by Timothy Good
Utah
Michael Vladeck is an Outward Bound instructor who had an encounter on the night of July 5, 1999, a half hour west of Salt Lake City en route to an Outward Bound retreat. Researcher Thane Mathis put me in touch with the witness, who subsequently sent me his report.
“I pulled off westbound I-80 in Utah onto a ranch exit to put my sleeping bag down and get some sleep,” Vladeck wrote. “The view from where I stopped for the night, about three quarters of a mile north of the highway, had a 360-degree panorama of the juniper- and sage-covered plains. There was a consistently present breeze, about twelve to twenty miles an hour, and the sky was covered in a thick, low-lying blanket of stratus clouds. I could see the lights of Salt Lake City bouncing off them about forty miles to the east.”
As he put down his ground pad and bag and prepared to lie down, he noticed that the clouds to the west were oddly bright—and becoming brighter. At first he thought it might have been the moon, but when the lights continued to brighten even more, he assumed that the “brights” of an eighteen-wheeler truck parked on the off-ramp of the highway were responsible. “Then, as I was about to get into my bag, a bright light cast my shadow on the ground in front of me [and] as I turned around, I saw an enormous non-aerodynamically shaped craft finish coming through the clouds. My guess was that it was seven hundred feet away from me (although I could be off by an additional three hundred feet, at most).
“It was huge—a 747 airplane could fit inside of it. It seemed to be about 300 to 350 feet long, 110 to 150 feet wide, and 60-plus feet high. It had a rectangular base, and from the super-bright lights (I’ll explain those in a moment) shining off the desert floor and reflecting back upward, it appeared as if the side was prowed-out in an arching angle—on the side that I saw, as well as the back. The front of the craft was just past me and I couldn’t see its shape.
“All of the craft was dark except for one strip of rectangular lights—about thirty of them pressed together near the front of the underside, spanning about 100 to 130 feet or so [see sketch below]. The lights were very full-spectrum-looking, as the juniper and the desert floor were lit up intensely as if they were under very bright daylight.”
“The craft was moving about twenty to thirty miles an hour, heading north-northwest, and its elevation remained constant (around five to six hundred feet), and it seemed to stay with the contours of the desert floor—when the land dropped away in the distance, its elevation above the land directly below it stayed the same. It also made no sound that I could hear at all (while there was a breeze, it was still rather quiet out). There seemed to be no kind of propulsion system on it that I could discern.
“When it went out of view, I could still see the clouds above it glowing from the craft’s lights off the land and bouncing upward. Then, all told about two minutes from my turning around to see it, the lights in the distance faded out of sight. That was it. I was so blown away by it all. It seemed like I imagined it or dreamed it—even five minutes later. I think this was because it was so out of context with anything else I’ve ever seen that I had nothing to ground the experience to….”24
Birmingham, U.K.
Another witness profoundly shocked by his experience was Edward Bradley of Birmingham. At 20:30 on the evening of Thursday, March 28, 2002, he was returning on foot from a friend’s former flat in Highfield Road, having collected mail to forward to him. “As I was walking down Sherwood Road,” Edward reported to me, “to the left I saw in the distance three points of light approaching. The only thing that appeared odd was that the lights were not flashing on and off, as you would normally expect to see on an aircraft [apart from the navigation lights, that is—Author], and they were very, very bright red. As I carried on walking, the shape of the craft appeared in full view—and what I saw wasn’t a plane.
“The object was a long triangular craft and at each corner there was a red light—three lights in total. It looked red but it didn’t look a natural red. It was the same color as blood. The object itself was jet black, the same color as a polished lump of coal, and I was standing not underneath it but diagonally opposite to it, on the left-hand side of it and less than a quarter of a mile away from it. [See photo section.]
“It made no sound and was moving very slowly and steadily. When I say ‘moving,’ flying is not the word: I think the word is gliding, but it was just on a perfect straight course. The part that made my blood run cold was that it was as if the sky behind it had suddenly gone flat and was sort of shimmering. Imagine a flat black wall and it was affecting what was going on behind it. The sky behind it was like black mercury. That shimmering effect was very odd. There were no clouds that night. Stars were in the sky but not behind the craft—around it, but not behind it. It was having an effect on the sky the other side of it.
“It was a huge craft and very, very low indeed. Lengthwise I would say it would have fit comfortably into a reasonably-sized football ground. It was very close to the tops of the houses in the street and in fact flying in the same line as they were in. From the ground, I would say it was at a height of a twenty-story block of flats. I watched it go in the direction of the Stratford Road toward Solihull and then it just carried on. It didn’t shoot away; it carried on at a set speed and a straight course.
“I had a mobile phone with me, but I was so shocked that I never thought to film it—I was mentally taking it in. What surprised me was that I have often read stories about people who see lights in the distance. But this passed me in the street: it was a real object, as clear as seeing a car pass you in the street. And it was passing through a heavily built-up part of a Birmingham suburb. There wasn’t a soul about in the street at all, and no one to speak to or say ‘Did you see that?’ I have no proof whatsoever. My only hope is that someone else saw it that night in the U.K., in another location….”25
Edward Bradley—whom I have now met—strikes me as an exceptionally reliable witness. His background includes positions with the Civil Service, the Department of Trade and Industry, Lloyds TSB, and Virgin Trains. He currently holds a responsible position in another company.
Nova Scotia
Don Ledger is a Canadian author, pilot, and UFO researcher who lives in Labelle, Nova Scotia. I have long respected his integrity and previously cited his investigations—and those of Chris Styles—into the Shag Harbour incident of 1967, involving an unidentified submergible object (USO).26 In a lecture on flying triangles presented at the Halifax UFO International Symposium in 1993, Don included the report of a giant craft seen by Helen M., an experienced amateur astronomer living in Cow Bay, about five miles northeast of the City of Halifax/Dartmouth, on the night of August 13, 2002.
Helen had been watching a few meteors when one, larger than the others, appeared out of the constellation of Ursa Major. “It had a long tail and rather than winking out immediately, it arced across the sky and over her head to the southeast,” Don reports. Instead of gradually fading out, however, its progress across the sky was suddenly terminated, “as if it had passed behind something … there seemed to be a black curtain being drawn across it from slightly behind her, from the southeast, [and she] was surprised to discover a straight black line was crossing the sky and blanking out the stars.
“At intermittent moments she could see what she described as ridiculous and ludicrous tiny white lights at the outer extremities of this black line as they passed over the canopy of trees surrounding her property [and then] noticed that one light was trailing the other two and she realized she was seeing ‘a perfect black triangle of gargantuan proportions’ [which] was in the process of crossing directly over the clearing around her house.”
“If there had been a full moon, I wouldn’t have been able to see it,” said Helen. “This thing blocked the entire area of sky above me—we’re talking football fields in length and breadth. This thing was enormous—too big to be in the air, you would think. It was pitch black, very black. It moved ve
ry slowly—ten miles an hour? There was absolutely no sound at all. Everything became very still. And I felt ‘tingly,’ like when you get pins and needles, [but] the feeling left when the triangle was out of sight.” The entire event lasted about five minutes as the craft passed from the southeast and then disappeared over the trees to the northwest.
Helen’s next-door neighbor kept pheasants in a cage on the other side of the fence and, atypically, they were not making the usual bird noises and remained quite still during the incident. “When I got up the next morning,” she told Don, “I had a headache which remained with me all day, and I felt nauseous and dizzy once in the afternoon.” The headache remained with her until the following day.
“I have to tell you I still feel a little weird about it,” she explained to Don. “It’s hard to wrap my mind around the reality of what I saw. But see it I did, whatever it was….”
Don Ledger’s extensive inquiries yielded other reports of the craft, including input from an air traffic controller who informed him that “there was an unknown target with a strong [radar] return at the specified time and in the specified area, moving very slowly in the indicated direction.
“He also advised that even though Helen lost it in the treetops, the object moved very slowly about that area before moving in over the city. He watched the object [on radar] for a ten-minute period [and] advised that from time to time while over the Cow Bay area it disappeared, then reappeared in and out of the clutter at 1,800 feet—a known floor for radar reception in that area. The tapes were recorded off primary radar returns at Moncton Center, some eighty nautical miles from Halifax. The computer sensor had applied a ‘chicken’s foot’ to the return … a ‘Y’ symbol which denotes an unknown. There was no transponder code attached to the return, making it a pure primary return.
“With the very real possibility that this object was at 1,800 feet, I re-did the math, coming up with a length—on each side—of [about] 4,600 feet,” reports Don. “How thick was it? Even one foot of thickness gives us 6.48 million cubic feet. For every extra foot of thickness, you add an extra 6.48 million cubic feet. Even at a ratio of 20:1, that would make this object 180 feet high, comprising over 1.6 billion cubic feet of volume….”27
Aldermaston, U.K.
Alien craft have a long history of monitoring our developments in the field of nuclear weaponry. Britain’s Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) is located on Ministry of Defence (MoD) property in Aldermaston, Berkshire, and it was adjacent to this area that two witnesses—who prefer to remain anonymous—encountered a large craft on September 11, 2004. One of the witnesses (ML) revealed the details of the encounter to veteran investigator Ananda Sirisena, who reports as follows:
“At around 6:30 a.m., ML and his wife were returning home after babysitting at their daughter’s house when they saw a huge object hovering over a field, to the right of the road that they were driving on. At the time of the sighting, it was a bright dawn with a clear, blue sky. ML had spotted the object first through the trees and, while trying to keep it in sight, nearly drove into the ditch on the left-hand side of the road. His wife [queried] why he was driving in such an erratic manner. He stopped the van and told his wife to look out through his window.” She then spotted the craft too. “It’s a spaceship!” she declared.
“ML informed me that the object was, in his estimation, many hundreds of feet in length, with pastel lights all around that appeared to pulsate softly [and] described it as ‘cloud-like,’ saying that the colors around the [central rim of the] object were like ‘moving clouds.’ … The couple observed the object for a short while, which ML estimated to be a few minutes. He had gotten out of the van and climbed up on the hood to get a better look. I asked ML to sketch the object, [which] shows a classic ‘flying saucer’ shape….
“The couple were just past Church Lane, located on Burghfield Road as it approached the M4 motorway, near the town of Reading. The massive object was hovering over a field adjacent to AWE…. Suddenly, from a hovering position, the UFO started to move directly over the MoD site, then rapidly toward the M4 motorway [and] was out of sight.
“ML is convinced there must have been many other witnesses because of the sheer size of the [object] and its proximity to AWE. He is certain that the object must have been captured on the innumerable security cameras surrounding the site [and] by drivers on the M4 motorway and possibly even picked up by the cameras that monitor traffic on that busy link between South Wales and London….”28
Tennessee
Some encounters with flying triangles have disturbing consequences. In the early morning hours of Saturday, October 2, 2004, Sidney, a country and western singer, was driving home from work on a rural road in Bristol, Tennessee, when he noticed what appeared to be a fire between the trees some distance away. “As he drove,” reported MUFON Tennessee state section director Kim Shaffer, “he again noticed the ‘fire,’ which seemed somewhat brighter and appeared to be moving. He neared an intersection near his home and exited his car [for] a better look. Slowly, from behind trees, emerged a huge triangle-shaped craft. The witness started to run but realized there was nowhere to run to, so he stood in awe and watched.
“The craft slowly came into full view, a perfect triangle which the witness estimated to be some three hundred feet in length and width, and only 100 feet or so high, blocking out all the sky. He noted three large domes, comparing each dome to twice the size of his car, burning brilliantly a reddish orange, lighting the treetops and illuminating the entire bottom of the craft. He also noted ‘rib-like’ structures evenly spaced and running the width of the craft. [See photo section.]
“As the object passed over the witness’s head, he stated that his skin burned, tingled, and felt really strange. He also noted that the sound seemed to [permeate] throughout his body and, being a professional musician, assured me that he could never adequately reproduce the throbbing hum he heard. The object passed over the witness, made a westward turn without banking, and was gone from his sight.
“The witness went home and tried to sleep but could not get the object off his mind. He had managed to get some sleep early that morning and awoke to a nosebleed, a metallic taste in his mouth, and his skin feeling sunburned on his back and face. He also noted that when he brushed his hair, strands of it were coming out in the brush. He also has been weak and nauseated since this encounter.”29
I asked Kim Shaffer for his evaluation of the case. “He is a devout Christian and would not dare to elaborate anything which took place that early morning,” he responded. “Sidney had lost fifteen minutes on his electric watch. He has monitored it closely (with the same battery) since and it has lost no time whatsoever. He has also been having recurring nightmares and been awakened several times by beams of light coming in his bedroom and strange noises (humming and buzzing) outside.
“I might add that he was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor (very small—three millimeters) in his frontal lobe just prior to the encounter … subsequent medical tests (MRI and ultrasound) revealed the tumor was gone—I think this was sometime in January 2005.
“I am shocked as well by the extreme interest shown by Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and the U.S. government to the report on the Web site immediately after the encounter. As webmaster, I am able to see the domains which visit the site. There were hundreds of visits from the aforementioned domains, which have never visited before or since.”30
Cambridge, U.K.
“Why don’t UFOs appear over major cities?” I am frequently asked. To which my response is that they have done so, on numerous occasions, such as over Aberdeen in 1956 and Phoenix in 1997.
Cambridge may not be a major city in terms of size, but for centuries it has remained one of the world’s leading centers of academic excellence. In his column in The Independent on Sunday in December 2004, journalist Andy Martin reported that while cycling back from a concert on a Friday night in Newton Road, Ca
mbridge—he neglects to give a date—for a couple of hundred yards he “had a clear view of a trio of radiant white lights in the sky, garnered with a few blinking blue and red lights underneath them. What I couldn’t work out was what they were doing there. I was pedaling while they remained perfectly still…. Obviously, they were nothing to do with an aeroplane.
“As I approached the end of Newton Road (where I live), I got off my bike and I was looking—slack-jawed—almost straight up. Had the guiding star turned up early? In fact, it was more of a starship, the bright lights just hanging there in the sky, I would estimate at a height of around four or five hundred feet. There was no noise, not a whisper.
“As I looked more closely, I could see the dark outline of a craft that was nothing like a plane. There was no central tube and a couple of wings poking out at the sides; it was more rounded or at least bulkier. But it was big, definitely Jumbo-sized. And it wasn’t going up and it wasn’t coming down. It was going neither right nor left….
“A couple of minutes passed by in which nothing—except for this great miraculous nothing in the sky—happened. Then, smoothly, gently, quietly, the UFO—for it was certainly unidentified and it was a flying object—tired of immobility and pulled away from its parking spot, picking up speed as it went over my head and over the house in the rough direction of Girton. There was a faint rumble—a kind of deep purring noise—as it went by. The way it moved had a silky, dancing quality…. I raced around into the back garden, but it had already vanished.
“I should add, by way of confirmation, that my wife and fourteen-year-old son (who had been playing in the concert) were with me at the time. I said to them, ‘Was that a UFO?’ ‘Yes,’ said my son. ‘Is there any chocolate going?’ …
