“WHAT I SAW WAS REAL” SAYS ABDUCTION WITNESS
The Pentagon has been quietly investigating unidentified flying objects since 2007. The fact that they think they might exist is good news to those who have seen them
In June, the US government published a long-awaited report. Although the report did not, as many had hoped, admit to the existence of other civilisations, it did reveal that not only were objects appearing in our skies that the Pentagon – which controls the United States military – could not explain, but some clearly pose “a safety of flight issue and pose challenges to national security”.
The unclassified version of the report (there was also a classified version seen only by a handful of lawmakers) found that it could not rule out “non-terrestrial” explanations for the sightings. The report offered five possible explanations for the sightings and, crucially, one catch-all “other” bin.
It’s that “other” bin that has arrested the attention of stargazers around the world. If the US military has been quietly and seriously investigating UAPs since 2007, and if the official report cannot rule out the existence of extraterrestrials, is it time we looked again at claims of close encounters and the people who have made them?
“I don’t know if I was abducted or not. The whole point of my work was to try and understand what happened to me.”
– Whitley Strieber
Enthusiasm for the subject has permeated popular culture ever since the Roswell incident in 1947. Fast forward to 1961, when Barney and Betty Hill told the world’s first abduction story. We then had the Travis Walton case in '75, when Walton and all of his work mates passed a lie detector test, several times. There was another Mojave Desert abduction story followed by a spate of sightings by police and several military figures from the US, UK, Belgium, Russia, Brazil and several other countries.
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| Travis Walton was literally lifted off his feet infront of 4 workmates in 1975 |
The topic of alien encounters remains sensitive. I discovered just how sensitive when author Whitley Strieber, who is said to have been abducted in 1985, prematurely terminated our interview. In a subsequent email, he wrote: “I genuinely don’t know if I was abducted or not. The whole point of my work thereafter was/is to try and communicate exactly what happened to me and attempt to interpret and to ultimately understand the experience.
“I was turned into ‘alien abductee Whitley Strieber’ by the media. That was regretful and was something that I desperately didn't want. Much of what should have been focused on was lost in the eagerness to make a fool of anyone coming forward with the kind of experiences I had. Many of them [journalists] appeared to have had a good time writing their snide, quasi comical articles.”
He added: “Attitudes of many in the media and some of our more senior politicians are probably the biggest barriers to successfully understanding anything about this – and contributes towards leaving us, as a country, wide open to security and military threats from those who are accessing our airspace and interfering with the security of some of the most devastating weapons on the planet. Whether they are alien to our country or to our planet, I don't know, but what I do know is, it's happening.”
After I got off on the wrong foot with Strieber, though, he did come back and introduce me to highly decorated former US navy cryptologist Matthew Roberts. He was stationed on the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt when fighter jets recorded the infamous “Gimbal” and “Go Fast” videos of unexplained objects off the Florida coast during 2015, which went a long way to prompting the Pentagon’s UFO report.
Now retired from the military, Roberts is unmoved by the debunkers. “These things are picked up by multiple sensors that are sometimes from different manufacturers, so to think that they would all be glitching in the same way at the same time would just be impossible – it just doesn’t happen that way.”
Mick West, a science writer and video game programmer turned conspiracy-theory debunker, offers his own, more down-to-earth explanations for the objects: arguing that mundane things – tech glitches, camera glare, balloons and birds – are more likely than aliens.
However, now even the Pentagon has conceded there’s more to UFOs than that. In its nine-page report it states: “Most of the UAP reported probably do represent physical objects given that a majority of UAP were registered across multiple sensors, to include radar, infrared, electro-optical, weapon seekers and visual observation.” In other words, there was something out there and the images were not technical glitches. I ask Roberts about a theory put forward by West that the Gimbal object was glare caused by a nearby aircraft. “All aircraft – nationally, internationally – have to broadcast who they are. If they’re not broadcasting that, that’s very unusual. Mick West, bless his soul, he has never been in the military,” he says.
Roberts explains that, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, unidentified air tracks escalate very quickly. “It will go to the captain, it will go to the admiral, and they’ll want to know what that is because the thought would immediately be: ‘Is this a commercial airliner? Has it been hijacked?’ We’re not as incompetent as Mick West would have you believe. If something is unidentified, it absolutely has to be identified immediately.”
Despite the debunkers and proliferation of more mundane explanations for UFOs, reports of close encounters have persisted for decades. Terry Lovelace, a retired assistant attorney general in Vermont, USA, and author of Incident at Devil’s Den, kept his abduction to himself for 40 years due to fear of losing his job and associated stigma. He had a close encounter in 1977 while serving in the US air force.
“They took us and they hurt us.”
Lovelace, now 67, was on a camping trip in Devil’s Den national park in northern Arkansas with a friend and colleague named Toby when things got strange. They were sitting around a fire, struggling to chat over the din of buzzing crickets and croaking tree frogs before everything went quiet. “That sounds kind of clichéd – out of a movie – but that is exactly what happened to us,” he says.
Three bright lights appeared on the horizon and moved in their direction. When the lights were overhead, they could see that they were emanating from a black triangular prism as wide as two city blocks.
A blue laser beam darted over them, which Lovelace thought was scanning them. When it shut off, they became sleepy. Next thing, he woke and saw Toby peering out of the tent. The triangle was hovering above what appeared to be a dozen children standing in a meadow below them. “What are these kids doing out here in the middle of the night?” said Lovelace.
“They aren’t little kids. Don’t you remember, they took us and they hurt us?” Toby answered.
Lovelace says the moment Toby said that, fragmented memories flashed in his mind. Years later, hypnosis helped fill in more blanks and he recalled actually encountering creatures while inside the UFO.
‘People who were previously disbelieved and ridiculed should be listened to and given a fair hearing’, says Nick Pope.
For some, the fact that the Pentagon has finally admitted it cannot explain the behaviour of the objects may have been a surprise but, for PC Alan Godfrey, 73, it merely proves what he already knows.
On a windswept and wet West Yorkshire evening in November 1980, Godfrey was in hot pursuit of a herd of escaped cows in Todmorden’s housing estate. Instead of cows, he stumbled across a giant levitating diamond that would change the course of his life. Godfrey’s close encounter with this UFO went viral worldwide and transformed Todmorden into Britain’s Roswell.
Godfrey, a no-nonsense Yorkshireman born and raised in Oldham, is long retired from the force but still recalls the events of that night when he came face to face with the peculiar object – a diamond-shaped aircraft hovering 5ft off the ground while spinning on its axis.
He just had time to sketch the UFO on his notepad before he was blinded. In his next moment of conscious awareness, he was sitting in his patrol car. The UFO was gone. “I got out of the car, looked at the road surface, and it was like a whirlpool,” he says. The UFO’s rapid revolutions had arranged the dead leaves, twigs and other debris into an autumn-themed spiral.
In the aftermath of his encounter, he had visits from the Ministry of Defence, correspondence from a Russian scientist and interest from the world’s press. He even underwent hypnosis to uncover memories of his abduction.
PC Godfrey was ridiculed for years – many who claim to have had encounters of their own are reluctant to go on the record for fear of the same treatment – but things are changing. High-ranking government officials such as Christopher Mellon, the former US secretary for defence in intelligence, and Luis Elizondo, former director of AATIP, insist that there are aircraft in our skies that don’t obey the known laws of physics. Even Barack Obama has gone on record on the subject, talking to CBS this year:
“There’s footage and records of objects in the skies, that we don’t know exactly what they are, we can’t explain how they moved, their trajectory. They did not have an easily explainable pattern. And so, you know I think that people still take seriously trying to investigate and figure out what that is.”
When it comes to abduction stories, sceptics will say these encounters are either hoaxes or accounts of vivid dreams or hallucinations. Christopher French, emeritus professor of psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London, has spent years studying the paranormal and argues that sleep paralysis is a better explanation for many of these stories. “In some cases, you get associated symptoms, and they include a sense of presence; a very strong feeling that there’s something in the room with you,” French says. He adds that sufferers might hallucinate and “see strange lights moving around the room or strange figures or shadow people”.
That doesn’t fit for Godfrey’s story – he was driving and on duty at the time. “I think in Alan Godfrey’s case, he was sleep-deprived; he had been on duty for a long time. The most likely explanation is some kind of hallucinatory experience due to tiredness,” says French. What about the story he told under hypnosis? “The thing with hypnotic regression is that it is one of the best ways known of generating false memories. If you go for hypnotic regression expecting to recover memories of alien abduction, there’s a very good chance that’s what you’ll get.”
But Nick Pope, a former UFO investigator for the Ministry of Defence, is not convinced and thinks that Godfrey is genuine. “He had a lot to potentially lose by coming out with this and yet stuck to his guns.”
Doesn’t a hallucination explain what he saw? “I get that people do have hallucinations, but they tend to be the result of either mental illness or some sort of hallucinogenic substance, and this guy was on duty and was, by all accounts, rational. And so those explanations don’t seem to apply – I’m stumped when it comes to that particular case. Ask yourself: how many times have you been tired and come to the end of a long day? We’ve all been in that situation, and we don’t suddenly construct bizarre narratives about spacecraft and aliens.”
Is it time to start taking some of these people more seriously? “I don't believe everything I've heard to be literally true,” says Pope. “But at the very least, some of those who were previously disbelieved and ridiculed should definitely be listened to and given a hearing. If I didn't think there was any value in this beyond entertainment, I wouldn't be of this opinion.
“For everyone who tells you these people are attention seekers after fame and fortune, I would say, ‘What fame? What fortune?’ Who outside the UFO community has heard of Alan Godfrey or Terry Lovelace?”
Does Pope think live beings from other civilisations could be here just now on Earth? “I don’t know. I am certain they're definitely out there, but whether they’re down here or not? I don’t know. I think it more likely that we’re dealing with unmanned probes.”
If not hallucinations, equipment glitches or mistakes, many will say black ops, conducted by the US, China, Russia, or other militaries, are a more plausible explanation than aliens. “I accept that most military personnel won’t have sight of every single black project and, therefore, won’t necessarily know about every secret prototype, aircraft or drone that’s flying,” says Pope. “But the military and government, and the intelligence community have a pretty good idea of roughly where the ceiling is in terms of technology. So, when these expert military witnesses describe the sorts of speeds, accelerations, manoeuvres that are reported with these sorts of incidents, I sit up and take note.”
“The levels of psychological arousal in people living with PTSD go “through the roof” when asked to retell their stories.”Whatever one thinks about the veracity of these stories, many of the people who tell them believe they are real, and some suffer from severe mental illness in the aftermath. Chris French says the levels of psychological arousal in people living with PTSD go “through the roof” when they’re asked to retell their stories. “If you do the same thing with those who have experienced abduction, you get the same thing.”
Lovelace’s night in Devil’s Den changed his life and the life of his friend Toby. The US air force got wind of their ordeal and, per military protocol, separated and reassigned them. Lovelace ignored his orders and visited Toby to say goodbye. “Toby was falling apart,” Lovelace says. The two embraced. Toby said: “It happened, didn’t it?” “Yes, brother, it happened. You’re not losing your mind,” Lovelace replied.
Lovelace has suffered enormously since that night. “I’ve had 40 years of nightmares. I still have a phobia of crossing open ground. I still sleep with a light on and a gun by my bed.” But he feels vindicated by acknowledgments made by the US government, military personnel and Obama. “I’ve got a long list of people that I’m going to email and say, ‘I told you so.’”
For Godfrey, it’s 40 years too late. He is adamant about what he saw that morning in the UK. “I’ve had all sorts: you fell into some sort of trance when you were driving – all that piss. No, it was real. It left debris on the road – my headlights reflected off the fucking thing, as were the blue lights of my police car. This was a real incident. I don’t need the Americans to tell me there are things out there. I know what I saw. If I’d got out and thrown a brick at it, it would have hit it!’ It doesn’t change what happened to me and how I was treated back then.”
Danny Lavelle - Journalist for The Guardian newspaper in the UK
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