I told him what had been told me. “On the night the film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind premiered in Arkansas there were strange events everywhere in the state, particularly UFO sightings. The mutilations have started and are continuing. Cows have been dying for weeks, Jacques.”
Vallee told me the day he would return to Tulsa and he asked me to pick him up at Tulsa International. We planned then for the two of us to drive straight on over to Arkansas and from there to begin our work on our first case together.
Something almost miraculous happened before he returned from California to the middle of the country. TV cameras and crews are notoriously expensive and almost impossible for non-television persons to command at any price ... especially in those days before the light portable, easily handheld cam.
I was preparing for our trip by putting things together. Just as in many other occurrences in my life, what I needed came to my hand somehow. In what I can only call a miracle, an acquaintance who ran a film studio volunteered the services of his professional film crew and their equipment and the truck to haul everything in, free of charge. One of the cameramen offered his black Mercedes as transport for Vallee and myself, also without any charge. I could barely believe it.
I went to the airport to pick up the French scientist and was waylaid by a friend who wanted to talk to me. I wasn’t there but the crew was on the job and they just kept the cams running as Vallee disembarked. As soon as I came on the scene, we gathered the thousands of dollars worth of equipment and the men into the truck, we two stepped into the Mercedes, and we all headed for Benton County, Arkansas, the hotbed of the mutilations scare. Acquiring the equipment for our work and people to do the photography, as well as the means of comfortable transport, seemed not only a stroke of good luck, but pure magic to me.
The drive to Arkansas also seemed like magic. Vallee was very businesslike but electricity sparked between us. There was an incredible connection it seemed. I had to pinch myself. This would be my first big field case investigating UFOs. Thrills ran through me like lightning stroking through a summer sky in Oklahoma. He seemed quite calm even though my nerves were jumping.
We spoke only of the work ahead and of the preparatory work I had already done and he told me he wanted to talk first to the Deputy Sheriff who had taken all the striking photographs.
The Arkansas Lawman had confided in me that he was the only person in that particular Sheriff’s Department who believed that there was a connection between the UFO sightings and the mutilated cattle. The pictures he had taken of a mutilated cow had been of considerable interest to Vallee. The rolls of photographs of the dead cow had been taken from every conceivable angle; the head, backbone, each hoof, stomach, tail. Each and every anomaly had been photographed in distant shots, up close and at medium range. What was strange had become evident only after the pictures were developed. Every single shot showed a bright piercing ray of white light beaming from the sky and striking the various parts of the animal. The light was visible from every angle and it appeared in each photo. We decided that one photograph with such a laser-like beam of light could have been coincidence. We were positive that the ray of white light appearing in every single photograph was no coincidence. It was as if the beings above had made an effort to leave their signature on each picture.
The Bentonville Deputy Sheriff, who was sympathetic to our investigation, directed us to a farm where a fresh mutilation had just taken place. The crew and I were able to make a tape of Vallee and the Deputy talking about the cow which had already been moved from the field.
Several years later, on the anniversary of his first call to investigate the scene of a mutilated cow, that particular Deputy Sheriff, whom I had come to think of as a friend, found one of his own cows mutilated. Later he was bitten by a poisonous snake and then resuscitated. I was sorry to hear that he had been fired from his job in the County Sheriff’s office. During this period before his dismissal, I had talked to him by telephone rather frequently. Most of the time as we talked, our line would go dead. We agreed that there was a diabolical element stemming from the UFO scene, an element which had taken over in both of our lives since we’d become involved with the UFO’s, the cows and the sinister black helicopters which were always swarming over the whole melee.
Vallee never had any type of problem or visitation in his personal life whether in the United States or in France or at least he never mentioned anything, not even when I was comparing accidents with the Deputy or other UFO observers. He did observe once that he held the theory that the helicopters were a signal that the mutilations had something to do with a covert military operation. He certainly had reservations about the rash of sightings being totally alien in origin.
Our first mutilated cow had, as had most all of the other mutilated cows, had had all the blood drained from her body. The farmers and ranchers and other observers reported that strange looking small, black, helicopter-looking vehicles were observed hovering, without lights, in the vicinity of almost every instance of mutilation. The farmers were getting nervous, not because of the UFO connection, which most didn’t even believe, but because of the continuing depredation on their cattle herds. They were losing money. Each dead cow was a serious drain on that particular farm’s economic structure.
Many people of the county thought the whole flap to be a hilarious joke of some kind or a figment of the imagination of kooks and crazies. The ranchers may have thought those things as well but they finally banded together to camp out together in groups at night, each man armed with a gun. They couldn’t afford any more of what many called “this kind of tomfoolery.”
Sometimes Vallee and I joined them in their vigil in a slightly different way. Nightly we drove the loaned Mercedes across the roads and highways of the area, looking for evidence of mutilations in progress. We stayed for two days on our first field trip and my adrenaline level was so high that I had trouble sleeping at all, even after our return to Tulsa.
The two of us made innumerable return trips to the Bentonville and other Arkansas areas during the next seven years. My patient husband Bob just understood that my life’s work was inextricably joined with that of this internationally renowned researcher, so he allowed me the freedom that our investigations required. Our children were in school and during this period, Bob became their principal after-school-caretaker with his mother lending a hand. Most of the time I was fiercely homesick for him and the girls but I felt compelled to continue the work.
During the seven years of traipsing through mucky cow lots and hot, dusty fields in Arkansas and other places, Dr. Jacques Vallee was always absolutely and perfectly controlled, always organized and ready for the work ahead. He was the epitome of precision and preparation. I never saw the man except in a suit, a tie, and wearing perfectly polished shoes. He always looked as if he were dressed for a day in a Wall Street office. He was never without his briefcase in hand.
I, on the other hand, was the perfect “Lucy.” Always out of control, accident prone, sick at my stomach, and strangely imprecise and unprepared. I well remember one typical Barbara incident: In a small town cafe I was opening a plastic container of cream to pour into my coffee. Somehow I sprayed the cream all over Vallee’s tailor-made English shirt, his designer tie and his expensive suit. Whatever could happen that I could do that was bad or unexpected, did happen. He hardly raised an eyebrow until the cream sprayed him for the third time. He learned to keep his distance when I was preparing my coffee.
Particularly, I was always losing or forgetting my purse. It’s impossible to remember how many times we had to go back to get my handbag. On our first trip I set the pattern. I broke the heel from my shoe while we were interviewing a veterinarian. The veterinarian had to nail my heel back onto my shoe... quite reluctantly, I might add. The vet seemed to think I had broken the high heel from my shoe just to irritate him. It was on that trip that I learned that the stepping in manure is considered “good luck” in France.
Whenever I
was with this unemotional European model of decorum, it seems, my mind was not firing on all synapses. I think his up-tight perfection made me seem, by comparison, more than a little dizzy.
I do know that whenever Vallee and I worked together I could expect something dreadful when I got home. Luckily Bill Blair was interested in my adventures so I was able to hang on to my job with his TV studio. However, in my personal and private life, some member of my family or a part of my household would always have met with sickness or accident or some other terrible happening. A sinister energy has always operated behind the scene to make problems for my family and me throughout my career as an investigator. I’ll talk more about this problem in a later chapter.
When we arrived in Bentonville on our first trip, our first interview was with the Deputy Sheriff whom I had interviewed earlier in my preliminary work with the lawmen and townspeople. He was the only lawman who admitted to having seen the UFOs or to having been affected by them in some way.
During the years that I worked with Vallee, we visited sites in New York, Arizona, Arkansas, all over rural Oklahoma, California, Kansas, and Missouri. Because I love animals I shuddered with fear and anguish for the poor animals who had been so mistreated. At that time most of our trips were to investigate instances of mutilated cattle. We gave little or no consideration to abductions in those years.
Vallee, the Physicist, became my mentor during the next few years. I really didn’t know that our farewells in New York would be our last time to see each other.
An interesting sidelight during that time was a discovery I made about my mother and about something that had happened in my childhood. In 1980 after I’d said goodbye to Vallee, I came off the plane in Tulsa and drove to my Mother’s house. I’d invited my mother, and some of her friends to have lunch with me at a local tearoom.
At the luncheon table I said, “Well, Mother, we’ve just been on another investigative case. One of those ‘crazy chases,’ as you call them.”
Mother smiled at the others at the table before she spoke. What she said knocked me back in my chair. My Mother had always made sure I understood that she thought I was chasing a will-o-the-wisp, in other words, just wasting my time.
“You know, Barbara, I never did tell you about the time that big UFO was right above our house.”
“For God’s sake, Mother. I’ve been investigating UFOs for years now. Why on earth didn’t you ever tell me about this?” I must have looked as agitated as she’d ever seen me because she made a calming motion with her hand. The type of signal Mother’s use to keep one quiet in public.
“Well, honey, I just never thought to tell you about what I saw. It wasn’t much.” She smiled an apologetic smile.
“Can you describe the vessel?” I asked the question but if Vallee had been there, the always on-the-job scientist would at this point, have taken out his notebook and pen.
“Well, yes.” She looked up into the air above the luncheon table as if once again seeing what had appeared in the Missouri sky that day. “It was some silvery metal, something like aluminum, I guess, but not quite as shiny. A kind of a big saucer shaped metal disc. Really big. From so far away I couldn’t gauge exactly, of course, but certainly much larger than a car or even our house.”
Mother glanced at me to be sure I was listening. I was. Big time.
“I was standing out in the yard. It was in Missouri. It was summer. Really hot. Late in the afternoon.”
“What happened?” I couldn’t wait for her next startling bit of information.
“Oh, nothing.” She smiled at her friends at the table. “I looked at it for a minute or two, but it didn’t move or really do anything, so I just went on hanging out the clothes then went back inside.” She took a sip of her iced tea. “How long can one be required to stare at something that is just sitting up there doing nothing?”
“My God, Mother!”
She frowned at me.
“No need to speak in that way, dear.” She turned back to the others. “I believe there was something written about it in the St. Louis Post Dispatch and The Globe. Yes. There was quite a little flurry there with people who saw the UFO. Nineteen forty-five or forty-seven, I believe. I’m not really sure.”
I am convinced that my mom’s sighting was of the ship which teleported me to that green meadow somewhere. It all came back to me. I’d been teleported for the purpose of implanting a tiny communication device in my head. I remembered being held by my mother when I ran in exclaiming about “something in my head” and feeling, against my cheek, the clothespins in the pockets of the apron my Mother was wearing that day. She looked me over because of my complaints but she couldn’t find anything. I’ve always been afraid to have my skull examined by doctors or scanned on x-ray. What if they had found evidence of a foreign object? I’d grown up thinking there was a tiny lump just below the skin in the area back of my ear. I didn’t mention this at the luncheon table, of course. Mother was terribly pleased with the sensation she’d just caused while trying to amuse the visiting ladies and her own daughter. I didn’t want to steal her thunder.
Vallee rarely did anything but write notes throughout all our investigations. He took reams of notes every other day we were together, as we looked at sites and talked with spectators and landowners. We questioned and measured and observed and photographed. So far as I know he drew no conclusions at all. If he did come to some conclusion he never told me. Every trip we made was through my discovery of whatever was puzzling people at a specific area. I would try to learn more about it then I’d contact Jacques and he would come flying in and then the two of us would go measure, observe, question and photograph whatever had come my way.
Sometimes I felt as if the whole series of investigations, and my part in them particularly, were just one big charade staged for the man’s private entertainment. Maybe he used those voluminous notes to write a book... in French, perhaps. He certainly never published anything in English about our investigations, or none that I have ever seen. I don’t know.
That’s when I began to wonder who he really was.
Chapter 10
UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL
After several years together as investigative partners, Jacques Vallee and I eventually agreed to part company for a reason which I will explain later on, but I, driven by a compulsion I still didn’t understand, continued the work alone.
By this time my name was so well known that many people called me when they had problems with cattle mutilations or when they heard about such problems. Often they called about other problems as well.
Once I was driving along a country road in Oklahoma when I spotted a cow lying down. I parked the car and I leaped over the fence, being very careful when making my way across a small open pasture. This was, after all, private property, and I wasn’t looking to be shot at by an irate rancher.
The cow was lying just at the edge of a wooded area. Because this animal was mutilated in what seemed to be a common pattern I’ll try to explain exactly what I saw. Bile rose in my throat as I surveyed the body of the animal.
The cow was lying on her side, not moving, her legs stiffly outstretched. That is what made me suspect she was a victim of mutilation as the area had recently had several UFO sightings.
The first wound I saw was a perfectly round hole about three inches in diameter on her right side. The ear on that side had been sliced off and the right eye had been cut out in a cup shaped incision as if a very large melon scoop had taken a cup shaped dip of flesh right out of the cow’s head. The animal’s rectal area had been excised in what appeared to be a perfect circle, another large scoop which took out the entire rectum and the area around it for about one inch in other words, a three to four inch circular piece had been taken.
There was no visible blood on the cow nor on the ground around her. Each of the bloodless incisions appeared to have been made with surgical precision by a seasoned practitioner of the art or by a very sharp cutting machine of some type. The visible fl
esh within the incisions looked somewhat desiccated to my eye ... much as had the flesh on all the other mutilated cattle I had seen, also. Perhaps cauterized, would be the better word. Try to imagine what a raw steak would look like with the blood totally removed from it and the edges of the steak high heat seared. Then you’d have a closer approximation of what I saw.
Normally, a dead animal is a magnet to flies, ants, and larger predators. This cow, even though the summer day in Oklahoma was a normal 95 degrees in the shade, had not one fly on it, no maggots, no beetles. That was typical in most of the mutilation cases. She was displaying a trait in common with all the other mutilated cows we’d looked at. Her hulk repulsed all ants, flies and other insects, as well as all birds. No carrion birds had visited her, either.
I’d noted many times that mutilated cows did not deteriorate as quickly as most cows that have died of natural causes. Dogs, cats, and other cows and domesticated animals stay strictly away from animals who have died in this manner... and that includes their calves. If a cow is killed by a bullet or in some other more ordinary way, farmers have assured me that the calves most often stay near their dead mother until the farmer or rancher removes them. Not true in the mutilation cases we saw.
As usual, there was no odor, whatsoever.
This animal lay completely alone. Nothing moved or chirped or breathed within an approximate hundred-yard radius of her body in every direction, except for me, of course. There was no sign of footsteps, car tire marks or any other marks of intruders in the area around the cow.
The trees and bushes that stood near the cow’s body were fearfully and strangely quiet. No birds, no insect calls, none of the usual bug, animal and bird clatter and movement, no activity at all. Dead quiet, especially in the country, is not pleasant, let me tell you. There was nothing to do but to search for the farmhouse and report this find to its owner, which I did.
During our years of investigative partnership a few of the farmers we had talked with were convinced that somehow Jacques Vallee and I were to blame for what had happened to their cows. I was a bit concerned that my report might cause this farmer to think I was the one who had killed his cow, but that didn’t happen, not with this man, luckily. He knew there had been “flying saucer” activity in the air over his farm and he blamed the mutilation of this heifer upon the UFOs, not upon me.
Barbara: The Story of a UFO Investigator Page 7
