The
blinding light of discovery that UFOs are real hit me in May 1975, a stunning
breakthrough in thinking after decades of scoffing.
For
seven years in the 1960s I was managing editor of a small daily newspaper
in Virginia, and I never allowed any UFO stories to appear in the paper. The
few that came in over the Associated Press wire were tossed in the wastebasket.
A cigar-shaped craft? Nonsense.
Later
I worked on four other, much larger newspapers, but in 1973 went to work for
the National Enquirer tabloid, first as a writer on the rewrite desk and then
as a reporter. Even though the Enquirer regularly published UFO stories at
that time, I still thought only crazies or misguided people believed UFOs
were real.
As
a writer, I found it grating to have to write a UFO story based on information
obtained by reporters. When I read their files, I was certain that they simply
had not asked the right questions. If they had, it would be obvious what people
were actually seeing, a planet, a satellite, a plane…
Writers
and reporters had quite different jobs at the Enquirer at that time. The reporter's
job was to get the story itself, to interview the people involved and do whatever
else was required, and then write a comprehensive report running perhaps thousands
of words. From start to finish, this could take from a few hours, if it could
be done by phone, to weeks, depending on where in the world the reporter had
to go to get the story.
Then,
after the reporter’s file had gone through several other steps in the
editorial process, it was given to a writer who was told to tell that story
in just a few hundred words.
IDLE REPORTER
PUT TO WORK
Writers
aren't necessarily better writers, but reporters are usually too emotionally
involved with a story to be able to cut it down to a tenth of its original
length or even much less. They’ve put in a lot of time and effort and nearly
every part of the story is, to them, as important as the next. The editors
reason, probably correctly, that most readers don't want to read long-winded
stories.
In
May 1975, a few months after I switched to reporting, the editor I was working
for inherited the responsibility for UFO stories from another editor who had
been promoted. A day or so later, my editor dropped ten unfinished UFO
files on my desk, asked me to pick out the two most interesting ones, and
work them. (I had nothing to do at the time and have sometimes wondered what
my life would be like today if he had dropped those UFO files on another reporter’s
desk.)
One
file seemed to have more promise than the others. A UFO reportedly had landed
near a farmhouse east of Superior, Wisconsin.
I phoned half a dozen people in Wisconsin and the family’s claim began
to take on credibility. I was told people were still seeing UFOs flying south
down the St. Louis River, and some thought UFOs might have been using the
bottom of the bay as a base.
That
kind of thinking appeals to editors. Good headline: SECRET
UFO BASE FOUND.
I
remember thinking to myself that here was a chance to see what all this flying
saucer nonsense was about. But the unexpected happened. In one week’s
time I got hooked on UFOs, and almost overnight I realized that it was a mystery
of astounding proportions.
I got a lot of help that week from Eugene Lundholm, a librarian and psychology lecturer at the University of Wisconsin at Superior and a veteran UFO investigator. Gene had looked into not only the farm case but also many other UFO reports over the years, and he pointed me in the right directions.
I
roamed all over northern Wisconsin, and also visited a couple of towns in
the 
Upper
Peninsula of Michigan as well as several small cities along the Minnesota
shore of Lake Superior north of Duluth.
Altogether I talked with sixty to seventy men and women who had had encounters or sightings over the previous two years. Only a dozen or so were related to the farm landing case.
Putting
my theory to the test – that with enough information I could determine exactly
what people were seeing – I asked every one of those sixty to seventy people
every question I could think of. And I was not able to explain what any of
them had seen.
The
realization was astonishing and very sobering. I’ve been chasing UFOs ever
since… still trying to learn what’s behind this intriguing mystery.
STIFF NECKS
AND WATER TOWERS
After
that week in Wisconsin and Minnesota, I went somewhat overboard on the subject
of UFOs. It was as if I was the first person who'd ever discovered them. My
family and friends must have been bored out of their minds, and for years
some of my co-workers still asked if I’d seen any little green men lately.
In
the beginning it was obvious to me that UFOs could only be spacecraft from
other worlds. But the more assignments I got and the more I stories I covered,
the more I realized there is nothing obvious about UFOs at all.
For
the next few years I nearly always got a stiff neck whenever I flew some place
on a story assignment, which was fairly often. My eyes were always glued to
the sky outside my airplane window, night or day, looking for UFOs that I
knew had to be out there. But in flying some three hundred fifty thousand
miles chasing down UFO stories over the next six years, I never saw anything,
nor in the tens of thousands of miles since.
Then
there were the water towers, the flattish round kind that stand atop a pedestal
a couple of hundred feet high. On the horizon they look like big disc-shaped
objects. I would fly into some city, rent a car and drive off across the countryside
to carry out an assignment, and somewhere I'd always spot one of those water
towers. I knew they were water towers, but I kept an eye on them anyway, just
in case one decided to zip off across the sky.
It was, as someone once said, my "alien obsession."
More
than twenty-seven years later I still have never seen a UFO, but I have talked
to about two thousand people who have, and they long ago convinced me.
What happened that week in the Superior-Duluth area
was that I "discovered" what so many others had before me, a genuine
mystery that was then and still is far beyond comparison with anything else
I know of. Something alien is definitely in our midst and has been for a very
long time... decades, perhaps centuries.
Whether the craft and intelligence behind the phenomenon come from other planets or star systems or universes or whether they're native to this earth is something that, in my opinion, no one yet knows. Whatever it is, when the mystery is finally solved it, will undoubtedly be one of the greatest stories of all time.