Strange Cases of UFOs and Lakes

The UFO phenomenon is full of very strange reports stretching back for many decades. From sightings to crashes to alien abductions, it really runs the range. One trend that has turned up is the tendency for UFOs to congregate around certain areas for reasons unknown. Bodies of water have long been one type of place these strange craft flock to, and here we will look at a selection of UFOs appearing at lakes. 

One very remarkable case of an actual abduction carried out by a lake-dwelling UFO is that of a woman named Betty Andreasson Luca back in 1950. A housewife, mother and grandmother, she would claim that this experience had been uncovered through hypnosis, and that the strange incident had happened when she was just a child. She says that she was in her home on a perfectly normal evening when she was whisked away by a “wheel-like vehicle,” and once aboard, she claims that it went speeding towards a large lake at dangerously high speeds. She braced for what seemed to be imminent, catastrophic impact as the craft hurtled towards the water’s surface with no sign of slowing down, but instead of the expected crash, it smoothly submerged and continued without issue or even so much as a shudder.

After some time of travelling underwater at great speeds, the underwater scenery blurring by outside, the craft then allegedly entered a submerged tunnel system, which had ice and icicles along its walls and was brightly lit through means she could not ascertain. She says the ship eventually reached an enormous underwater dome and base or facility of some kind, where she was shocked to see a collection of people in some sort of suspended animation within glass containers, frozen there like insects stuck in amber. She described hundreds and hundreds of these people, wearing clothing from different periods throughout history and placed in sets that approximated that period, which made her think of this strange place as a “Museum of Time.” There were people of all ages encased like this, rows upon rows of them, along with animals as well, and it was a chilling sight, She was then sped off back to her home, and would forget the whole incident for decades until she had it uncovered by hypnosis in 1980 after experiencing vivid nightmares of the ordeal.

It is hard to know what to make of this report, and seeing as Andreasson has gone on to report other encounters with aliens she says are angelic servants of Jesus Christ, her tales have been met with some skepticism. Was she really taken deep underwater to this Museum of Time by a UFO?

Moving on, it was the evening of November 23, 1953, and what had started out as a routine, quiet night for Air Defense Command Ground Intercept radar operators at Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, was about to get very weird very fast. It started with an unusual radar signature that was picked up over the Soo Locks area of Lake Superior, near the border with Canada. It was particularly odd, as the area in question was restricted airspace; no one should have been there at all, yet here was this anomalous target just flying through as if it had every business in the world to be there. The nearby Kinross Air Force Base was notified, and they began scrambling a fighter to take to the air and intercept the mystery aircraft. An F-89C Scorpion was prepped for takeoff and roared up into the sky towards the unknown, carrying within pilot First Lieutenant Felix Moncla and radar operator Second Lieutenant Robert L. Wilson. Little did anyone know that they were about to fly out into one of the greatest UFO mysteries in history, or that they would not be coming back at all.

Once in the air, Wilson went about trying to track the mysterious object, but this would prove to be easier said than done, as he had trouble getting a lock on it. Instead, ground radar operators kept constant radio contact, guiding the plane towards its target, yet as they descended from a higher altitude to engage, the object reportedly made a sudden, sharp turn and evaded them. The F-89 panned around to continue the pursuit, and the object managed to match their movements and remain elusive, almost as if it were toying with them. Meanwhile, ground radar was watching this cat and mouse game unfold as two blips on a radar screen, and at one point at an altitude of 8,000 feet and around 70 miles from Keweenaw Point, the two blips seemed to merge on the screen. This was not necessarily completely shocking in and of itself, as there was no distress signal issued and it was just thought that the two aircraft were passing over or under each other, yet when the expected separation of the single blip into two did not happen, and radio contact with the F-89 was lost as that blip just continued off as one signature things got more worrying. It was thought that this meant the two objects had collided, yet the single blip continued its journey on its original course with no sign of having any problems, until it left the radar range altogether.

There were panicked attempts to recover radio contact with Moncla, but there was nothing but silence in return, and so it was assumed that their plane had crashed, and a rescue mission was immediately launched, involving both the American and Canadian Air Forces, as well as numerous ships. The area where the blips had become one was then scoured for any sign of the men or their plane, but not a single sign of any wreckage was found, as if they had just flown off the face of the earth. Neither was any sign found of the mysterious aircraft that had started all of this, and it too seemed to have just vanished.

In the meantime, the USAF got off to an unsteady start trying to explain all of this to the public, at first saying that the F-89 had crashed after chasing a mysterious unidentified object, but they soon backpedaled away from this and completely changed their story. The official report was now that the object that was being chased was actually a Canadian C-47 Skytrain, later oddly changed to a DC-3 airliner, that had flown off course and that the F-89 had crashed due to pilot difficulties on the way back from successfully guiding the Canadian aircraft back on course, speculated as likely caused by Moncla experiencing vertigo, combined with the poor weather at the time. Yet, this doesn’t jibe with the fact that two radar blips had gone in, merged, and only one had come out. The Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) also changed their story, at first saying that the DC-3 pilot had not been aware of the American jet at all, yet they later claimed that there had been no Canadian aircraft in the area at all at the time of the incident. Either way, according to the RCAF the incident had never happened at all.

Curious, and it would get even curiouser when ex-Marine and UFO researcher Donald Keyhoe found in leaked Air Force documents that far from considering this an open and shut case, the government in fact considered it to be a very anomalous occurrence that they could not explain. Keyhoe also found that there had been wildly conflicting stories from Air Force officials when informing the families of the victims, with some saying the plane had come in low to crash into Lake Superior and others saying that the plane had exploded and disintegrated in midair. This last one is strange, because does vertigo cause a plane to explode in midair? Without any wreckage to examine, it is hard to say, but what is for certain is that the USAF and RCAF couldn’t keep their stories straight. Making it a bit more ominous and conspiratorial is the fact that investigators from the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) who looked into it were surprised to find that Moncla’s mission had apparently been struck from the official record altogether. They would write:

“There is no record in the Air Force files of sighting at Kinross AFB on 23 November 1953… There is no case in the files which even closely parallels these circumstances.”

Other odd things would pop up related to the case. One is that UFO researcher John Tenney would claim to have spoken to a member of the USAF who claimed that there had been a faint radio transmission from Moncla hours after his plane was said to have gone down, which seems weird, and it is hard to know what to make of. There would also be a possible clue in the report of some railway workers along the Canadian Algoma Central Railway, who claimed that they had heard a huge explosion on the night of the incident. These incoming leads have done little to solve the mystery, and indeed have only served to sprinkle it with more oddness.

The whole Kinross incident actually received relatively little coverage and remained fairly obscure to the general public at the time, perhaps to the relief of the governments involved, and it flew under the radar for quite a few years until it was sort of resurrected again in 1968. In October of that year, some wreckage was found near the eastern shore of Lake Superior that looked very much like that of a USAF fighter plane, but the only confirmation forthcoming was an Air Force officer admitting that they seemed to be from one of their planes, but the report was never officially recognized and the identity of the parts remains unknown. In 2006, interest in the case was piqued again when it was claimed that a group of Michigan divers from the “Great Lakes Dive Company” had discovered Moncla's F-89 at the bottom of Lake Superior, even providing sonar and photographic evidence. However, efforts to contact the company all led to a man calling himself “Adam Jimenez,” who was very vague about it all. It would later be found that the Great Lakes Dive Company didn’t even really exist, that the claims were likely a part of an elaborate hoax, and Jimenez soon completely disappeared after that.

With so many mysteries and so many conspiracies surrounding it, theories have flown about what happened to the plane and the two men. Maybe it was a crash, just as the military has said, but maybe it was something more. The idea has been put forward that this could have involved some top-secret experimental aircraft, possibly from a foreign power, that was engaged out there. There is also the notion that this was a genuine UFO encounter with something beyond our understanding, an otherworldly craft that either collided with the F-89, shot it down, or even abducted the entire plane to whisk it off to places unknown. In the end, we are left with a case that officially remains a simple crash, but which is far from satisfactorily explained. With all of the changing stories and obfuscation, there are only a few things we know for sure. We know that Moncla and Wilson took off in that plane to never return. We know that two radar blips converged and only one left. And we know that there has never been any other trace found of the missing plane or crew. Other than that, there is nothing concrete to go on; the government has been very opaque on the whole incident, and we will probably never get the answers we seek, even as that plane and its two crew remain missing.

On October 26, 1958 at 10:30 PM, near the Loch Raven Dam, north of Baltimore, Maryland, two men by the names of Phillip Small and Alvin Cohenwere driving along and as they approached a bridge, they saw what appeared to be a “flattened out, egg-shaped object” hovering approximately 100-150 feet from the top of the bridge. They slowed their vehicle down to try and get a better look, and as they did, their car just completely died and would not start again. The frightened men looked on to see the object flash a blinding white light, which was accompanied by a loud, low rumble like thunder. The UFO then slowly rose straight up, seeming to get even brighter as it did so, and then flew off out of sight. 

The men were then able to restart their car and rush to the nearest phone to report their sighting to the Towson Police Department. Two patrolmen would arrive at the scene to find that the witnesses were experiencing an excruciating burning sensation on their skin, so they were taken to St. Joseph's Hospital in Baltimore for treatment. Project Blue Book investigated the case, but found no absolute cause for the appearance of the object or the physical symptoms experienced by the witnesses. The case remains unidentified, although the Air Force did state that the object constituted no security threat to the United States.

In the spring of 1959, a U.S. Air Force C-118, now called a Douglas DC-6, was doing training runs at McChord Air Force Base, also called McChord Field, in Pierce County, Washington. On April 1, the large cargo aircraft was doing takeoffs and landing training, particularly what are called “touch and go” landings, after which the plane would circle back around and do another run. On this day, the plane had a very experienced crew, with seasoned pilot 1st Lieutenant Robert Roy Dimick, his co-pilot 1st Lieutenant Thomas E. Lasater, and flight engineers Technical Sergeant Guy J. Cunningham and Staff Sergeant Arthur T. Foote. Everything was going to plan, and it was all considered to be pretty routine stuff, but then something very odd would happen that would launch this plane into an obscure but fascinating oddity of UFO history.

During one of the landing runs, the plane was told to hold off and let some approaching fighter jets land, so Dimick brought the aircraft into a holding pattern over nearby Bonney Lake while they waited. At some point during this holding pattern, which was a mundane maneuver the pilot had done many times before, the pilot allegedly suddenly made a panicked radio call, saying, “We’ve hit something or something has hit us.” The plane then quickly lost altitude as the pilots struggled to maintain control, finally clipping some treetops in the surrounding wilderness, which heavily damaged the wing. The plane would then continue limping on, spewing flames the whole way, and finally come down just outside the town of Orting, killing everyone on board.

For the Air Force, there was nothing mysterious about it. They officially explained the crash as due to pilot error and a misunderstanding between the plane and ground control over who was tracking its altitude, all compounded by the fact that it was very dark and there were no ground lights in the wilderness they were over. For the Air Force, it was just a tragic accident, move along, nothing to see here. However, some odd details would begin to emerge that seemed to point to something far stranger. In the days after the crash, some locals claimed that they had heard what sounded like sonic booms at around the time of the accident, and there were also some reports of seeing strange lights in the sky in the weeks before and even on the evening in question. When combined with the claim that the pilot had said they had hit something, this started to spawn rumors that the plane might have actually collided with a UFO. According to some researchers, the plane also did not seem to hit the ground at an angle, as one would expect, but rather it has been claimed that it seemed to have almost come down vertically, as if pushed down from above. Also, according to some witnesses, there were sinister efforts by the military to quiet local officials in Orting from talking about it.

Pushing it all further into the realm of conspiracies is the fact that the original report on the incident seems to have had two whole pages redacted from it, and numerous requests for the information have allegedly been denied time and time again. Why should that be if this was a simple training accident involving pilot and ground tower error? Also, the doomed plane was flying in calm conditions on a routine run, and suddenly radioed a collision, before going down to take the lives of all aboard. With all of the reports of the lights and sonic booms and other strangeness surrounding this case, is it all as the Air Force says it was, or is there something else more mysterious going on here?

The case of the Bonney Lake incident is fairly obscure, but it has all the makings of an intriguing case. What really caused that plane to go down back in 1959? What did those men potentially witness out there while soaring over that swath of wilderness? What did that call mean? That they had hit something? What could that have been, and how does that tie into the official explanation? Why the redacted pages? Although the military claims it was all an accident, these oddities and discrepancies have ensured that the case has still generated discussion in some circles, and considering we will probably never really know the full story, it seems destined to do so for some time to come.

On the night of March 14, 1965, James W. Flynn, who is a rancher and hunting dog trainer, was camped out for the night at Lake Okeechobee in the Florida Everglades, and one night his dogs suddenly became uncommonly agitated and restless. He looked around, expecting visitors, but instead he saw a bright light silently and slowly descending about a mile away. At first, he thought it might be an airplane in trouble, so he got into his buggy to try and get closer to investigate, following an eerie glow through the trees. As the terrain grew more treacherous, he was forced to stop the buggy and continue on foot through the glow-frosted gloom towards an unknown thing through those trees.

He soon entered a clearing to see not a crashed plane, but rather a circular, cone-shaped object hovering over the ground that measured about 75 feet in diameter, emitting a low hum and ensconced within a pulsating glow. There were four rows of ports or windows encircling the craft, each emitting a yellow light unlike the color of the craft's overall glow, and a partition immediately behind the windows prevented him from seeing any internal details or occupants. Overcome with curiosity, he crept closer to the strange craft, and that was when a “pencil-thin blue light” supposedly shot out from "somewhere" on the craft to hit Flynn on the forehead "right between the eyes.” He lost consciousness and immediately crumbled to the muck at his feet.

When he regained consciousness, he was partially blind, sluggish, had a terrific headache, and a large, sore bruise on his forehead. Of the craft, there was no sign, so he stumbled back to his buggy and was able to get himself to a hospital, where he told everyone about his otherworldly ordeal, and he was diagnosed with “atrophy of internal muscles.” It was odd enough to convince authorities to go check the site out, and there they found a large circular spot in the clearing where the ground and grass were charred, as well as fir trees with their tops completely burned off. At the time, the Air Force was quick to write off and debunk such experiences, and they quickly labeled the whole thing as a hoax. We are still left with the question of what happened here, and if it was just a hoax, how did Flynn manage to create the charred circle, burned trees, and unusual physical symptoms? We may never know for sure. 

The following year, on January 11, 1966, Patrolman Joseph Cisco was on patrol at the Wanaque Reservoir, in Wanaque, New Jersey, when he got a strange call over the radio, reporting a “glowing light, possibly a fire” by the lake. The dispatcher continued, saying that there had been a rash of UFO sightings in the vicinity. Cisco would say of what happened next:

“I pulled into the sandpit, an open area to get my bearings. There was a light that looked bigger than any of the stars, about the size of a softball or volleyball. It was a pulsating, white, stationary light changing to red. It stayed in the air; there was no noise. I was trying to figure out what it was.”

At around the same time, Wanaque Mayor Harry T. Wolfe, Councilmen Warren Hagstrom and Arthur Barton, and the Mayor’s 14-year-old son Billy were on their way to oversee the burning of the borough’s Christmas trees, when they heard the reports that something "very white, very bright, and much bigger than a star" was hovering over the Wanaque Reservoir. They managed to run into Officer Cisco, and all of them observed the oval object “flying low and gliding oddly over the vast frozen lake like a huge star, but it didn’t flicker.” The object apparently frequently changed colors from white to red to green and back to white. The next thing that Officer Cisco remembers is his patrol car’s radio "going bananas," as calls from all over a 20-mile radius flooded into the police headquarters. Cisco radioed Officer George Dykman, who was on patrol nearby. Just as Dykman received Cisco’s message, two teenagers came running up to his patrol car, frantically pointing at the sky and shouting, "Look, look!"

At that moment, Wanaque Civil Defense Director Bentley Spencer drove up with CD member Richard Vrooman, and all of them gawked at the mysterious object, trying to figure out what it was. Joseph Cisco’s radio crackled as another unbelievable message came across the airwaves: "Something’s burning a hole in the ice! Something with a bright light on it, going up and down!" Then another transmission fought its way through the din: "Oh boy! Something just landed in front of the dam!” Spencer and reservoir employee Fred Steines raced to the top of the 1,500-foot-long Raymond Dam, where they described seeing "a bolt of light shoot down, as if attracted to the water... like a beam emitted from a porthole.” Hagstrom would say:

“There was something up there that was awful bright. We don’t know what it was. We thought it was a helicopter, but we didn’t hear a motor. It looked like a helicopter with big landing lights on. We got goose bumps all over when we saw where the hole was.”

One day after the initial sightings of the UFO, Patrolman Jack Wardlaw reported seeing a "bright white disk" floating in the vicinity of his home in the Stonetown section of Wanaque, just west of the reservoir. He would say of it:

“It seemed like only a block away, above Lilly Mountain, maybe 1,000 feet up. Don’t ask me what it was. But I do know it wasn’t any helicopter, plane, or comet. It shot laterally right and left. It stopped. It moved up straight. And then it moved down and disappeared in the direction of Ringwood to the north. It was definitely disc-shaped and at certain angles, egg-shaped."

That same evening, Cisco would see the object again over the reservoir “moving back and forth like a rocking chair motion.” A few minutes later, the object shot straight up into the night sky, until it was indistinguishable from the other stars. It would not make another appearance. This case is interesting in that it has multiple witnesses, many of whom would be considered to be quite reliable. What was going on there at that lake?

One of the most dramatic and harrowing supposed UFO encounters in not only Canadian history, but that of anywhere else, began in 1967 in the remote wilderness of a place called Falcon Lake, Manitoba, located just about 150 kilometers east of the city of Winnipeg. It was here in this peaceful wilderness that, on May 20, 1967, industrial mechanic and Polish immigrant Stefan Michalak was out prospecting for mineral deposits. At one point he seemed to have found what he was looking for, a rich vein of quartz, but as he was getting ready to try and go about staking a claim on it a very bizarre sequence of events would unfold that would change his life forever, and would go on to become one of the most intriguing cases of a purported UFO attack ever.

As he scoped out the area, Michalak was startled by a gaggle of geese suddenly alighting into the sky with some commotion, which he followed skyward until his eyes fell upon an otherworldly sight hovering above. He says that the geese passed in front of two large, oval or cigar-shaped objects in the air surrounded by a reddish glow, and that one of these began to descend as he looked on in awe to land on a nearby flat shelf of rock, where it seemed to morph into a disc-like shape right before his startled eyes. As the strange object did this, the other craft allegedly ascended into the sky to disappear, leaving Michalak alone with the glowing disc that had landed only about 45 meters away from him.

The witness would claim that he had warily approached the curious sight, and as he did so, a hatch would open on the side of the object as the glow subsided to reveal a metallic surface. He claimed that the opening belched forth a smell not unlike sulphur, and that a motorized whirring noise could be heard emanating from within, as well as the glare from a bright light. He still crept closer, and said that he could hear what sounded vaguely like voices echoing about within. Michalak allegedly called out to whoever it was, but there was no reply. The multilingual Michalak even tried calling out in Polish, Russian, and German, thinking that this was a manmade craft, but met with only that unearthly machine hum each time. Where as most people would have probably called it a day and gotten out of there with haste, Michalak was so curious that he moved ever closer to the craft, each call out to the occupants unanswered, until he was purportedly standing right at the portal that had opened in the craft, and it was here where things would get truly bizarre.

After taking a peek within to see various flashing lights, panels of some sort, all bathed in a purplish glow, he reached out to touch the side of the object to find it extremely hot to the touch, causing him to withdraw his hand in surprise. Inspecting his glove, he found that it had actually been melted, and as he stared at his hand in bafflement, the whole of the craft then began to rattle and shake. As this was happening, the now frightened man says he was struck in the chest by what felt like a stream of very hot air emitted from within the craft, which sent him sprawling back away from the disc. The bizarre craft then began to lift off the ground to hover over him, before shooting off over the trees into the sky to leave Michalak feeling nauseous to the point that he vomited where he stood. In his head, he could feel an intense pain building, as well as an intense burning in his chest area, and he knew that something was very wrong. Wrapping himself close with his jacket, he meandered off towards the road and civilization, constantly vomiting along the way and eventually stumbling into the parking lot of the Falcon Motor Hotel.

When hotel staff found him, he was delirious and rambling, disheveled and wild-eyed and still vomiting, and it was at first thought that he was just very drunk. Michalak managed to make it on his own on a bus back to Winnipeg, where he was whisked off to the hospital, and things would get even stranger still. When examined, it was revealed that he had a series of burn marks that formed a grid-like pattern over his chest, as well as signs of what appeared to be radiation sickness, the cause unknown. Michalak’s son, Stan Michalak, would later say of seeing his father in this state:

“I recalled seeing him in bed. He didn't look good at all. He looked pale, haggard. When I walked into the bedroom there was a huge stink in the room, like a real horrible aroma of sulphur and burnt motor. It was all around and it was coming out of his pores. It was bad. I was very afraid. My dad had been injured and I didn't know anything about it.”

As soon as the man was lucid enough to give his version of events, the story hit the news, and a UFO sensation was born. There was quite a lot of interest from the military and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and Royal Canadian Air Force at he time, with numerous alleged searches of the area of the incident using tracker dogs and aircraft, and even Michalak himself was recruited to join in the sweep when he was feeling better. They found the remains of Michalak’s scorched and melted glove, as well as some of his tools and allegedly a circular area on the rock that was strangely devoid of moss or any vegetation and which possessed soil high in radiation readings and some odd pieces of melted metal within the cracks of the rock, also radioactive.

In the meantime, the tale was launching itself into local legend, and there was, by many accounts, a pronounced military presence in the area for weeks, with helicopters hovering above at all hours. There was also a deluge of reporters and curiosity seekers gravitating towards the Michalak home, and in the meantime, there was also an intense investigation going on into the claims he had made. There were some efforts at the time to discredit Michalak, trying to paint him as a town drunk who had hallucinated the whole thing or completely fabricated it, but this didn’t stick and seems to have been wholly invented just to make him look crazy. He had been a military policeman in his former years and was known as an honest and responsible upstanding citizen, with no history of telling tall tales, by all accounts not someone who would be making these kinds of stories up or showing up stumbling about ranting about flying saucers. There was also the physical evidence left behind, which could not be easily explained and which was confirmed by doctors. UFO researcher Chris Rutkowski, who has written the definitive book on the whole incident, “When They Appeared: Falcon Lake 1967: The Inside Story of a Close Encounter,” has said of this:

“Michalak certainly wasn’t an alcoholic. He didn’t drink to excess but he drank socially. To suggest that having a few drinks or even three or four drinks the night before his experience would make him imagine something to the point where he would be physically burned and leave radioactive debris behind is, I think, quite a quantum leap.

We have a witness who was judged by a psychiatrist to not fabricate stories. A person who was a good member of society holding a good job, a background in the military himself, and no reason to perpetrate such a hoax at all. He maintained until he died that this is what happened to him. He did not have a history of seeing aliens around every corner, like so many contactees and abductees maintain these days in their own stories. This was a very unusual experience that happened to him and he was as puzzled as anyone. Whether it was something from outer space or a military vehicle… there’s no question something happened. It’s a mystery. It’s quite fascinating. I knew the family quite well, and he wasn’t the type of guy to make up stories like this."

Michalak’s son would agree, having said, “If Dad hoaxed this — remember we're talking about a blue-collar, industrial mechanic — if he hoaxed it then he was a freakin' genius.” There were also the findings of official investigators and civilian researchers, who concluded that there was no explanation for the incident, the radiation, or what happened to Michalak, and to this day, the Canadian Department of National Defence considers the case to be officially unsolved. Michalak himself would adamantly stand by his story right up until he died in 1999, so what happened to him? Was this just all some sort of elaborate hoax or something else, and if so, what? One idea is that he saw not aliens or extraterrestrials, but rather some sort of terrestrial experimental aircraft, and indeed, Michalak himself thought this could be the case, never really specifically insisting that what he saw were aliens. His son Stan has said of this:

“If you asked him what it was he saw, he could describe it in intimate detail but he would never say, 'Oh, it was definitely extraterrestrials,' because there was no evidence to prove that. He might ask, 'What do you think I saw?' but right up until he died, his story never changed one iota — nothing about it or how he told it. I'm not so close-minded that I can't entertain the possibility that it's otherworldly. I can't discount that. But without specific evidence to show me that it is, I don't know. What I can tell you is that I'm an aviation fanatic, a huge aviation buff, and I am very familiar with how aviation technology has advanced in the past 50 years. And there was nothing even close to that in the works anywhere at that time.”

What are we dealing with here? Was this an extraterrestrial presence? Was it some type of top-secret military craft? Was it all a tall tale, and if so, how did he fake the injuries and the physical evidence that was allegedly found at the site? Or was it something else altogether? What caused those grid-like burns on his chest, and was this some sort of attack directed at him? These are questions we still don't have the answers to, and the case of the Falcon Lake Incident has become one of the great mysteries of the landscape of UFO lore.

Moving along, we come to 1981, when Captain Phil Schultz was flying a TWA passenger jet on a routine flight over Lake Michigan, in the United States, under ideal conditions. The flight had up until then been completely smooth, but then things would get strange. Both Schultz and his co-pilot suddenly saw in the near distance a “large, round, silver metal object with six jet black portholes equally spaced around the circumference,” which had dropped rapidly from somewhere above them. The object was so large and in such close proximity that a collision seemed imminent, and Schultz, a veteran US Navy fighter pilot in the Korean War, took evasive action. The mysterious object then made a sharp turn and shot off out of sight. Schultz would later talk extensively with Dr. Richard Haines, former senior scientist with NASA, about the incident, and although he had always been skeptical of similar reports by other pilots, he insisted that what he had seen was “a spaceship.”

One morning in August of 1981, an unnamed 55-year-old Polish immigrant living in Germany took a bicycle ride from his home in the city of Rheda-Wiedenbruck on a clear, sunny day. He was rather fond of these leisurely rides, during which he would just meander about and enjoy nature, and on this day, he decided to head to a small lake called Lintel, not far from where he lived. He often went to this lake to enjoy the peaceful serenity of the area, and although his bicycle chain broke and he was forced to walk, it wasn’t far, and it was such a lovely day that he kept on going. As he sat looking out over the placid water, his attention was drawn to movement out across the lake on the opposite shore. He could see an old shed out there, and nearby it a figure who seemed to be moving around strangely.

The witness thought this was just a fisherman getting supplies from the shed, but as he peered across the water at this person, his attention was drawn to something else. According to the report, the witness saw a massive metallic object, about 10 meters high and 30 meters in diameter, that looked somewhat like an “upside-down plate” hovering silently about 50 feet over the surface of the lake, with no apparent windows, seams, or propulsion device. It sort of hovered there for a time, never making a sound, and when the witness looked back to the fisherman he had been observing, he could now see that the man was in the company of several other figures dressed in some kind of suits that seemed to sparkle and glint in the sunlight. When he looked back at the flying object, he could see that it seemed to be moving towards that shed, eventually hovering low over a grassy clearing near it.

As he looked on at this bizarre sight, he still had no idea what he was looking at, and when he saw a woman walking her dog pass right past the object, the witness began to think that it was perhaps some sort of super advanced transport aircraft accepting passengers. He took it upon himself to approach the strange craft, and as he got closer, he could see there was some type of oval opening in its side, and he went even closer, meaning to ask how much admission was for a ride on this wondrous aircraft. It would appear that aliens were the furthest thing from his mind at this point, but this was about to change.

There was a platform leading from the opening down to the ground below, and as he approached, the witness noticed one of the figures in the sparkling suits examining the bicycle he had left not far away. He could now see that the being was somewhat translucent, but this was still not enough to deter him from stepping aboard the craft. Once inside, he found himself in a room that seemed to be surrounded by nearly transparent walls, and he was led to sit on an “invisible bench” by another of those strange figures. He could now smell a very unpleasant smell like burning rubber, and noticed that the fisherman he had seen earlier was sitting nearby in some sort of daze and was half-naked, being examined by one of the entities. The one near him then telepathically demanded that he hand over his satchel, which he did. The surroundings were now filled with that smell of burning rubber, now so potent that it made him feel dizzy, and he also became aware of some other rather unsettling sights around him. He says of what happened:

“In my way toward the being I was somewhat light as if there was no floor below. I saw a cut off head of a cow without left eye and a half of its horn that was also cut off. There were some chains in it jaws. There were also childish shoes and glasses. They put me on some table. I felt lightness as if I was devoid of some internal organs. The interior part of the object was light with pinkish-violet glow."

He was brought into a “misty, blue-grayish room” with more of the beings, and he was undressed and forced to lie down on another table. He was then examined, dressed up again, and his bag was returned to him. He was also given some sort of belt that seemed to transform into different shapes and had strange symbols on its side. The belt would also hover over the floor if dropped and return to his hand, and would always return to its original position, no matter how much he tried to fold it up. As all of this was going on, the ship seemed to be moving, and he would say:

“I could see many lights and I don't know if in the ceiling or by a transparent floor I saw an enormous city with illuminated tower blocks - sometimes I was observing them from various positions. And maybe I was in some big machine or over it, somewhere far away when it was a night and everything around resembled very much an illuminated city.”

The witness also says that a “small, transparent ball as big as a tennis ball” suddenly materialized in his hand, which “sparkled with many colors.” He could see when it shone that the bones in his hands were visible, like an x-ray, and this frightened him enough to make him want to throw the ball away, but he found he could not, as every time he threw it hovered back to him in much the same way that the belt did. The ball seemed to be weightless, and when he looked within it, he could see various strange things. The original report by UFO researcher Marcin Mizera would say of this:

"The ball was emitting an image from inside - something like a three-dimension show. There were impossible things inside. From a chaos [a multitude of colorful stains divided by lines] there formed some images. There appeared: a tower [measuring pressure] from the town where he lived and then a town hall and a tower block standing in vicinity of his house. Then other similar elements were seen, for example: church towers, playing fields, parking lots etc. Mrs. X saw even himself holding the ball and looking into it. He wanted to turn it in his hands but it transformed into a big, glass circle [7-10 m.wide] that got smaller immediately and transformed into the original ball.”

What in the world was going on here? It is all so bizarre that it is hard to say. All through this, one of the mysterious figures just looked on with an inscrutable expression, as if observing, and the witness would say of what happened next:

“I smiled foolishly because it was weird, cool and funny. I haven't seen something like it before. The humanoid was looking at me as a king at a clown. Anyway, I found myself unexpectedly on a scrapheap."

He was just suddenly there on the ground, around 5 km from the lake, with a severe headache and his watch inexplicably broken. His skin was red, as if suffering a sunburn, and he also noticed that both the orb and the belt he had been given on the craft were gone. A search of the area also showed that his bicycle was gone, and so he walked home. He felt a sudden exhaustion upon arriving and fell into a deep sleep. From that day on, he claims that he suddenly had an incredible affinity and talent for painting and went on to become a well-known artist in the area, although it is unclear if this had anything to do with his surreal encounter or not. The whole thing is incredibly bizarre, and it is really hard to make sense of. What happened to this man, and what did he experience out there? It is hard to say for sure, but it is certainly one of the weirder alien encounter reports there is.

Most recently, there is an account from the UFOCasebook concerning a witness who had quite the unusual experience at a pond in Flager, Oklahoma in June of 2006. The witness says of what happened:

“On June 27, 2006, five of our grandchildren were fishing in our pond about 3:00 p.m., when they saw a big splash on one side of the pond. Everything became still, and the pond became like glass as the object sank. Then they saw a whirlpool in the pond about 8 to 10 feet across that moved very fast across the pond towards them. When it hit the water there was steam that went up from the object then the object disappeared to reappear in another area.

One of the children got on a boat that was at the bank, and she could see lights around the sides and the object looked like metal. Two other children said they saw the lights, but two of them said it looked yellow under the water. Two were still watching it when they saw the water and grass around the pond next to them start to move violently, so they got scared and ran to the house. They were very disturbed by what they saw, and it took three hours before they would tell us what had happened. They range from 7 to 13 years old and all had the same story.

The next day we drove around and found truck like tracks that led towards the pond, but stopped before they got to the pond. There was a circle where the grass had been bent down in an arc shape at the edge of the pond as it splashed into the pond. They said there was a cloud over them that was swirling. The older children thought it might be a tornado that sounded like a muffled lawn mower. I asked the OSU Extension Agency to check for contamination. They informed me there had been two other similar incidents.”

What are we dealing with in accounts such as these? What sort of inscrutable activities were these things up to? Why congregate around lakes? Are these even reliable cases at all, or merely delusional rants? Whatever the case may be, these are some damn strange accounts that serve to propel the UFO phenomenon further into the weird.