The classic must-have scientific work on UFOs is The Humanoids, (1969) edited by Charles Bowen, editor at the time of The Flying Saucer Review, (FSR) the most important journal in the field, published since 1955. The contributors to The Humanoids include Aime Michel, Jacques Vallee, Gordon Creighton, Coral Lorenzen, Antonio Ribera, and Charles Bowen, all important Ufologists of the time. Each present a collection of cases of landed UFOs, with the pilots visible or on the ground. The cases were collected and organized in a variety of ways, some by place, some by time. Such landed occupant observations comprise the bulk of scientific evidence about UFOs and the humanoids who drive them. That is because in the landed occupant cases we can clearly rule out the alternatives, such as swamp gas, or Venus, or secret military aircraft. They are therefore veridical. Many of these observations have multiple observers. Many of them happened in the daytime. All of them involve close encounters between humans and humanoid visitors, sometimes very close encounters.
The Humanoids is a book which cannot be found in the usual ways. In the forbidden sciences, it almost seems there is an inverse relationship between the rarity and obscurity of a book and its central importance. One can find used copies on the Web at www.alibris.com or just do a Google search. Charles Bowen has his own web site at cb.html, and that may lead you to copies of the book. Be persistent. It's worth it. The FSR (Flying Saucer Review) is also an excellent source of other cases of landed UFOs, and many back issues of FSR are still available. The Humanoids was originally published in 1969 as an issue of the FSR. A hardback edition was then published, and some of those are still available used. I have a Futura paperback edition, second printing 1977. Some of these can still be found.
There is no first case of UFOs, since we find them in the background of some Renaissance paintings, looking just like the flying saucers of today, and we also find drawings of them in Paleolithic cave paintings, from the last ice age, or in aboriginal rock drawings.
Kenneth Arnold's sighting near Mount Rainier on May 12, 1947 began the modern era of UFO sightings. There were many other UFO events in 1947, including Roswell in early July, and the Villa Santina case, which happened on July 23, 1947.
The Villa Santina is in Friuli, in the extreme north-eastern province of Italy, north of Venice and bordering on Austria and Yugoslavia. The witness was Professor R. L. Johannis, and he saw a classic flying disk, stuck in the side of a mountain, as well as one of the few examples of "little green men." They weren't that little, being about the size of the San of the Kalahari, and they weren't that green, being a kind of earthy green (Bowen, p. 188 ff.). This case was presented by Gordon Creighton. Professor Johannis said he knew nothing about flying saucers, because the Italian press had not begun to mention them. This happened only a few months after the Kenneth Arnold sighting, and a few weeks after Roswell. These small earth green characters with bright colored clothing are clearly not the same species as the small grays of Roswell (see the book by Col. Corso in the Bibliography).
The Johannis humanoids were less than 90 centimeters tall, wearing dark blue overalls with vivid red collars and belts and cuffs on the legs. Their heads were bigger than human, their skin was an earthy green, and they had 8 fingers without joints, with 4 opposing 4, so their precision grip was essentially the same as their power grip. Their eyes had a vertical pupil, like terrestrial reptiles or cats. They were very interested in the professor's climbing stick, which had a glacier climbing pick on one end. In fact, they temporarily paralyzed the Professor and took his ice pick. The two figures who had approached Johannis returned to their disk, which shot straight out from the rock, with a shower of stones and earth and rose silently into the air. "The disc suddenly grew smaller, and vanished. Immediately afterwards, I was struck by a tremendous blast of wind (the air shock?), which rolled me over and over.." (Bowen, p. 193). Did the craft really grow smaller, or was this an optical illusion as it simply moved straight away from Professor Johannis at a tremendous speed? Disguise, misdirection and disinformation are all ways of obeying the Prime Directive.
Creighton's case #64 is a sighting by some Argentine children of short, greenish humanoids. So, among the different kinds of humanoid, we can definitely include short greenish humanoids, "little green men," if you like. The following case shows us another unusual variation, that of humanoids with bright red skin, and just one eye.
Gordon Creighton's case #30 describes the encounter by 3 boys in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, with a humanoid described in the following way: "Upon his extremely round and totally bald head the man wore a large round transparent helmet surmounted by a circular object. He appeared to have no ears or nose, his mouth appeared to open in a strange manner, his complexion was a vivid red, and he had only one large brown eye, devoid of any eyebrow." So Binocular vision does not seem a requirement for humanoids. Gordon Creighton lists 5 species with just one eye. If this seems impossible to believe, Frank Edwards tells us in Strange People (1961) that in a backwoods community in Mississippi, there is an African American who also has one solitary normal-sized eye in the middle of his forehead. So this is apparently a natural variation in the evolution of humanoids. In The Humanoids there are some species with 3 eyes, and one species with many eyes. Generally, though, a humanoid is bipedal, bilateral, binaural and binocular, with eyes above nose above mouth, 2 arms with fingers, and 2 legs. There can be minor exceptions to some of these features. One thing that is universal is the body arrangement of head, trunk, arms and legs. None of them resemble Steven Spielberg's ET.
In case #28 in Gordon Creighton's list, a citizen encounters "a very tall creature with a melon-shaped head, very long and almost white hair, and three eyes which stared fixedly, without blinking." In Creighton's case #56, from a "Lima newspaper La Prensa of August 31, 1965, two people had recently been driving along the Pan-American Highway when, at a place some 20 kilometres from Arequipa, they saw 'a strange being, a Martian,' who 'resembled a shrub, was only 80 centimetres high, and had only one eye.' The creature was of a blackish colour. In addition to its single golden-coloured eye in the head, it also had other small eyes located up and down the body." The humanoid body plan can accommodate many variations.
Alien humanoids come in many different colors. I know of landed occupant cases involving humanoids with the following colors: white, gray, yellow, brown, black, green and red. There may be blue humanoids, but I haven't run across them. Some are covered in fur, others are hairless, with everything in between. There are many variations in fingers and eyes. There are wide variations in size.
Space-traveling humanoids can be quite tiny. This is Creighton's #55, from Cuzco, Peru: "Shortly before noon on August 20, 1965, numerous people, including an engineer, Senor Alberto Ugarte, and his wife, and a Senor Elwin Voter, saw a tiny disc land on a terrace of the ancient Inca Stone fortress of Sacsahuaman, just outside Cuzco. The disc was about 1.5 meters wide, of a vivid silvery colour, and from it there emerged two small beings of strange shape and dazzling brightness. Discovering that there were so many people about, the little creatures at once went back into the disc, which took off rapidly and vanished westwards." (Bowen, pp. 119-120). This is a diameter of about 5 feet, and a height of 1 foot, if it follows the usual dimensions of flying disks. Even if we allow a height somewhat greater, these little creatures could not be much taller than 12 inches.
Abductions and seductions seem to have begun in 1957, with the A.V. B. case, not published until 1965 in the FSR. The next was Betty and Barney Hill, on September 19, 1961, whose story was told in The Interrupted Journey, by John G. Fuller. A.V.B. was seduced by a white humanoid with freckles, with almost white hair, red pubic hair and red hair under the armpits. She had blue eyes, and was close enough to being human to easily cause an erection in Mr. A.V.B. The aliens in the Hill case may have been the same species, since they reminded Barney Hill of a red-headed Irishman. In both cases, the eyes were slanted, but not like the Chinese. In the A.V.B. case, the woman indicated by gestures to AVB that their sexual union would result in a baby, which she would raise on her home world. This is only possible if our two species share a common ancestor, such as a bacterial spore, hidden inside interstellar dust. Dust does not burn up entering our atmosphere. Tons of space dust enter our atmosphere everyday, and some of it could contain bacterial spores. To return to the AVB case. She could bear a child in the normal way only if she and her companions were just another variant of our own species, in other words, a branch of Homo Sapiens that somehow became space travelers in the past 50,000 years. I do not rule that out. We know practically nothing about our history as a species, except for the past 5000 years or so.
Another possibility is expert gene manipulation. A third possibility is a clone of AVB that would be raised in a distant star system. One more thing. A. V. B. could remember all this consciously. His memory had not been erased by the aliens, since it was in no way frightening or traumatic. AVB's story is not the product of hypnosis, which is very tricky, since hypnosis is apt to produce just what one expects. Or fears.
How do UFOs navigate? One of our humanoid visitors (I don't like to call them aliens) told Billy Meier, a Swiss farmer, that they came from the Pleiades (Randolph Winters, 1994, The Pleiadian Mission). This is surely disinformation, all part of their unwillingness to have any effect on our civilization, since a young star nursery dominated by huge blue white stars would be a hell of violent x-rays and UV and quite inhospitable to life. Still, it could be a clue, for those smart enough to understand it. The Pleiades (Seven Sisters) are 425 light-years from Earth, yet are easily visible with the naked eye, riding the ecliptic across our winter skies, in front of Orion. And they are a gravitationally bound system, which would look much the same from any distance. If they can be seen across 425 light-years with the naked eye, they can surely be seen many thousands of light-years with telescopes. I suspect that visitors to our corner of the galaxy first find the Pleiades, jump there, and use the orientation of the seven very bright stars to define a three-dimensional coordinate system. Orient yourself correctly, look up the tables for the distance to jump...and then jump.
A few human beings can make objects instantaneously jump into or out of sealed containers. This is popularly known as teleportation, but Psi researchers usually call it an apport, from the Latin Apportare, meaning to "take to a place." Uri Geller once accidentally apported himself 30 miles, from Manhattan to Osinning (Uri Geller: My Story, 1975, p. 238). He suddenly became aware that he was going to be late for a dinner party, so he began to run, and the next thing he knew, he was crashing into the back porch of Andrija Puharich, a well-known psi researcher of the time. That is where the dinner party was to be held. It was Friday, November 9, 1973.
Small objects often levitated or apported in Uri's presence, spontaneously, without any intent on his part. This suggests to me that levitation and apports are closely related. There are excellent controlled studies of apports by the Chinese (see the chapter "Chinese Studies of Psi"). While we don't fully understand them, apports appear to take a shortcut through a fifth spatial dimension, which could work if the geometry of the physical universe is as described by Stephen Hawking in The Universe in a Nutshell.
So there is reason to connect UFOs, Psi and physics. Star travel requires the ability to instantaneously jump hundreds of light-years. And the only thing we know which resembles that is teleportation. Physics provides no such capability, except in the invisible world of quantum mechanics. Levitation and apports could entirely explain the UFO modes of travel. Levitation is silent and effortless. The UFO humanoids levitate their huge space-ships silently and effortlessly, whether low and slow, or racing out of the atmosphere at thousands of miles per hour. Jumping lightyears requires teleportation. There is no other known alternative.
Could "jumping lightyears" be some technological feat which only superficially resembles apports for Psi research? Maybe...but even the details are the same. For instance, Hans Bender investigated a poltergeist case in which objects were apported out of a closed chest inside the house, and they would appear outside the house under the eaves. No matter how heavy, they would flutter to the ground in the classic "falling-leaf" pattern which has been frequently seen with UFOs (Vaughan, A. (1970). Poltergeist Investigations in Germany. Psychic, April.). When I read this, many years ago, I realized this is the secret to UFO propulsion and interstellar travel. Hans Bender was a noted German parapsychologist who died in 1991. Look him up on the Web.
There are several falling-leaf patterns in Bowen: "Mr. E. A. Bryant was out walking in the country on April 14, [1965, Scoriton, England] and had reached Scoriton Down, a spot with beautiful views, at about 5.30 P.M. Without warning he was confronted by a large aerial object which moved pendulum-wise to the left and then to the right before coming to rest, hovering some three feet from the ground, about forty yards in front of him. The object had appeared 'out of thin air' and Mr. Bryant says he was frightened." (Bowen, p. 21).
Jacques Vallee's case 24, September 28, 1954: In Froncles, three witnesses observed a large bright object which oscillated, then landed and changed colour." (Bowen, p. 33). In the next case, the falling-leaf pattern preceded the apport. "The Two little men went aboard, inviting Villanueva to follow, but he turned and ran to a distance, and then watched the craft rise slowly, in a kind of pendulum movement, 'Or like a falling leaf in reverse,' until at a few hundred feet, when it began to glow intensely, and then shot up vertically at staggering speed, with a faint swishing sound, and was at once out of sight." (Bowen, p. 91, Gordon Creighton's case #4 at Ciudad Valleys, Mexico in mid-august of 1953).
Following is Creigton's case 6, Pontal, Brazil: "On November 4, 1954, Jose Alves of Pontal was fishing in the river Pardo near that place. It was a quiet night; the spot was deserted. Suddenly, he saw a strange craft approaching with a wobbling motion, and it landed so near to him that he could have touched it." (Bowen, p. 92).
There is another aspect of the UFO phenomenon which suggests psi powers rather than technology. Frequently the occupants individually levitate or apport, and this is how they manage to get very quickly from down on the ground to inside the space-craft. This problem of ultra-fast ingress or egress has been noted by the Ufologists.
Here is a case of an individual alien levitating. It is Creighton's case #41 from Argentina in 1963. The 3 man crew of a freight train saw a figure on the tracks, apparently carrying the body of a small child. "Suddenly, when the locomotive was not more than 5 metres from the entity, he "shot upwards as though in a whirlwind' and vanished." (Bowen, p. 105). "Vanished" means an apport. We might be visited by humanoid aliens who don't even need spaceships.
I am struck by the amazing variety of our humanoid visitors, and their surprising and sometimes funny behavior. They don't look as we expect, and they don't behave as we expect. Some species speak fairly good Spanish or Portuguese. [Most of the good cases come from South America.] Many species communicate by telepathy, but there are many more that do not. And their speech is variously described (depending on the species) as grumbling or barking or cackling or just unintelligible. You would think they would know that we can't speak their language, but there are many cases where the attempt has been made.
There is also the comical vaudeville act in Creighton's last case, #65. "Their complexions were brown, and their faces 'shriveled' and furrowed like those of old people. The hair was white, their heads rather large in proportion to their bodies...One of the little men [80 centimeters tall] had a sparse beard and wore a dark peaked cap....The man with the flashing lights, who was the nearer, now jumped to his feet also and grabbed this cylinder by a handle in the middle of it, and began running off, staggering as he did so, and he collided with his companion so that both nearly fell to the ground." (Bowen pp. 124-125.
We tend to think of UFO aliens as peaceful and hairless. There are many cases in Bowen of bellicose hairy dwarfs that attack human citizens and leave claw marks. No real harm is done. They don't allow humans to use weapons, and will paralyze anyone who tries it. But they are not averse to a good knock-down-drag-out-no-holds-barred wrestling match, if that is the right word for it. Maybe that is a sport in their homeworld.
The authors of this book give sources for each case. Usually these are newspaper reports, but sometimes they are UFO journals, including the FSR.
The landed occupant cases have both veridicality and reproducibility. Certainly these cases cannot be dismissed as "swamp gas," Venus, experimental human aircraft, hoaxes or Jungian archetypal visions. They are real flesh and blood. Sexual or belligerent contact with them shows that. The thing that most demonstrates the reproducibility of landed occupant observations is that all of our visitors turn out to be humanoid. This is unexpected. Both scientists and science-fiction writers have given their imaginary aliens a wide variety of forms.
The observers in these cases were just ordinary citizens. They never became famous. No one ever made TV movies about them. The reports themselves stayed local, in the local newspapers, and were not picked up by the wire services or BBC. These cases come from many parts of the world, always rural and isolated places, and range in date from 1947 to 1969, over 20 years. If it were some kind of hoax, how could these ordinary citizens have coordinated their stories so well? And thrown in the fascinating variety of humanoid forms and colors?
Case closed. If you aren't convinced of the reality of UFOs by The Humanoids, there is something defective in your understanding of scientific method.
We now have enough data to come to the following conclusions: (1) Our visitors do not make official contact. Why not? This was a great puzzle to the early Ufologists, yet there is an easy explanation. They are anthropologists, with a little bit of the other sciences thrown in. Landed UFOs usually make off with soil samples and bits of vegetation.
Human anthropologists never want to interfere in the primitive cultures they are studying, because they know that contact between primitive and advanced cultures is often fatal to the primitive culture. Compared to our visiting humanoids, we are the primitives, and therefore official contact would be bad for us.
All our alien visitors take care to avoid interfering with our society. They do this in various ways. (a) UFOs only land in rural and uninhabited places. (b) Some UFOs are disguised as something else, an asteroid for instance (see "Bio.") (c) Or if they look like spacecraft, they may give us a sound and light show, making electrical systems nearby quit and other amusing tricks. This is to convince us that they travel by technology, which is what everyone assumes anyway. If you study Bowen, you will find no consistent correlation between the sound and light show and the action of the UFO. Some glow when accelerating. Some glow after they have landed. And so forth. (d) When our humanoid visitors make contact with a human, Billy Meier, for instance, they always feed the human disinformation, ideas that fit into popular mythologies, yet are easily refuted by scientists (Winters, 1994).
(2) Our visitors are all humanoids, with wide variations in size, color, hairiness, and the details of the face, fingers and eyes. In height, they vary from 12 inches to an estimated 20 feet, and some are as hairy as a wookie, the furry creature from Star Wars.
(3) They jump hundreds or thousands of light-years in an instant. Planetary systems with intelligent and civilized humanoids are quite rare, quite far apart, and we must plan on trips of thousands of light-years.
There is one little problem with all this, and that is Fermi's Paradox, widely known in the scientific community. In 1950, there was a discussion about ET and the great Italian scientist Enrico Fermi said, "If ETs are at all common, where are they?" Let me expand that a little. Earth has had oxygen, water, and dry land for the last 1.5 giga-yr. Even if ETs traveled slowly, surely they would have come across Earth in that immensity of time. If we found such a planet, we would colonize it. But that has not happened. Despite the disinformation given to some contactees, there is no evidence of any alien involvement in the evolution of life on Earth.
Let's think about this. Why not? The universe is three times as old as our Solar System, so surely there were star traveling humanoids 1500 million years ago (1.5 gyr). If star travel by technology were possible, we would expect both good and evil aliens. That is certainly what we find in science fiction. You know the difference between science and science fiction? One is science and the other is fiction. And UFOs don't travel by technology.
Our humanoid visitors are all anthropologists, which I claim makes them more spiritually evolved than missionaries, traders, diplomats, or conquistadors. This is a very important clue, one that could change our own path from dead end technology towards more fruitful pursuits. So I will list this as the fourth lesson to be learned from the UFOs.
(4) Only spiritually evolved species are capable of star jumping. Undoubtedly Earth has been visited by UFOs over the last 1.5 gyr, but they had no wish to alter the natural evolution of the planet. And I am sure they had no need, having learned to control population growth, preserving the ecology of their homeworld. Greed is a primitive habit, as is conquest. Self-control is an advanced trait.
Copyright © Dr.H 2004
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