The Abduction of Pier Fortunato Zanfretta

The alien abduction phenomena is a tricky, tricky, thing. There are a variety of different proposed explanations for alien abductions. Many feel that they are completely fabricated events within the person's subconscious. Others are convinced that abductions represent a systematic biological program which is being performed by extraterrestrials in order to produce a race of alien-human hybrids.  Some believed that these experiences stem from sleep paralysis. Still others see it is as some kind of demonic activity meant to deceive and lead people from the path of righteousness.  I haven’t decided where I land on the topic yet.

Today I wish to take a look at an interesting abduction case which isn’t discussed too often. As an added bonus, at least in my mind, it doesn’t involve those pesky Greys. On the night of December 6, 1978 security guard Pier Fortunato Zanfretta was out patrolling his route around Torriglia, a village near Genoa, Italy. An Italian journalist named Rino di Stefano, who has done an extensive amount of research into the case firsthand, tells the following version of events which befell Zanfretta that fateful night:

As Zanfretta approached a client's uninhabited country-house (called "Our Home" by the owner, Dr. Ettore Righi), in the area of Marzano, his patrol car, a Fiat 126, mysteriously stopped dead. The car engine, lights and radio all failed seemingly for no reason. At the same moment he saw four strange lights moving about in the garden of the house and stepped outside of his car to investigate with gun and flashlight in hand.At first he thought that burglars were behind the house. So he walked through the open gate and crept along a wall in an attempt to surprise them. Feeling himself touched from behind, the security guard whirled around and saw something that filled him with terror: only inches away stood what he called: "An enormous green, ugly and frightful creature, with undulating skin, no less than ten feet tall". When he directed the beam of his flashlight on the being's face, he was so frightened that he dropped it, but quickly it up again and run away. While running, he became aware of a large and very bright light behind him. Turning around, he saw a huge, flat triangular form which was blinding in its brilliance.

At this point, I have to commend Zanfretta for keeping his senses about him and getting the hell out of the area. I’d like to think I would maybe stick around and check the situation out some more. Of course I’ve never come face to face with a 10ft tall anything. So who knows how I would actually react. Getting back to the account, Stefano continues:

Zanfretta shielded himself from the light with his arm. This thing which he assured was a flying saucer, ascended from the back of the house. It was bigger than the house itself, and produced a hissing sound. Later, Zanfretta said that he felt an intense heat. He made it back to his car and tried to call his security company's operations center in Genoa. It was 12:15 A.M. Carlo Toccalino, the radio operator, has testified that Zanfretta was speaking in an excited and disconnected way. He kept saying: "My God, are they ugly!". The operator then asked if "they" were human and if they were assaulting him. The answer was: "No, they aren't men, they aren't men". At that point, the communication were abruptly broken off

The radio operator called the chief of the security force and two other security guards were sent out to look for Zanfretta. Arriving at 1:15 am the two guards found Zanfretta lying on the ground apparently frightened and near hysterical. Stefano says:

When he saw them, he jumped up, gun and flashlight at the ready. Eyes bulging, Zanfretta didn't seem to recognize them, nor to understand when they told him to lower his weapon. The other patrolmen rushed and disarmed him. To their surprise, his clothes felt warm even though the December night air was quite cold.

The Italian police were said to have launched an investigation almost immediately following these events. During their investigation, they found that nearly 52 people admitting to seeing strange lights in the vicinity of Zanfretta’s encounter at around the same time it was alleged to have occurred. Stefano tells us the following in regards to the investigation:

Antonio Nucchi, the commandant of the Torriglia station, has stated that he was every confidence in the testimony given by Zanfretta. In fact, he has known the security guard for many years and, when I asked him what he thought about him, he answered: "I can state with certainty that he is a clear thinking man with no strange fantasies in his head. When we went to investigate the scene the next day, he almost didn't want to come, he was so scared. Only something exceptional could have frightened him so."

Per Stefano’s insistence, Zanfretta agreed to undergo hypnosis. According to an Above Top Secret thread:

Zanfretta agreed to be hypnotized by Dr. Mauro Moretti, a psychotherapist and member of the Italian Association of Medical Hypnosis, in Genoa on December 23. During that occasion Zanfretta said that he was abducted by "monsters about 10 feet tall, with hairy green skin, yellow triangular eyes and red veins across the forehead" who brought him to a hot, luminous place where they interrogated and examined him.

During the same session, Zanfretta also indicated that the creatures came from the "third galaxy" and that "they want to talk with us and that they will soon return in larger numbers." The aliens did not speak Italian to the guard, but used a "luminous device" to translate what they were saying.

To my surprise, Zanfretta was back to work only a few weeks after the event. I have to admit, I would probably use this encounter as an excuse for a vacation, but “to each his own” I suppose. Zanfretta may have later regretted this decision to return to work as these creatures from the “third galaxy” were not evidently not finished with him yet. According to Stefano:

At 11:45 PM on that night [December 23rd], Zanfretta was at work as usual, driving a Fiat 127 inside the Bargagli tunnel, near the Scoffera Pass. Suddenly he lost control of the car. On the radio, he reported that the Fiat turned on its own and came out of the tunnel. Terrified, Zanfretta tried to work the brakes and steering wheel, but the car continued on its own along the steep road uphill.

Speaking with the radio operator, the guard said that he was having difficulty with the patrol car, and couldn't see well because of the very thick fog. After going for about a mile, the car finally come to an abrupt stop, throwing Zanfretta's head against the steering wheel. He called the radio operator and this time, in a very controlled voice, said: "The car has stopped. I saw a bright light. Now I am getting out." Zanfretta and his car were found at 1:10 AM by other guards.

The first to see Zanfretta was sergeant Emanuele Travenzoli. Zanfretta was in a field near the road. His clothes were warm and dry, and so was his head, despite the rain. The man was very scared, he was shaking and crying. "They say I must leave with them. What about my children? I don't want to, I don't want to...". Again the Carabinieri were called.

During their investigation they found that, though the car had been in the cold and rain for a long time, the roof of the Fiat was as hot as if it had spent an entire day in the sun. The interior of the car was also said to be as hot as an oven.

All around the car were disproportionately large footprints. As measured by the Carabinieri, the tracks proved were 20 inches long by 8 inches wide, with a distinct empty spot between sole and heel.

In addition, the Carabinieri found that Zanfretta's gun, a Smith & Wesson 38 Special, had been fired five times. But the guard couldn't recall at whom he had fired the weapon.

Zanfretta would go on to have many other abductions and encounters with various “extraterrestrial” denizens, far too many to name here. Instead I invite those curious to learn more to check out the links below. Zanfretta seemed to not be too bothered by the actual encounters themselves, frightening as they may have been. Instead the majority of stress and negativity Zanfretta received was from earthly sources. After Zanfretta’s story got out, he received constant harassment via telephone. People calling him crazy or phony. However Zanfretta always maintained that the events he recalled were real and had truly happened to him.

What are we to make of Zanfretta’s account? According to all who knew him, he was a reliable, stand up guy. Co-workers described him as honest and most seemed to believe that something strange happened to him, if not necessarily an abduction. He never seemed to have profited from these experiences, although he did appear on television and Stefano would eventually write a book detailing Zanfretta’s reports. I’m reserving my judgement on this case for now. I will say that I do believe Zanfretta had a genuine experience. What that experience involved remains a mystery.

Additional Reading:

ATS Thread

UFO Research Network

Rino di Stefano’s site

The Valensole Incident

Stories of humanoid encounters are easily a guilty pleasure of mine. I have written on a number of occasions on this blog about the variety of strange tales of human interactions with non-human, apparently “extraterrestrial” creatures. As I was flipping back through the various bookmarks I’ve made over the years, I came across a particular incident which I wasn’t familiar with and don’t remember seeing it being discussed very often. I thought I’d take a moment today and share with you the story of the Valensole Incident.

Early on the morning of July 1, 1965 at around 5:45 A.M., farmer Maurice Masse was smoking a cigarette before he began working outside his home which is located near the French village of Valensole. As Masse was smoking his cigarette he heard a strange, whistling sound coming from overhead. Masse was apparently standing beside the ruins of a tall wall located on his fields, next to a vineyard, and had to step around the wall in order to find the source of the noise. Lon Strickler, at phantomsandmonsters.com tells us a version of the events which came next:

At the time, he was positioned next to a 7-foot-tall rubble pile at the edge of a vineyard, so he had to step out from around this to view the source of the sound. It was then that he saw something shaped rather like a rugby ball and about the size of a Dauphine automobile, resting on four legs some 200 feet away in his lavender field. Close to the curious looking object were two figures resembling “boys of about eight years.”

Masse was apparently more curious than frightened by this whole encounter and began to make his approach towards the entities. As he came near the creatures Masse could see they were hard at work collecting lavender from his lavender fields. When he got to about 15 or 20 ft away the creatures apparently noticed Masse and immediately stood up from their “work”. Masse described the entities as such:

less than 4 feet tall, as dressed in gray-green overalls with smooth, bald, pumpkinlike heads, large slanted eyes, and with little holes for their mouths. They made grunting sounds between them, although their mouths did not change appearance, and Masse was not sure where on their bodies the noise was coming from. (source)

Apparently upset or annoyed by the interruption to their flower picking, one of the creatures raised up a long, thin, pencil-like object and pointed it at Masse. This brings to mind the countless similar reports that Jacques Vallee discussed of entities waving pencil-like wands at witnesses in order to paralyze them. Here to, Masse found himself completely stricken and unable to move. At this point, the creatures entered their craft and flew away into the morning sky. One can infer that they were “frightened” by Masse’s interruption of their flower picking and had to flee the scene immediately. Personally this whole thing reeks of the “staged event” vibe. This idea was speculated on by researchers like the late Mac Tonnies, in his writings and in his posthumously published work, The Cryptoterrestrials.

Once Masse found himself able to move again, he went to the spot where the craft had landed. The landing spot had impressions in the ground from the craft and some kind of material which allegedly hardened into something like concrete days later. It was said that nothing would grow in the spot for some time. Many researchers, including Jacques Vallee, conducted interviews and investigated this case. They all came to the same conclusion; that the witness was reliable and was reporting what he believed to be a real event. An interesting little note to end this tale on is that Masse would later report to investigators that he had had some kind of communication with the entities, though he would never reveal the details of this communication. Strickler notes that:

Though he hinted that there had been some sort of communication between himself and the beings, he never revealed the particulars to investigators. He told Vallee that one was best off not sharing such encounters with anyone, even family. “One always says too much,” he added.

What are we to make of this incident? Assuming that the witness is telling the truth, and I see no reason to doubt him, why would these creatures go through so much hassle to obtain lavender? Is there more to the flower than we know? Somehow I doubt it. In my mind, this incident seems to lend credence to the idea that someone is staging these events in order to perpetuate a meme. Of course, that’s only how I feel about the case today. Who knows what tomorrow might bring? I’d love to hear your opinions on this case. Was it an expedition from some distant planet to gain specimens? Did Masse have a weird hallucination? Let me know in the comments below!

Further reading/sources:

Lon Stricklers’ write up

Educating Humanity

ATS thread Started by Kandinsky

Airships and Secret Inventors

That the UFO enigma didn’t start in 1947 with Kenneth Arnold’s Mt. Rainier sighting is fairly obvious to anyone who has read any UFO literature. The same, or very similar, phenomena has taken a variety of forms over the past hundred years or so. In the 1930’s Scandinavia was home to the so-called ‘Ghost Fliers’ which John Keel wrote about in his book Our Haunted Planet. These Ghost fliers would perform a variety of maneuvers which would seem to defy conventional wisdom; flying at night with no lights, flying in dangerous weather conditions, or killing their engines and seeming to glide before having the engine turn back on. Some time later you had the Ghost Rockets in Sweden in the mid to late 40’s which were whipping and zipping throughout the skies. Micah Hanks has recently written a book which discusses Ghost Rockets in detail, appropriately titled The Ghost Rocket Mystery.

These mysteries are all well and good, representing strange objects occupying our skies for reasons completely unknown to us. Today however I would like to turn the clock back and look at a mystery which occurred some 30 or 40 yrs before the coming of the phantom planes, when our skies hosted another kind of technology that seemed to be just outside of what conventional technology might have allowed. I’m speaking about the great airship mystery of the 19th century, and some in the 20th century, which flew all over parts of the US, Canada, and eventually made its way to Europe.

Jerome Clark discusses the Airship mystery in his, oft cited by me, Unexplained!. He points out something that I think is worth noting;

An outbreak of airship reports occurred along the border of Germany and Russian Poland in early 1892. As would be the case with later airship scares, the Germans were thought to have developed advanced aircraft that could fly against the wind (unlike balloons) and hover for extended periods of time. No such aircraft existed at the time

This idea that, so far as we are aware, no aircraft like those that were reported existed really fascinates me. It’s an idea which we will return to at the end of the post. For now, let us head to California in 1896 where the great airship flap is about to begin. Clark continues;

Beginning in mid-November 1896, numerous witnesses in both urban and rural portions of the state reported seeing fast-moving or stationary nocturnal lights assumed to be connected to airships. Daylight sightings typically were of a device that “somewhat resembled a balloon traveling end on ... and with what appeared to be wings both before and behind the [bottom] light,” as the San Francisco Call  of November 22 put it, or of a “great black cigar with a fishlike tail … at least 100 feet long” with a surface that “looked as if it were made of aluminum,” as the Oakland Tribune of December 1 had it. In some cases, observers reported seeing propellers.

Not surprising to anyone, in his book New Lands (which I read in Steinmeyer’s version of Fort’s The Book of the Damned.), Fort took an interest in sightings of supposed “mystery airships” (as he referred to them) and in one instance he remarked about something which I found rather amusing;

Upon the 28th of April, 1897, Venus was in inferior conjunction. In Popular Astronomy, 555, it is said that many persons had written to the Editor, telling of “airships” that had been seen about this time. The Editor writes that some of the observations were probably upon the planet Venus, but that others probably related to toy balloons, “which were provided with various colored lights”

Evidently, Venus has always been to blame for strange things spotted in the sky! Fort goes on to relate newspaper accounts of an interesting aspect of this phenomena. Fort shows readers;

The first group of our data, I take from dispatches to the New York Sun,  April 2, 11, 16, 18. First of April - “the mysterious light” in the sky of Kansas City - something like a powerful searchlight. "It was directed toward the earth, traveling east at a rate of sixty miles an hour."

About a week later, something was seen in Chicago. "Chicago's alleged airship is believed to be a myth, in spite of the fact that a great many persons say that they have seen the mysterious night-wanderer.

A crowd gazed at strange lights, from the top of a downtown skyscraper, and Evanston students declare they saw the swaying red and green lights." April 16—reported from Benton, Texas, but this time as a dark object that passed across the moon. Reports from other towns in Texas: Fort Worth, Dallas, Marshall, Ennis, and

Beaumont—"It was shaped like a Mexican cigar, large in the middle, and small at both ends, with great wings, resembling those of an enormous butterfly. It was brilliantly illuminated by the rays of two great searchlights, and was sailing in a southeasterly direction, with the velocity of the wind, presenting a magnificent appearance."

Along with the reports of these airships were reports of their, mostly human, “secret inventors”. Whenever an airship was sighted, it could almost be guaranteed that someone would step forward having claimed to have met the inventor of these crafts. In his, newly republished, book Operation Trojan Horse John Keel relates a story of one such person who claimed to have met the pilot of the airship. Keel says;

A San Jose, California, electrician named J. A. Heron claimed that the airship pilots enlisted him to make some repairs on the machine. He was taken to a desolate field north of San Francisco for the job and was rewarded by being taken on a flight to Hawaii. He said the craft made the 4,400-mile trip in twenty-four hours. His wife later told reporters that he had been home in bed on the night of the alleged trip.

While I don’t rule out the possibility that people could have made these craft, after all the craft seemed to be just within reach of the technology of the time, there doesn’t seem to be any evidence to support this idea. What are we dealing with in this case then? Are they all hoaxes? Some of them certainly were, it seems that the Aurora, Texas “crash” of an Airship is widely regarded as a hoax. It is also known that there were liar’s clubs and so it’s likely that some of the stories were probably made up. However there seems to be an underlying phenomena that a large number of people experienced at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century.

One theory for what these “airships” are, is that the Non-Human intelligence which has been interacting with humanity since recorded history (whether they be Ultraterrestrials, Extraterrestrials, or Cryptoterrestrials) have, overtime, adapted their conveyances in such a way as to shape our perception of them. This idea is largely the premise of Keel’s Operation Trojan Horse. The other idea is that perhaps, not entirely unlike a rorschach test, we are projecting our expectations onto a relatively malleable phenomena which is shaped based upon the viewers perception.

I haven’t decided where I land on this issue just yet. I fluctuate between the last two theories I mentioned, and perhaps the reality is somewhere in between the two. The only thing which I can say for certain is that the airship mystery is a fascinating footnote within the overall history of UFOs and Fortean phenomena.

The Case of Indrid Cold

Although Charles Fort’s books were obviously highly influential in developing not only my theories on various paranormal topics, but also how I look at and interpret reality in general, I would be remiss if I didn’t also give John Keel his due credit as well. Though my interest in paranormal phenomena has been a life-long one, it wasn’t until probably 2008 or so that I discovered Fort’s, and a little later, Keel’s works. Their writing styles, the content of the writings, and perhaps most importantly of all the way in which they encouraged a non-dogmatic approach to the topics, helped shape the person you see today. (For better or for worse, I suppose only time will tell). With Keel’s birthday being yesterday, March 25th, it got me to thinking back on some of the stranger tales that Keel related in his works.

One of my favorites is the case of Indrid Cold. While in Point Pleasant, West Virginia digging up information on the various strange occurrences which followed in the wake of the Mothman sighting, Keel meet and interviewed a man named Woodrow Derenberger. Keel tells “Woody’s” story in his famous book, The Mothman Prophecies:

At 7 P.M. on November 2, 1966, he was heading home in his panel truck after a long, hard day on the road. The weather was sour, chill, and rainy. As he drove up a long hill outside of Parkersburg on Interstate 77 a sudden crash sounded in the back of his truck. He snapped on his interior lights and looked back. A sewing machine had fallen off the top of a stereo, but there didn’t seem to be any real damage.

A car swept up behind him and passed him. Another vehicle seemed to be following it. He eased his foot on the accelerator. He had been speeding slightly and thought it might be a police car. The vehicle, a black blob in the dark, drew alongside him, cut in front, and slowed.

Woody Derenberger gaped in amazement at the thing. It wasn’t an automobile but was shaped like, “an old-fashioned kerosene lamp chimney, flaring at both ends, narrowing down to a small neck and then enlarging in a great bulge in the center.”

A door slid open on the side of the thing and a man stepped out. The stranger was about five feet ten inches tall with long, dark hair combed straight back. His skin was heavily tanned. Grinning broadly, his arms crossed and his hands tucked under his armpits, he walked to the panel truck. He was wearing a dark topcoat.

Underneath it Woody could see some kind of garment made of glistening greenish material almost metallic in appearance. "Do not be afraid." The grinning man did not speak aloud. Woody sensed the words. "We mean you no harm. I come from a country much less powerful than yours." He asked for Woody’s name. Woody told him. "My name is Cold. I sleep, breathe, and bleed even as you do."

Cold told Woody to report the encounter to the authorities, promising to come forward at a later date to confirm it. After a few minutes of aimless generalities, Cold announced he would meet Woody again soon. The object descended, the door opened, Cold entered it, and it rose quickly and silently into the night.

You can listen to Derenberger’s account in his own words here, it’s file # 47. Derenberger has been interviewed by a radio station and is offered the chance to tell the story. Derenberger would go on to have other adventures either with Indrid or his kin, visit the planet Lanulos, and eventually write a book called Visitors from Lanulos. Interestingly enough Keel actually wrote the foreword to Derenberger’s book even though he didn’t necessarily believe the man’s story.

The story of Indrid Cold does not end there, however. Keel mentions that a number of times while investigating the Point Pleasant area he received phone calls from mysterious persons claiming to be “Indrid Cold”. Of course Keel was no stranger to mysterious and bizarre phone calls, as many portions of his books dealt with his seeming “harassment” by some informed third-party. This concept is captured in the 2002 Richard Gere film, The Mothman Prophecies, where Gere played a ‘John Klein’. You can see that scene here on YouTube.

In The Complete Guide to Mysterious Beings, which has been republished making it easier to come by, Keel discusses the idea of the “Grinning Man”. Within this category he includes the figure of Indrid Cold. Keel also tells another story of a similar type of entity which two young kids encountered. Keel writes:

A blazing white light "as big as a car" nearly scraped the 550-foot-tall television tower outside of Pompton Lakes, New Jersey, site of the large DuPont explosives factory, on the night of October 11, 1966. A policeman and his wife watched the object move slowly northward and disappear beyond the neighboring hills.

On the other side of those hills. Sergeant Benjamin Thompson and Patrolman Edward Wester, of the Wanaque Reservoir Police, observed the same sight at about 9:45 P.M. as it swooped low over the reservoir. "The light was brilliantly white," Thompson said. "It lit up the whole area for about three hundred yards. In fact, it blinded me when I got out of the patrol car to look at it, and I couldn't see for about twenty minutes afterwards."

Forty miles south of Wanaque, in Elizabeth, New Jersey, two boys had a frightening experience that October 11, at approximately the same time that Officers Thompson and Wester were watching the glowing object cavort above the reservoir. There had been a number of aerial sightings in the vicinity of Elizabeth the previous week, apparently clustered around the New Jersey Turnpike which slices through that city. New Jersey newspapers from one end of the state to the other were filled with UFO reports during that period.

The two boys, James Yanchitis and Martin "Mouse" Munov, were walking home along Fourth Street and New Jersey Street when they reached a comer parallel to the tumpike. The tumpike is elevated and there is a very steep incline dipping down from the busy thoroughfare to Fourth Street. A very high wire fence runs along the street, making it impossible for anyone to scramble up the incline to the tumpike. There are bright street lights on that particular comer.

It was on this comer that the two young men encountered "the strangest guy we've ever seen."Yanchitis spotted him first. "He was standing behind that fence," the youth said later. "I don't know how he got there. He was the biggest man I ever saw." "Jimmy nudged me," Mouse reported, "and said, 'Who's that guy standing behind you?' I looked around and there he was . . .

behind that fence. Just standing there. He pivoted around and looked right at us . . . and then he grinned a big old grin."

Yeesh, that Keel tells a good story. I’ve got goosebumps after reading that account. The story of Indrid Cold seems to evaporate around the same time that the Mothman flies back to wherever he had made his home and after the collapse of the Silver Bridge.

There is an interesting postscript to all of this however. A man on reddit claims to have been contacted by “Indrid Cold”. With this being the internet, I’m inclined to be skeptical, but still suggest you follow this link and read about it on Reddit.

After it’s all said and done, I’m not sure what to make of Indrid Cold. Did Derenberger actually encounter a man from Lanulos that night back in 1966? Was the figure the two kids in New Jersey saw Indrid Cold making his rounds and generally creeping people out? I don’t know. I do know that Indrid Cold, as well as the other myriad creatures and spooks which Keel wrote about inspire me to always keep an open mind, to deny belief and dogma, and to always say, “ Forget the answers! What’s the question?”

Atmospheric Lifeforms

As anyone who has visited this blog in the past is likely aware, I’m a fan of alternative theories. Usually the more out there, the better! With this in mind I want to take a look at the old-fashioned (out-dated?) concept of Atmospheric Lifeforms. That is, actual living entities which make their home far above the ground high up in the atmosphere. At first blush this idea sounds a bit preposterous, but let’s look into the history of the concept a bit and reserve judgement until a little later.

Crawfordsville Monster

 

In Unexplained! Jerome Clark repeats a story which originally appeared in the Indianapolis Journal. The story is as follows; September 5, 1891 at around 2 o’clock in the morning, two men were hitching up a wagon when they sighted a “horrible apparition”. Clark continues:

One hundred feet in the air, twenty feet long and eight feet wide, the headless, oblong thing - apparently some bizarre variety of living creature - propelled itself with several pairs of fins and circled a nearby house.

They were not, however, the only witnesses. A Methodist pastor, the Rev. G. W. Switzer, and his wife also observed the phenomenon.

Clark notes that this creature hadn’t tired of harassing Crawfordsville quite yet. Continuing Clark relates:

The creature was back the following evening, and this time hundreds of Crawfordsville’s citizens saw its violently flapping fins and flaming red “eye”. The creature “squirmed as if in agony” and made a “wheezing, plaintive sound” as it hovered at 300 feet. At one point it swooped over a band of onlookers, who swore they felt its “hot breath”.

The legend himself, Charles Fort, also wrote about this account. One of the things I admire about Fort is that he never takes things at face value and is always questioning events. In this case Fort notes that when he happened upon this story he

“Supposed that there was no such person as the Rev. G. W. Switzer. Being convinced that there had probably never been a  Rev. G. W. Switzer, of Crawfordsville - and taking for a pseudo-standard that if I’m convinced that is something to suspect - I looked him up.” (LO! from The Book of the Damned)

Fort would later find that Switzer was real, was still alive at the time Fort was collecting these accounts, and confirmed that he had actually seen the monster. Later a Crawfordsville reporter, and member of the Fortean Society, named Vincent Gaddis interviewed some older residents of the town in 1946. According to Clark, Gaddis wrote, “ All the reports refer to this object as a living thing”. For the witness of this ‘monster’, it was an actual living creature of some kind. Clearly one that was, and is, unknown to science.

Unlike other more elusive crypto animals, these atmospheric lifeforms have reportedly left behind some traces of their existence. However, very much like other things in the paranormal, this potential proof is as ephemeral as the creatures themselves.

Clark relates another story in Unexplained! about a reported “carcass” of one of these atmospheric lifeforms. He notes:

One such incident occurred in Philadelphia on September 26, 1950, when two police officers saw what they thought was a UFO land in  a field. When they and two other officers investigated, they found a six-foot-long gelatinous mass that evaporated within half an hour.

This account sounds very similar to a possibly related phenomenon called “Star Jelly”.

Star Jelly

 

Hopefully you’re not eating while reading this post, that stuff looks pretty gross! Star Jelly, or as it is sometimes known pwdr ser, is a gelatinous substance which sometimes found on grass or trees. The traditional explanation is that it is deposited to the earth during meteor showers, perhaps it is the remains of these atmospheric lfeforms? Or is it as simple as science says; this jelly is the by-product of cyanobacteria?

Atmospheric Amoebas: Full of Orgone

 

Aviation and military historian, Trevor James Constable is an early UFO writer who was one of the first to theorize that UFOs may actually be what he called “critters”. In Constable’s way of thinking these creatures operated on Orgone energy.  Orgone being the ‘life force’ which all living beings have which was proposed by Wilhelm Reich. Constable wrote a book in 1975 outlining his theories on these entities which was entitled The Cosmic Pulse of Life.

Constable is an interesting character who has seemingly done more research into Reich’s Weather Manipulation concepts through orgone, but that’s all a bit outside the scope of this post. You should check out his site linked above for more info on all that.

Science weighs in or towards a conclusion?

 

The above photo is of a an organism called diatom, which is a single celled algae. This algae was discovered making it’s home about 16 miles up in the atmosphere by Researchers from the University of Sheffield and Buckingham University. The Telegraph relates the following:  

Researchers from the University of Sheffield and Buckingham University claim to have found evidence for microscopic organisms living 16 miles up in the atmosphere between Chester and Wakefield.

The scientists used a specially designed balloon to gather samples in the stratosphere during the recent Perseid meteor shower.

They found the fragments of single celled algae known as a diatom.

They argue that this could be the first evidence to show how life may have arrived on Earth from space, perhaps carried here by meteorites.

It is not the first time organisms have been found in the atmosphere and indeed the skies are thought to be teeming with microscopic life.

Though it’s not quite as fantastic as the Crawfordsville Monster, we do seem to have evidence that microscopic life is making its home high up in the atmosphere. Could there potentially be macroscopic life living up there? Could these creatures explain some UFO sightings? After all, UFOs are said to operate unlike conventional aircraft. Could that be explained because they aren’t aircraft at all? Quite possibly. If nothing else, it makes for an interesting thought experiment.