The Book of the Bizarre: Freaky Facts and Strange Stories (72 page)

FIRST UFO SIGHTING

In 1947, less than a month before the incident at Roswell, New Mexico, Kenneth Arnold, a pilot from Boise, Idaho, reported seeing nine unusual objects in the sky near Mount Rainier. He described the mysterious objects as “bright” and said they were flying at a “tremendous speed.” His experience is said to be the first sighting of unidentified flying objects (UFOs). In
1952, Arnold wrote and self-published
The Coming of the Saucers
, the first UFO book.

UFO RELIGIONS

UFOs are major components of some new religions, including Unarius, the Aetherians, the Order of the Solar Temple (whose believers thought they would be carried away by the Hale-Bopp comet), the Raelians, and Scientology (whose mythos tells of a galactic emperor who brought billions of people to earth and killed them). The UFO religions, which tend to be apocalyptic, profess a belief in superior beings (the old gods?) who will come down from the sky and save the true believers.

“The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.” —JOAN DIDION

According to a 2005 Gallup poll, 24 percent of Americans and 19 percent of Britons believe that extraterrestrials have visited earth at some time in the past. Men are more receptive to the idea of alien visits than women are.

IF YOU'VE BEEN ABDUCTED . . .

Each alien abduction story is different, but there are key elements to almost every one. Most people who claim to have been abducted describe combinations of the following:

• Light, often from a beam that sucks the person into the spacecraft;
  
• A disk-shaped spacecraft that looks very high tech;
  
• Medical testing and experimentation, often quite invasive;
  
• “Lost time,” or amnesia about a certain period of time.
  

THE TUNGUSKA EVENT:
A UFO CRASH LANDING?

On June 30, 1908, an explosion at or above the Tunguska River in Siberia felled sixty million trees.
When the Soviet government funded an investigation in the 1920s, Leonid Kulik and his associates interviewed eyewitnesses who said they had seen a huge fireball crossing the sky. The blast was estimated to be between ten and fifteen megatons and left an enormous, butterflyshaped region of scorched and flattened trees.

What was it that exploded? An extraterrestrial body?

In 1930, a British astronomer proposed that it was a small comet. But in 1983, an astronomer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory wrote that comets are made of ice and dust and that a comet could not have flown so close to the earth without disintegrating. Expeditions sent to the Tunguska River region in the 1950s and 1960s found microscopic glass spheres containing nickel and iridium, which are found in meteorites, and in 2001, investigators suggested the blast was the explosion of a meteorite from the asteroid belt. But there's no typical meteorite crater in the area.

Other theories suggest that a small black hole was passing through the earth, a piece of antimatter exploded, or a nuclear-powered UFO blew up. Some blame Nikola Tesla. In an article written in 1908, Tesla claimed that he could direct electromagnetic-wave energy to any point on earth from his transformer at Wardenclyffe Tower in Shoreham, New York. One of Tesla's associates reported
that during one test the Wardenclyffe Tower glowed and an owl flying nearby disintegrated. That's when Tesla stopped talking about projecting electromagnetic force.

To this day, no one knows for sure.
Star Trek
's explanation is as good as any: An alien race saved humanity by exploding its planet and deflecting an incoming meteor that would have struck Europe. The remnants of the explosion hit Siberia.

MARFA MYSTERY

If you're ever driving through Texas and have some time on your hands, travel east from Marfa on U.S. Route 90 to the Mystery Lights Viewing Area, where you can witness Marfa's mysterious white-lights show. According to testimony, the lights flash one at a time, quickly fade away, and then reappear for the public's viewing delight. Are the lights reflections from stars, cars, or city lights? Spaceship high-beams? Astral glowworms? Nobody knows for sure.

THE GRAYS