Fringe Cases of Alien and UFO Attacks

Alien and UFO encounter reports come in all shapes and sizes, ranging from the slightly odd to the downright utterly bizarre. It is a category of experiences that invites the strange, yet some of these are weirder than others, and some of the strangest of all are when these alien entities turn out to be anything but friendly

A bizarre series of frightening events played out in Abbiate Guazzone, Varese, Italy on April 24, 1950. It was around 10 pm that evening when a local mechanic by the name of Bruno Facchini, 40, stepped out after a violent thunderstorm to go relieve himself at an outdoor outhouse on his property. After he finished his business he stopped to have a cigarette and that was when he noticed a series of several strange odd flashing lights which at the time he at first thought were being generated by the receding storm. Seeing as the lights seemed to be emanating from a nearby field, he decided to investigate, as he was starting to get the impression that they were coming from a nearby row of power lines, and so he was thinking there might be a danger with a fallen power line. This is where things would take a sharp turn into the weird, and he would tell the Italian UFO researcher Antonio Giudicci of what happened next;

“It was still a little farther. I decided to go there. Then I saw there a huge dark shape, like a ball, with a flattened top. In the middle of the shape there was a small ladder, lightened by a green light. Almost immediately, I understood that the light came from some sort of lamp handled by a standing man who seemed to be engaged in welding. He wore something like a diving suit and a mask. Next to a power line pole I saw a huge, round shape. From the illuminated disc, a ladder came down. A door opened. I could see inside the UFO, because a light diffused inside, there was another ladder leading to a higher level of the craft; on the walls, there were bottles connected together in rows and between them I could notice that there were gauges and tubes. Driven by curiosity, at went closer, and I saw two other people, with the same clothing, moving slowly around the craft - I guessed that their diving suit was heavy and slowed down their movements. The craft, lighted by the welding tool, cast metallic reflections back.”

There were apparently enough sparks flying everywhere that the interior of the craft was eerily lit by the flickering light, and he could see numerous dials and cylinders within. As he was taking this all in and trying to process it he became aware of a strange buzzing noise “like a giant beehive,” and a sensation of warm air all around him. He noticed that all of the mysterious figures were similarly dressed in grayish one-piece tight-fitting clothes and were wearing helmets but their faces were concealed behind masks from the front of which emerged one flexible pipe which reminded him of a breathing tube. Even at this point, his mind was struggling for rational answers, with him surmising that it was a downed aircraft with mechanics trying to undergo repairs, but this would soon turn out not to be the case, as they moved in an oddly disjointed fashion and spoke amongst each other with an otherworldly guttural language. He continues;

“I offered to help, but the only answer I received were some guttural sounds that were not understandable. I wondered what their intentions were. I had the feeling they were inviting me aboard. Suddenly I heard an uproar, like the amplified buzz of a bee, or a huge power generator. I saw another ladder in the interior of the craft, and all around, tubes, cylinders, and gauges. I understood that this was not a plane, and I was seized by panic, I started to run away.

I was not so close anymore when I turned my head back. I saw one of the men raise some sort of apparatus he carried at his side and beam a ray of light in my direction. I started to run again, but immediately, I felt as if I was cut in two parts by some cutting tool or by a jet of compressed air and I fell flat.

After a while I saw four beings around the disc. Two were beside the ladder. A third one seemed to attempt to weld together a group of tubes. Exactly this operation produced the strange flashing that had attracted my attention. Thinking that this was some test of a secret prototype, I approached them asking if they had need for help. The beings started to make strange gestures and emitted guttural sounds, something like "gurr... gurr..." At that moment the craft was started and it was only then that I understood that they were not human beings. Seized by panic, I started to run away. While I ran, I had a glimpse at them and I saw that one of those individuals was directing something at me.”

He then felt that he was knocked back off his feet by an invisible force, and he felt a burning sensation on his abdomen. The figure kept its device trained on him and he dared not get up until the occupants filed back into the craft and it began to rise into the air before shooting off into the night. He says of the surreal experience;

“I was hit at the back by a light beam, and it had such a force that I felt pushed. I lost my equilibrium and I hit the ground, knocking my head against a stone. Hurt, scared, I stayed on the ground without moving. In the meantime those beings were finishing their welding job. Then they all entered in the disc, it closed and went away. They seemed not to be interested in my anymore. I am convinced they only wanted to scare me and had no intention to do anything wrong to me. They were busy in removing the scaffold and withdrawing the ladder. Then the door closed. All the lights went out. And the buzzing sound continued. Suddenly the sound became louder. The craft took off, gained speed and disappeared.”

It was only after the night had fallen quiet again and the buzzing had stopped to bring the normal nighttime sounds crashing back into reality that he dared get up and go home. The following day, he went back to the site of the encounter out of sheer curiosity and noticed that there were some traces and four circular depressions of one meter diameter each, arranged in a square pattern of 6 meters side length, he grass around it charred and with lots of pieces of melted metal scattered about the ground. It was odd enough that he contacted authorities to come investigate, after which they collected some samples of the metal fragments for study. Analysis of the shards could only determine that they were some sort of heat-resistant, anti-friction metal. 

In the meantime, the witness visited a doctor due to the persisting pain at the site of the mysterious beam strike, and it was found that Facchini had a blackened mark where the beam had hit him, and this mark had grown until it covered his entire back, causing him pains for a whole month. No rational cause could be found for it. He would go on to suffer health and psychological issues for the rest of his life.

In the following decade, we have a case from September of 1964, when 28-year-old Donald Shrum and his friends were out bow and arrow hunting at Cisco Grove, Placer County, California. They had gone out hunting in the area many times before, so there was at first no reason to suspect that this would be any different from any of their other trips, yet there would be a series of events that would play out that would end in one of the most bizarre alien encounters on record. 

At some point during the day, Shrum apparently got so caught up in trying to track down deer that he became separated from the rest of the group. As night began to fall and the trees grew dark, he decided that it would be better to just hunker down for the night and catch up with the others at camp in the morning, so he took up a position in a tree. As he sat up there listening to the sounds of the night and trying to find elusive sleep, his attention was suddenly drawn to a strange white light in the sky that seemed to be moving in a sort of zig-zagging pattern and looked to descend below the tree line. As Shrum watched, it seemed as if the object was bobbing along to approach his position, and although he could not hear any noise, he assumed it was a helicopter.

Curiosity got the better of him, and so he dismounted from his safe perch up in the tree to try and get a closer look. He suspected that it might be a search party out looking for him after he failed to return to camp, so he launched a flare to let them know where he was, after which the light rapidly came right towards him, coming to within 50 feet and showing itself to be no normal helicopter. In fact, Shrum would describe it as a glowing, cigar-shaped object that was immense, around 14 stories tall. From this object a smaller one detached and supposedly came to rest not far away, which was enough to send Shrum scurrying back up into his tree for safety. He allegedly cowered there in the shadows in hiding for some time until he heard the sound of what sounded like people walking through the brush below, yet when he peeked down, he could see that these were not normal people at all.

Shrum would claim that he saw three entities, two of them humanoids standing about 5 feet tall and wearing silver coveralls and goggles of some sort, while the third was a hulking robotic creature with glowing orange eyes. These entities approached the tree and much to Shrum’s horror the robot began shaking it violently with incredible strength, in an apparent effort to get Shrum out of it. The terrified man hung on for dear life as these otherworldly beings continued their siege of his tree, and at some point during this ordeal, he claimed that the robotic entity emitted some kind of white vapor from its mouth, which had a strange odor and caused him to black out. He woke up some time later feeling nauseous and lethargic, but still up in his tree. Unfortunately, his aggressors were still there as well, and Shrum threw some lit matches and other items at them in a pathetic attempt to scare them off, before finally remembering his bow and using that to fire on them, hitting the robot three times to send sparks flying, but doing very little actual damage.

In the end, Shrum’s bow and arrow assault did not dissuade the outlandish beings, and indeed a second robot much like the first soon joined them. Once again, the robots released that toxic gas to render him unconscious, and once again he awoke feeling sick, only this time the aliens had gotten bolder and were actually climbing up the tree. Shrum managed to pelt them with various objects he had on him and they climbed back down to circle and shake the tree. This would go on all night, until the coming of dawn, when they apparently sent nearly a dozen of those robotic things at him and caused him to black out once more with a voluminous cloud of that smoke. However, this time when he woke he was oddly hanging from a branch by his belt and they were all gone as if they had never been there at all.

In the light of day, Shrum was able to make his way back to camp, where he learned one of his friends had also seen the UFO the previous night. Shrum would come forward with his bizarre tale and even talk to Air Force personnel about it, who were very eager to write it off as either fantasy or someone playing a prank on him. We are left to wonder what it really was he saw, what those creatures were, and perhaps most importantly, why they weren’t able to get him out of that tree despite having vapor-spewing robot goons. One interesting point was made by The Iron Skeptic, who says:

“Another thing is the way that the aliens are reported to have acted. Think about this for a moment: They could conquer the non-trivial challenge of interstellar travel, but they can’t get a guy out of a tree? That’s ridiculous. That’s like Andre the Giant not being able to open a jar of pickles. One way or another, those pickles are coming out of there. Either these aliens were the absolute stupidest, most bumbling, least competent abductors ever to grace the good green earth, or they had a reason for leaving the terrified man up that tree.

Their actions do, to some extent, appear similar to the actions of the Hopkinsville Goblins or the tiny, wrinkled little men that scared the hell out of some drunkards in Ririe, Idaho in the sixties: the aliens don’t seem to really want anything other than to scare the hell out of some people. The UFO enthusiasts claim that sometimes, aliens just like to screw around with people they abduct, apparently to gauge their reactions. For instance, sometimes they’ll show abductees apocalyptic images of the world being destroyed, just to see how the human will react. Could this just be some evil, alien psychology experiment?”

It is an intriguing point to consider and makes one wonder. How indeed did these forces not manage to get this one guy down from a tree, and was there some mysterious motive for it all?  The case is certainly one of the stranger ones out there and has remained amazingly under the radar for the most part. Whatever one may think of such far-out reports, a case of a guy hiding in a tree while robot aliens attack him certainly is not something you see every day, and it is a truly outlandish case that will most likely remain confined to the outer fringe.

The setting for another outlandish tale is the Everglades, a vast expanse of swamps and tropical wetlands covering a massive 7,800 square miles of the southern portion of the U.S. state of Florida. It was to this wild realm of gloomy tangled, mosquito-infested wilderness that on March 12, 1965, a rancher and former constable by the name of James Flynn came to do a bit of hunting. He loaded up his truck with a swamp buggy and his four trusty hunting dogs, before making his way through winding dirt roads as far as they would take him until he was right up against the swampy wilds. He then unloaded the swamp buggy, let his dogs loose, and penetrated deeper into the muck-covered back country in search of deer. The terrain was very daunting and unpredictable, but by all accounts, Flynn knew these swamps like the back of his hand and was a seasoned outdoorsman, so this was all pretty routine for him. However, the trip was about to take a turn into the weird.

Flynn camped out there for several days, which were fairly uneventful until the early hours of March 14, when at around 1 AM his dogs picked up the scent of something out in the dark and went darting off into the murky night barking, snarling, and yipping excitedly. Flynn watched them run off but was startled when several minutes later he heard a booming sound reverberate through the trees and mangroves, sounding very much like a gunshot. This was followed by one of the hunting dogs bolting back to the camp whining and with its tail between his legs, and the concerned Flynn decided to get into his buggy and investigate. His first thought was that his dogs had come across another hunter out there and that they had possibly been shot, so he sped off towards where the sound had come from. The vegetation was dark and thick, making it very slow going, but he finally saw something up ahead through the brush, which would turn out to be far more bizarre than anything he could have imagined.

Something ahead was shining very brightly, but at first, he could not make out what it was through the canopy of the trees. The light moved off some distance, then returned to its original spot and descended into a clearing among some cypress trees. At this point, Flynn still did not register this as an alien craft, and when he got off of his buggy to approach on foot he was under the impression that it was possibly a helicopter or even an experimental craft from the nearby Cape Kennedy base that was in trouble. His plan was to go offer help, but as he approached he got a good look at it through his binoculars and could see that it was no normal aircraft. There, hovering just a few feet off of the ground, was a massive, brightly lit object that looked like an inverted cone, measuring around 100 feet in diameter at its base and around 30 feet high. It looked to be made of some sort of smooth, shiny metallic material, and around its body were four tiers of windows that seemed to be lit from within with an eerie yellow glow.

Despite his awed shock, Flynn continued approaching through the brush, mesmerized by the bizarre sight of this strange machine in the middle of the swamp. He was aware of a whirring noise like a “diesel generator” but it was not nearly as noisy as such a huge flying craft would be expected to be. Nevertheless, the dog that he had in its cage back at the buggy was going nuts, barking and snarling like mad. Flynn got within around 200 feet of the otherworldly craft, upon which there was a sudden whine like a jet engine, followed by a gust of wind that practically knocked him off his feet. Several moments later, he saw the craft emit a bright beam like a “welder’s torch,” which hit him in the center of his forehead “like a sledgehammer.” After this, there was nothing but blackness.

The next thing Flynn remembers was waking up in the rays of the morning light, but his vision was blurry and his surroundings indistinct. He got up and stumbled about, finally recognizing his location as where he had been when he lost consciousness, and he could see through his cracked vision that where the UFO had been there was now a black patch of scorched brush. He then managed to make his way back to his camp, where his other dogs had been waiting for him and then went to the home of a Seminole friend of his, who got him to a hospital in Fort Myers. The doctors found the man had eyes that were bloodshot and red as if they had burst blood vessels, and there was an ugly bruise in the center of his forehead. An examination showed that there was also numbness and partial hearing loss, as well as some muscular reflex impairment, but there was no serious injury, and he was then discharged and expected to fully recover. During his stay at the hospital, he excitedly told of what had happened to him, and although his ophthalmologist was skeptical, he would nevertheless vouch for the man’s reputation as an honest, down-to-earth person not prone to wild imaginings. Dr. Paul R. Brown would say of his impressions of Flynn’s story:

“I first examined Mr. Flynn on March 17, 1965. He stated that while he was out hunting in the woods in this area two days before I saw him he noticed an unnatural light in the woods off in the distance. He stated that he went closer to the light to observe it and suddenly he was struck by “something from a space ship”. He said that he was knocked out and blinded. He said he recovered some sight in the left eye but he could not see out of his right eye. Mrs. Flynn accompanied him into my office, and Mr. Flynn seemed to be in quite an agitated state of mind at that particular time. He kept repeating over and over “I know you wont believe me, but this is what happened” and then he would begin to relate the same story.

As best as I can tell, Mr. Flynn appears to be a rather stable individual. He is not considered to be a person who likes to make up wild tales. Although his story could be a cover-up story for some other type of incident, I feel that this is quite unlikely since a more plausible story could have been thought up to cover up for him should he have felt the need for such cover-up. Since the incident Mr. Flynn quoted to me that he actually was sorry he even related the incident because it had caused him quite a bit of trouble and apparently not many people believed him anymore. At the time of the incident I was somewhat skeptical myself, but quite frankly at this stage of the game I am not quite as certain as I was before. I keep asking myself why should he have to make up a story like this. However, we must face the fact that this could have happened by tree branch or some other object striking him over the forehead. The only thing we can be sure of is that he did suffer some physical blow to the right eye.”

The incident would be investigated by NICAP and the Air Force, who examined the site of the alleged encounter to find a burned circle of earth measuring 74 feet across, as well as some scorched trees. Despite this intriguing physical evidence, the Air Force was quick to dismiss the case, and it was suggested that Flynn had merely hit his head on an overhanging limb and then fabricated the whole thing. However, investigators from NICAP and local law enforcement weren’t so sure about this. Interviewing the people closest to Flynn showed that he was an honest, well-like citizen who had never been known to play pranks or tell tall tales. It was surmised that whatever had happened to him out in that swamp, he at least seemed to believe his story. A rather ominous footnote to the whole thing is that when Gordon Lore, the NICAP Assistant Director, contacted the Homestead Air Force Base looking for more information, he was told that they had absolutely no record of the case in any of their files, and that “Nothing concerning this specific case was found in the files of the base commander, intelligence division, civil engineering, nor this office,” even though they most certainly had investigated it. Curious.

We are left to wonder just what happened out in that swamp on that day. What happened to Flynn? What were these entities and what did they want? Is it even real at all or just a hoax? Was there a cover-up involved? We will likely never know the answers, and it remains another weird one for the files. In another case from the files of researcher Albert S. Rosales, on November 24, 1978, a man by the name of Angelo D’Ambros was out gathering firewood in the woods near Vicenza Italy, when he became aware of a pair of bizarre entities hovering beside him. The report reads:

“The 61-year-old man noticed two 'extremely thin' entities hovering next to him - one of which was roughly 4ft-tall and the other was slightly shorter. He described the spindly creatures as having large, sunken white eyes and pear-shaped heads with 'enormous ears that rose straight up and ended in a point'. There were a pair of small tusks protruding from the sides of their mouths, and their skin was said to be yellowish. They wore 'dark, very closely fitting overalls', and had disproportionately large hands and feet with 'extremely long' fingers and toes.

The smaller gremlin circled Angelo while chattering in an unintelligible voice, and then its taller companion attempted to grab the man's machete. Terrified, he tried to keep his knife out of the goblinoid's grasp, but felt two electric shocks pass up his arm. Evidently choosing fight over flight, Angelo attacked the goblins with one of the branches that he had previously been collecting. The two creatures quickly made a beeline away from the enraged Italian, but he gave chase like any good action hero.

He followed as the floating fiends fled through the forest, and arrived in a clearing where he saw a metallic, disk-shaped craft. He was just in time to see a spindly arm close a trapdoor in the dome before the 12ft-wide UFO shot up into the sky with a burst of red flame and sped silently from the scene.”

Moving along, in 1989, a strange series of events unfolded in the wilds near Voronezh, Russia, beginning with numerous sightings by frightened locals who described a massive, red sphere floating over a park. When witnesses went to see what was going on, the object apparently dropped down to hover right over the ground, after which a hatch opened to disgorge several very bizarre entities. These creatures were purportedly 9 feet tall, dressed in silver outfits, and most notably with neckless, domed heads holding three glowing eyes and a bright red device that spun around “like a radar.” These aliens reportedly swiveled their heads about to look around, and along with the aliens was a “box-like robot” that walked around with jerky movements and upon which the aliens occasionally adjusted instruments on its chest. These creatures were bizarrely described as walking around the park collecting soil samples and occasionally projecting multi-colored beams from disc-like structures in their chests, and strangest of all they reportedly zapped a teenager who got too close with a tube-like weapon of some sort, which “dematerialized” the poor boy. Luckily the boy reappeared when the beings boarded their craft and left. What was going on here?

The UFO phenomenon has taken many shapes and forms over the years and features some very dramatic accounts of all types. However, perhaps the ones that are the most unnerving are those that suggest that these entities are perhaps at times hostile, and do not come with our best interests in mind. Is this all just hysteria, wild imagination, and hoaxes or is there any reality at all behind such reports? If so, what do these mysterious agents want and why have they targeted us? Whether any of this has any basis in reality or not, it is interesting to speculate on, and a dark peek into what we might expect if UFOs were to ever lurch forth from mere sightings of anomalous lights in the sky to the sinister possibility of aggressive actions or even warfare, to step out from the fringe and from science fiction to launch into the real world.