Bizarre And Surreal Alien Encounters From the 1960s

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Bizarre And Surreal Alien Encounters From the 1960s​

By Brent Swancer

The 1960s were a weird decade for UFOs. It was an era when science fiction dealing with the subject was just taking off, mankind was taking aim at the moon, and there was a lot of talk about what lies out there in the vast unknown. Although there had been many UFO sightings before then, and of course after, the 1960s holds a special place of being a time of some very bizarre encounters with these crafts and their occupants, and here we will look at a selection of some of the strtanger of these.

In 1962 there were several odd reports of alien encounters in quick succession from out of the country of Argentina, in South America, long a hotbed of UFO activity. On May 26, 1962, a woman in the sparsely populated rural province of la Pampa, claimed to have seen a strange bright disc land, out of which lumbered a hulking “robot-like apparition.” The robot apparently seemed to be collecting samples of soil, and when it realized it was being watched it apparently stared at the woman with an inscrutable gaze for some time before entering its craft and shooting off into the sky. The woman’s husband apparently witnessed the disc depart as well, and the woman was supposedly so traumatized by the incident that she was taken to a mental institution for treatment.

In July of that same year, a 17-year- old youth by the name of Ricardo Limeres was riding his motorcycle along a lonely rural dirt road at night in the vicinity of Parana, Argentina, when out of the gloom a strange looking figure appeared in the glow of his headlight. Ricardo was startled and tried to swerve and ride away, but apparently his motorcycle would not obey him, instead being drawn towards the mysterious stranger. The vehicle stopped right in front of the enigmatic being, which the witness could now see stood over six feet tall and had a head “in the shape of a melon” with three eyes. This bizarre entity reportedly tried to grab Ricardo, before ambling off in a robotic manner that was “scarcely human” towards a bright white light in the distance, leaving deep tracks in its wake. The following month there was another strange encounter from the same area, when on August 21 a medical doctor saw a disc with a halo in the sky as he was driving towards the city of Parana with his wife. Right after he saw this UFO he noticed two beings over six feet tall, with light hair and huge eyes, which were carrying “luminous objects” on their foreheads, with which they made signals for the car to halt. The doctor did not halt, instead tearing off into the night in a panic, as most people in their right minds probably would. What exactly was going on here? In October of that year there was yet another weird alien encounter reported from Argentina, this time from an area between a place called Isla Verde and Monte Maiz.

The report was given to police by truck driver Ernesto Donles, who would say of what happened:

I was driving my truck to Isla Verde when a luminous object – apparently a space ship – surrounded by light of blinding brilliance, came down near me. Three very tall beings, dressed in strange clothes and carrying unknown kinds of weapons, came down out of it towards me. I lost control of my vehicle and drove into a ditch, but I finally got back onto the road and kept on driving at high speed. The three creatures kept coming after me. A blinding red light came out of their craft. The creatures followed me for about a mile and a half. When I finally arrived in the outskirts of the town of Monte Maiz, they suddenly stopped the persecution. They then got back into their craft, which disappeared into the distance.

The report was corroborated by several residents of the area, who also claimed to have seen a flying object which had let off a blinding bright light that had dazzled them. Argentina certainly isn’t the only place where such encounters were going on in the 1960s. On December 12, 1962, a peace officer in Milan, Italy by the name of Francesco Piania was doing his rounds of inspection when he suddenly heard a whistling sound behind him.
He would say of what happened next:

At first I thought it was my ears, but the noise grew louder. As I was going to leave the courtyard I saw a silver-aluminum disc, shining under the moon’s rays, landing. I turned abruptly and stood paralyzed with emotion. I saw a strange being about one meter (3’3″) tall coming out of the disc. His space suit looked silver- fluorescent and emitted a bluish light. He was wearing a black helmet and made a gesture toward the dome or turret rising above the disc. Another person appeared at a porthole. The first man looked at me and then signaled for me to come toward him. At that moment the other being signaled him, and he reboarded the disc and the engine flew off.

What in the world? A fairly well-known case occurred in April of 1964, this time in the region of Socorro, New Mexico, in the United States. On April 28, 1964, policeman Lonnie Zamora was on patrol when he came across a four-legged “egg-shaped object” and two figures in a gully. As he approached the scene, he apparently heard a loud “blast or a roar” as he headed up the very rocky, dirt road towards the mysterious object. As he drew nearer, he noticed that the two people standing by the object were no larger than children and appeared to be dressed in white coveralls. Zamora got out of his car and started to walk toward the UFO when he again heard the roar or blast and saw flames and dust flying around the object. The policeman believed the object was about to explode, and so he dropped to the ground and shielded himself with his arms. When no explosion came he warily glanced to where the object had been but it was no longer on the ground, but rather speeding through the sky.

The Zamora case became pretty famous, splashed all over the news and apparently heavily investigated by both UFO researchers and the military, but after this it just sort of went cold and there was never any official conclusion. Also from New Mexico is a 1964 report by resident Paul Padilla, who claimed to have seen UFOs and their occupants in the area on numerous occasions. A report from the Aerial Phenomena Research Group says of it:

Last June, he said, he spent from 2:30 to 4 in the afternoon with the people – men and women – borne by the space machine. The UFO’s occupants, said Padilla, were not superhuman. But they were superior to our species in physical qualities, and in quality of knowledge. UFO crew members, he said, expect a large-scale renewal of volcanic activity along the volcanic rim just west of Albuquerque. Padilla said his first UFO sighting came on the west coast, when he conversed with the occupant of a small UFO. Once Padilla sighted an UFO near Landrith. This was the largest – about 900 feet in diameter. The object he viewed near Peralta was about 160 feet across, he said. From it stepped a number of people from the far distant galaxy of Coma Bernices, unimaginably far distant from here. Clothed in tightfitting, one-piece uniforms, the star- men made an attractive crew. And what did they think of us? ‘Their opinion is not that we’re bad or good,’ Padilla said. Nor will they attempt to save the human race from itself. ‘They know there is a super intelligence that governs the universe and everything in it,’ he said.

Pretty strange and ominous, indeed. There were quite a few outlandish encounters reported in 1964 from all over the place in the United States. On May 8, 1964, a farmer in Newark Valley, Pennsylvania, by the name of Gary Cox was out on his 300-acre farm spreading manure and went to check on an area of the farm located within a patch of thick forest. As he walked through the woods he allegedly saw a shiny object which he apparently thought at first was a discarded refrigerator just sitting out there amongst the trees. This would have been a strange enough thing to find out there as it was, but things were about to get much stranger. As he drew closer, he could see that it was far too large to be a refrigerator, and that it was metallic, about 20 feet long, and 10 feet wide, and was shaped sort of like an egg, with no discernible doors, windows, or hatches.

According to a report by the Aerial Phenomena Research Group:

Suddenly, two beings appeared. They seemed about four feet tall and had clothing with no seams and a headress with a dull-faced hood. He could not distinguish facial features. The beings appeared to have arms and legs but he couldn’t tell whether or not they had fingers and toes because their extremities were covered. The one stood by the craft and the other came within about five feet of Cox, saying ‘Do not be alarmed. We have spoken to earth people before. We come from what you folks call Mars.’ Cox said he thought it was a joke someone was pulling on him and tried to laugh it off, but the men appeared dead serious, and he didn’t know what to make of it. The men said they were interested in fertilizers and soils and asked why Cox was spreading manure. They said they grew food in the atmosphere but changes in it were creating problems and they were visiting earth to learn about organic materials. Cox explained what wonderful fertilizer manure is, but that when it was not available, commercial fertilizer does a good job. Cox said both men had trays in which they scooped up soil samples. The Martians asked for some commercial fertilizer to take back with them and he said he would get them a bag from his barn. All the while they were talking the ‘space craft’ sounded like an auto idling. As he turned to go for the fertilizer he heard a slight sound and looked around. In a matter of seconds the craft was out of sight. There was no exhaust or fire raising the dust, he said. Since he had promised the fertilizer he went and got the bag and left it in the field. The next day it was gone.

In Conklin, New York on July 16, 1964, five boys were out exploring when they saw what appeared to be “a spaceman” and his vehicle in a field about two miles from their homes. The creature was about the size of a little child, with a human- looking face and wearing a black suit and black helmet that bore antenna- like wires on its top and had white lettering across its front that they could not read. It was also wearing a plastic or glass lens over its eyes and was making a peculiar noise that the boys described as sounding “like a kazoo.” According to their report, the being stepped up on top of the vehicle, whereupon they asked it if it needed help or water, and after this it seemed to fall backwards from the top of the vehicle. The children then left the field and ran toward home. When the area was investigated by adults there was found flattened foliage and some strange indentations in the ground where the boys said the craft has rested.

A newspaper reporter who came to check it out would say:

The spot is round and quite large, like a circle. All the moss in the circle was like it was sucked up from the earth and was scattered all over. The moss was so dry the color of it was white, where outside of this circle the moss is like it should be – green and packed into the earth.

In August of 1964, the region around Hamilton, Montana experienced a wave of UFO sightings, and as this was going on one witness claimed to have actually seen one of the occupants. A logger in the area by the name of Lou Smalley apparently saw a UFO as he was driving his logging truck on a remote road, after which he noticed a strange creature sitting on a rugged point of rocks above the road. He would describe of it:

I got a good look at it for several seconds, and it wasn’t human. The creature was possibly five feet tall; had a hairy or shaggy appearance and was not wearing clothing. It stood upright like a man, but it wasn’t human. I’ve hunted everything from bears to cougars in the area and that the creature didn’t resemble anything normal.

Moving into 1965 we have a year filled to the brim with all manner of UFO and alien weirdness from all over the world. On January 23, 1965, a Waynesboro, Virginia man was chopping wood at an archery range when he saw two noiseless flying craft descend from the sky to rest on the ground some distance from him. From these craft disembarked several diminutive humanoids, estimated as being only 35 to 37 inches tall, which had very long fingers and eyes that, according to the witness, “seemed to look right through you.” They were apparently dark in color and wearing clothes the same color as the ‘vaguely’ disc-shaped vehicle behind them. These entities then went back into their ship, and the doorway “seemed to mold itself to the ship,” leaving no evidence of a door after it had closed. After this the craft emitted a glow and took off into the sky to shoot off out of sight.

On the evening of January 28, 1965, seven friends were driving in the Brands Flats area near Staunton, Virginia, when they saw “what looked like a man walking” toward the road from a field, seeming to carefully study passing cars as he went. When they got closer, they could then see that the figure stood only about three feet tall, and was wearing a one-piece, skin-tight garment that was silver in color. Two more of the figures then appeared, but when the witnesses stopped the car all three of them dashed up over a hill to disappear into the night. When they went off to investigate the area, they allegedly came across a “glowing aluminum barn”, in front of which one of the figures stood. The scared witnesses ran off, but not before one of them apparently took a picture of the outlandish scene. It is unknown what happened to the purported photo. On March 4, 1965, a resident of Brooksville, Florida by the name of John Raney was walk through the woods as he did almost every day, but this day would prove to be stranger than most.

He would say of the bizarre events that transpired:

I often walk through these woods to hunt snakes for my son in the Navy. He studies them and I’ve supplied quite a few. As I walked through some bushes, I saw a flying object about 700 yards away. It was bluish-green and reddish-purple in color, about 20 to 30 feet in diameter with two windows on top which were about two feet in diameter. It stood on a four-legged landing gear about four feet high with a top about six feet thick. I went around the bushes, walking back for a hundred yards so I could come in undetected. Then I walked to within a hundred feet of the object. I crawled into some bushes to watch it. Then I saw something like a robot walk from the bushes about 200 to 300 feet away. He came over to the spaceship. Then the robot-like thing saw me in the bushes. He walked to within 15 feet of me and looked right at me. I stared back at his glass dome. About five feet tall with a human-like figure, wearing a canvas-like suit of a gray-silver color with a glass dome helmet. The robot’s eyes were further apart than a normal human’s and its chin was more pointed. He looked at me for about a minute and a half. I couldn’t even blink an eye, I was so scared. Then he pulled something from his left side, lifted it to chin level and it flashed.
He flashed again and I took off from the bushes. As I ran out the bushes knocked my hat off and I fell to the ground. My glasses fell off and I just lay there. I was in kind of a sitting position and looked back at the robot. He flashed the thing again and walked back to the object. There was some kind of opening under the UFO and he got inside. After he was inside some blades on the rim of the object started to move like venetian blinds. They opened and closed. Then the rim started to go around – counterclockwise. It made a whooshing and rumbling sound and then started to go around faster. I’ve heard all the sounds aircraft make and this was unlike any I’d ever heard before. Then the gear retracted into the UFO and the object went straight up. I watched it and it was out of sight in less than ten seconds.

The witness claims that he even had retrieved two strips of a paper-like substance with alien cryptic letters on it and that he had turned them over to the Air Force, but they had never been returned or commented on. On August 13, 1965, two teenaged girls by the names of Ellen Ryan, 16, and Laura Ryan, 13, were at a bean field near Kent, Washington, when they were approached by three strange figures that were “not human.” They described the individuals as between 5-foot 2-inches and 5-foot 5- inches tall, and their heads had “white tops where humans have hair, with very large pores and a large protrusion on back of the head.” The eyes were apparently very large and protruding and the face, which was described as “grey like stone,” had no expression. The lower face appeared to be very tanned. The individuals supposedly wore purple armless v-necked jerseys with white shirts underneath. The frightened girls allegedly ran away, and when they looked back the figures had vanished.

Moving over to Brazil we have an account from August 14, 1965, when on that day a witness named Joao Do Rios was fishing near Sao Paulo, Brazil. As he sat there by the water, his thoughts were intruded upon by a “small being about 28 inches tall with large luminous eyes,” that emerged from the bushes. This petite humanoid purportedly spoke perfect Portuguese, and told the witness that he was a crewman of a spacecraft. The entity even reportedly gave the witness a piece of “unearthly metal” from his craft. This piece apparently ended up in the hands of the National Railway wagon factory at Cuzeiro where Joao was employed, although it is unknown what happened to it after that. Moving back over to the United States, on September 4, 1965 a man by the name of A.F. Salsbury Renton was out hunting at the Green River Gorge, in Washington, when he was confronted by an alien spaceship, and he would say of his bizarre experience:

Then a voice came from out of the craft which sounded like it came from a loud speaker and said in a distinct, but loudly amplified tone, ‘Don’t be afraid little Earthman, we are not going to hurt you – put down that gun and we will come out and see you.’ I did exactly what I was told, otherwise I didn’t know what might happen or what they might do with me – and, by the way, I must have looked that way to them inside the craft. Probably in a lapse of a couple of minutes an oval-shaped door opened under the lower part of the tube next to this saucer-shaped disc and a man came out and walked slowly towards me. I would estimate he was about 6-feet tall and probably 185 pounds in weight – age, 30 or so in years. He was dressed in a one-piece tight-fitting suit made of some sort of metallic coating resembling aluminum or chrome – sort of a dull reflection to it. He also had a helmet that fit close to his skull like a rubber bathing cap. On his side he carried an odd-looking sidearm pistol with a barrel about the size of a regular flashlight, but instead of a hole in it, it had some sort of an oval lens of a purple-bluish color. He was about two feet away from me when he spoke in a very refined but soft voice, saying ‘Don’t be alarmed, I am not here to cause you any injury or to hurt your small animal (a Mexican chihuahua).’ Looking by me he said, ‘Your food is burning, don’t you think it best to turn your fire off?’ In all the excitement and all that had happened I had forgotten about the bacon and beans I was preparing for supper. As we stood there, my fear began to diminish and I felt confident, so I observed the spaceman from another planet more closely. His eyes were a steel grayish color that studied you – seemed to be looking right through you. His face skin was smooth, but not tanned – sort of pale – but with a tinge of pink like a store window manikin. He was the captain of the craft.

From Long Prairie, Minnesota, on October 23, 1965, a James Towsley, 19, was driving a highway near the town when his engine died as he rounded a bend. The headlights went out, the radio stopped, and as his car rolled along he came across a rather bizarre and otherworldly sight. He would say of what happened:

I let the car coast and then I put on the brakes because I saw this thing in the center of the highway. It was like a rocket ship. It was about 30-feet tall and about 10 feet in diameter. It was sitting on fins. Then I saw them. They were standing in a big circle of light under the ship. I jumped out of my car and was going to knock one over but then they came at me. They came right up to the car. There were three of them. They had no eyes or anything. Just those tripod legs and the matchstick arms. They were like tin cans. The size of a beer can. I was going to grab one but then I figured that if they could stop my car and put out my lights they could do something awful to me. So we just stood there looking at each other and then they turned around and scooted back under the ship. The light was so bright I didn’t see where they went. Then there was a high-pitched humming sound and the ship took off straight up. It went up about a quarter of a mile, stopped for a moment and then disappeared. When the lights on the bottom went out after it was up in the air, my car radio and lights came on – and my engine started without having to touch the starter. I drove 90 miles an hour back to Long Prairie to report what I saw, but I wondered if people would believe me. I was sure of two things – the rocket (it towered above the trees along the road) was a spaceship of some kind and the three objects that came out of it were creatures like nothing else in the animal world I’ve ever seen. They definitely were not people as I know them.

Police apparently examined the scene and found three strips of an oil-like substance on the road. The following year, 1966, was also a good year for the bizarre. In July ofg that year, the area of the Erie, Pennsylvania Peninsula was terrorized by UFO sightings and “monsters” running around. One witness was a young woman who claimed that she was out with her boyfriend when they saw a metallic, silvery UFO come down to land in some trees nearby, after which there was a bright beam of light that came out of the craft to move in a straight line away from it. Shortly after this, the whole incident got even stranger, and scarier as well.

A report reads:

The girl said there was a ‘thing right by the car. I don’t know what it was. It was bigger than you,’ she told a newsman. ‘It was about six feet tall. You would have to look up to see it.’ In a brief sketch, that the girl drew of the ‘Thing’ it appeared to have the general shape of an upright, large creature such as a gorilla, although she maintained it was not any kind of animal she had ever seen before. She described it as a dark, apparently featureless creature. Not human, maybe animal, which moved sluggishly back into the brush after she had leaned on the horn. Patrolmen next day found strange markings in the sand where the girl said the UFO had landed. These impressions, they reported, were triangularly shaped about eight inches deep at the apex, and then sloping upward to an area that was rounded and smooth. Going from there, moving towards where the car was stuck in the sand, patrolmen found three other imprints. These appeared to be of the same shape as the first imprints found, but were less distinct. From where the first two imprints were found, leading to within 1 foot of where the car was stuck, a pattern of conically shaped imprints were found by the patrolmen. These imprints, also very sharply made, were about nine inches in diameter and six inches deep, leading to the bottom of the cone-shaped impressions. They were staggered as if made by a walking creature.

On the night of October 14, 1966 there was a similarly bizarre monster reported roaming around after a spate of UFO sightings at Albuquerque, New Mexico. One report on the incidents would read:

It was a bad night. While some city residents were having problems with ‘monsters’ in the backyard, others were seeing strange objects in the sky. State Patrolman James Chelsea saw a plane trailing a massive cloud of black smoke. The plane disappeared in the smoke cloud and then two large black objects flew off into the sky. He saw the objects about 7:45 p.m. ‘Hair raising’ was the way 19-year-old C.D. McClure described a ‘monster’ that he said ‘looked like a man and cries like a baby.’ The ‘monster’ had been appearing almost nightly at the McClure residence. The ‘monster,’ described as having a black body and white face without features, stands about five feet tall. It has scratched along the wall calling the family’s attention to its presence, and it gave a hair raising wail something like a baby McClure said. On the night of the UFO sightings, the ‘monster’ appeared again. But this time, more than the McClure family reported seeing it. A sheriff’s deputy said that at least ten other persons reported seeing it. On a prior visit, the ‘monster hit McClure in the chest, knocking him out, he said. Every time it has appeared since then, ‘crying like a baby,’ McClure’s chest has started hurting. Another strange circumstance is that the McClure radio stops playing every time the creature appears, McClure said.

What on earth was going on here? Who knows? Moving along into 1967, on July 31 of that year security guard Sidney Kipzin was doing his routine patrol at Churchville Park, New York, when he came across a mysterious object in the parking lot, about 50 feet long, round in the center with extended sides that gave it the “shape of a fat cigar,” and with an array of green blinking lights on its bottom. As he was trying to process this bizarre sight, there appeared two “midget-like men” dressed in shiny black uniforms, who quickly walked past him to enter the craft. The UFO then lifted into the air and flew off. The evening there would be around 30 people who would inundate police with reports of seeing UFO in the area.

On September 15, 1967, two unnamed witnesses were on their farm in in Northwestern Connecticut, in the United States, when they noticed a strange light in the sky and went out to investigate. One of the witnesses would say of what happened next:

We saw a bright light over that tall tree in the distance. It was bright, it looked as big as a Volkswagon. The light was several hundred yards away and went from white to red and back to red, dancing up and down and about. Then, we heard noises in a barn about 50 feet from the house and a sound like a lawn mower trying to start. Then it looked like they came out of the barn. There were three figures, about five feet tall, but we only saw two at first, standing beside a mail box. The strange light still shimmered and glowed on the distant hill. The figures beside the mail box were dark and looked like the same shape all over. There were no distinguishing lines between top and bottom but they seemed to be straight from toes, if any, to head. What the beings were about to do by the mail box may never be known, because at that time a car approached around a nearby curve and the things made a wild dash for cover. They went real quick. That’s when we saw the third one. As they ran, the light on the hill went out.

What was going on in any of these cases? Are these honest, reliable reports of alien encounters or just the product of a time of psychedelics, the Cold War, and fervor over the burgeoning UFO phenomenon? What are we to make of these accounts? Whatever the case may be, they sure do shine a very weird spotlight on a snapshot in time when UFOs and alien encounters were all the rage.

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