheric realm could be thought forms produced by the human unconscious mind.
—RANDALL FITZGERALD
Evans, Hilary (b.1929) Hilary Evans is a prolific writer/researcher and a leading proponent of the psychosocial approach to the UFO mystery. He works as a picture librarian, assisting his wife who is the proprietor of the Mary Evans Picture Library.
Born in Shrewsbury, England, Evans was educated at Cambridge and Birmingham Universities, where he received his B.A. and M.A. degrees in English literature in 1951 and 1953, respectively. His early writings—UFOs, the Greatest Mystery (1979) and The Evidence for UFOs (1982)—were straightforward assessments of the UFO phenomenon. In 1987 he devised and edited, with John Spencer, the international compilation UFOs 1947-1987, and in turn assisted Spencer on another compilation: Phenomenon (1988); both on behalf of BUFORA, on whose Council both serve. His more individual researches are embodied in three books: Visions, Apparitions, Alien Visitors (1984) ; Gods, Spirits, Cosmic Guardians (1987); and Alternate States (1989). Though none of these is a UFO book as such, they are relevant to UFO research in that they are largely concerned with alleged encounters with otherworldly entities.
Hilary Evans
Evans is a frequent contributor to many UFO publications and lectures widely in North America and Europe. His most recent books include: Almanac of the Uncanny (1995), UFOs: 1947-1997 (ed. with Dennis Stacy), and From Other Worlds (1998).
Address:
59 Tranquil Vale
London SE3 OBS
England
E-mail:
[email protected]
POSITON STATEMENT: Of course there are objects flying about which we can’t identify, and to that extent UFOs exist. But so long as the evidence for physical UFOs—let alone extraterrestrial visitation—rests on witness testimony, so long will it be subject to the reservations with which all such testimony must be received. Psychological and sociological findings show that we cannot set any limits to what the subconscious mind can devise and impose upon the conscious mind; so until I see convincing evidence for an external source, I find it easier to believe that it is to the subconscious mind of the individual that we must look for the most probable origin of most UFO reports.
While this can be seen as a form of debunking, I prefer to see it rather as a shift of interpretation. Simply because we cannot take an encounter experience at face value does not mean that it is has no other value. Those who claim abduction experiences, for example, are for the most part neither charlatans nor pathological cases; rather, they are people whose personal circumstances have interacted with the cultural ambiance to confuse fantasy with reality Approached on this level, the UFO experience can tell us a great deal about human behavior, both individual and social. Findings such as those of Alvin Lawson, and speculations such as those of Jacques Vallée and Mark Moravec should therefore be of the greatest interest to the behavioral scientist. At the same time it is clear that many UFO cases involve physical phenomena of an extremely interesting kind. Consequently, I find the work of Persinger, Rutkowski, Long, and others, and the fieldwork of Harley Rutledge and Project Hessdalen, to be of great potential value to our knowledge of the world around us.
—HILARY EVANS
Exeter (New Hampshire) sightings The Exeter case represents one of the most spectacular and best-corroborated UFO close encounters of all time.
About half past midnight on Friday, September 3, 1965, Officer Eugene F. Bertrand, of the Exeter (New Hamsphire), Police Department, was on routine patrol on the outskirts of Exeter when he spotted an automobile parked beside the road on Route 101. He stopped his patrol car to investigate, and upon approaching the vehicle, he found a lone woman in the car who appeared to be extremely upset. When Officer Bertrand inquired what the difficulty was, the woman replied that she had been chased approximately 12 miles along Route 101, from Epping to Exeter, by a very unusual looking, disk-shaped object, surrounded by a “halo” of bright red light. She reported that the object had made several swooping “dives” or “passes” at her car.
Officer Bertrand attempted to calm the woman, and asked her whether she could still see the object. She responded by pointing to what appeared to the officer to be nothing more than a star located close to the horizon. After several minutes of conversation with the woman, he returned to his cruiser and drove off, not bothering to record her name.
Officer Bertrand had no way of knowing that he had just been introduced to the first episode of what would very soon become known as the “Incident at Exeter.” Based on subsequent events that morning, the case might better have been titled “Incident at Kensington” (New Hampshire), since most of the dramatic aspects of the case occurred in the latter township, located a few miles south of Exeter.
At approximately 1:00 A.M., some thirty minutes after Officer Bertrand’s conversation with the woman, an 18-year old man, Norman J. Muscarello, was hitchhiking along Route 150 in Kensington, while returning from his girlfriend’s home in Amesbury (Massachusetts), to his home in Exeter. Mr. Muscarello had arranged to have his father pick him up in Amesbury and drive him home, but that rendezvous had not occurred, and he was making his own way home on foot and by catching rides with passing vehicles. As he hiked along the roadway on Shaw’s Hill, Muscarello was alarmed by the sudden appearance of a very bizarre looking object, which looked somewhat like a rugby ball viewed from the side, with five very bright, pulsating red lights or “windows” along its side. It apparently had risen out of a heavily wooded area several hundred yards to the north of the roadway, and
it proceeded to approach Muscarello’s location, passing over a nearby field and horse corral belonging to a Mr. Carl Dining.
In very short order, the object was hovering directly above the home of Mr. Clyde Russell, located some fifty feet north of the roadway, where it bathed the house and surrounding area in a “pool” of bright red light. At this time, it was not more than 80 feet from Muscarello, who later estimated its width at approximately 80-90 feet, considerably larger than the house located directly below it. He also reported that the object made no sound at all.
Artist’s conception of the Exeter/Kensington UFO
Muscarello at first crouched beside a low stone fence in front of the Russell home, hoping to be able to take cover from the bizarre object. Then, as soon as the object had moved away from the house, he knocked on the front door, hoping to raise its occupants. Although his pounding was heard by Mr. and Mrs. Russell, they elected not to answer the door, thinking the individual was possibly drunk or somehow deranged.
Muscarello then proceeded on foot west along the roadway, hoping to catch a ride into Exeter. He was picked up by a passing motorist, who took him to the center of Exeter, where he entered the police station at approximately 1:45 A.M.
The desk officer on duty that night was Officer Reginald “Scratch” Towland, who later reported that Muscarello was obviously quite agitated, so much so that his complexion was visibly pale, and he was barely able to stand. Based on this observation, together with the young man’s story, Officer Towland radioed the information to all units. Officer Bertrand immediately returned to the station, picked up Muscarello, and requested that he direct the officer back to the location where the young man had last seen the object on Shaw’s Hill.
When they first arrived at the location on Route 150, the two sat in the cruiser for a short period of time, at first witnessing nothing. Officer Bertrand made a radio broadcast to the police station, indicating that fact. They then exited the cruiser and proceeded into the field adjacent to the Russell home. For several minutes, they continued to see nothing unusual, but suddenly Muscarello witnessed the same object rise from behind dense trees at the end of the field, several hundred yards away. He shouted a warning to Bertrand, who wheeled around to face the object, now in the northern sky. At that moment, Bertrand considered drawing his service revolver to protect them both, but he quickly changed his mind. The two ran back to the cruiser, where Bertrand quickly radioed police headquarters about the sighting now in progress.
The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters Page 32
