Mysterious Unsolved Deaths Linked to UFOs

The UFO phenomenon encompasses a wide range of strangeness. From various inexplicable aerial phenomena to alien encounters, to abductions, it all launches itself out into the fringe at times. Despite this, it is not typically a field associated with death. However, over the years there have been many mysterious deaths that are in one way or another linked to UFOs. 

One of the earlier and most bizarre deaths supposedly related to UFOs is the 1956 case of Air Force Sergeant Jonathan Lovette. In March of that year, Lovette and Major William Cunningham, both of the Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, ventured out into the desolate desert scrub to collect fallen debris from a recent missile test at the White Sands Missile Test Range, and at one point Lovette went off behind a dune. A few moments later, Cunningham reportedly heard Lovette scream out in terror, and he ran to investigate. What he saw next would cause him to scream as well.

According to Cunningham, after going over a ridge he was met with the sight of a large, silvery disk-shaped object hovering around 15 or 20 feet in the air, which had a long, snake-like object trailing from it. To his horror, he saw that this appendage was wrapped around the leg of Lovette and in the process of pulling him towards the strange craft. At this point, Cunningham would report that he had been somehow inexplicably paralyzed, wanting to take action but unable to move as he watched his friend get pulled and reeled into the object, after which it sped off at breathtakingly great speed. As soon as it was out of sight, Cunningham found himself released from whatever had kept him frozen there.

After radioing Missile Control and telling them what had happened, he was told that they were indeed picking up a radar signature moving rapidly, but that they were not able to tell what it was. Security forces and soldiers immediately descended upon the area, and a massive search began, which would go on for 3 days without finding a single trace of the missing man. In the meantime, it was suspected that Lovette had been the victim of foul play and that Cunningham was responsible, his wild story simply a cover, and he was detained. On the third day of the search, after meticulously scouring 100 square miles of the landscape, Lovette’s body was found around 10 miles from where he had gone missing, and his corpse was in a horrifying state.

Besides being completely drained of every drop of blood, there was no sign of vascular collapse, meaning he had not died of bleeding to death, which was very unusual for someone who had been drained of so much blood. An incision had been made in Lovette’s lower jaw, through which his tongue had been removed, a cut which extended from the tip of the chin down to his larynx. His anus and genitalia had been expertly removed “as if from a plug,” and his eyes had been taken out smoothly. The body showed no signs of decomposition, despite being estimated to have been lying out there in the desert heat for one or two days, and most oddly of all there were found to be dead scavengers nearby that had apparently died after trying to feed on the body. None of it made any sense at all and still doesn't.

This particular incident has its origins in an alleged report called Grudge/Blue Book Report 13, which is mysterious in many ways in and of itself. The manual in question was supposedly analyzed by an information analyst for the U.S. Air Force and former Green Beret named Bill English and is allegedly dated 1953-1963. Upon the cover is written the code AFSN 2246-3 and the words “Top Secret Need Yo Know Only, Crypto Clearance 14, or above, Required” stamped on it in red ink. Since it is unknown if this document ever really existed or not, and the information given by Bille English is only preserved in his notes and his memory of what he read, it is unknown if the report is real or whether the Lovette case ever really happened in any sense at all, and so it remains shrouded in mystery.

In June of 1972, railway employees at a station near Tarrasa, Barcelona found in the early morning hours the decapitated bodies of two men. This was shocking enough as it was but would become even stranger when they found cotton balls grasped in their dead grips and a note on one of the bodies that read “The extraterrestrials are calling us. We belong to infinity.” This short writing was signed; “W.K.T.S.88.” The investigations performed by the police department found that the bodies had been decapitated as they placed their heads over the railroad tracks, and they belonged to a Jose Felix Rodriguez Montero and Joan Turu Valles. It was all macabre, sensationalized news at the time, but it got even more deeply disturbing as the investigation continued. There would be found reams of letters and notes in the men’s possession that were written to Ufologist Marius Lleget, the U.N., and two friends living in Zaragoza who were UFO nuts. The letter to Lleget read:

“Dear Sir, for a long time now we have been in direct contact with ‘those beings,’ which in one way or the other, you and other earthlings have been ‘studying;’ “the extraterrestrials.” They have been ‘mutating us slowly, however not on the same dates; please understand, like us, we are all ‘strangers on this planet.’ From ‘there’ they are calling us, and we have a long time ago identified them as your friends, we are ‘leaving’ filled with an immense joy which we had never known. We are headed towards the “Galactic Center.” At our homes you will find some writings, some data and notes which will serve to teach the unbelieving earthling (you are not one of them) that sentient life expands throughout the infinite Universe from an indefinable God. We know that you will believe the moment you read them, since you know that if our passion would have been popularity we would have obtained it a long time ago.

A Cosmic Salute, W.K.T.S.88”

A letter to the U.N. read:

“Dear Sirs, We have been studying your planet since times remote, and given our advanced cerebral state which is incomparable to that of humans, which cannot conceive the state of ‘stagnation’ in which humanity finds itself; the comedy that we have been continuously observing on your planet, when some humans have already reached other planets (moon) is inconceivable. Our intervention in the affairs of humanity will not occur until said humanity has already self-destructed, which will occur in no more than 300 years; then we will intervene in your planet’s affairs, and we will solve all your grave problems. Inevitably humanity is marching towards selfdestruction; so continue on with your ‘comedy,’ your hypocrisy, with your tyranny.  Signed W.K.D.K. through W.K.T.S. 88.”

The letter to the friends read:

“Friend; you well know that the theme of Ufology is one that is very passionate for you. And it has been since a while back. What you don’t know is we have had ‘direct contact’ with “them” since the year 1970. Upon receiving this letter we are sure that by some form of media you have learned that we are now with “them,” since they have called to us, since our ‘mutation’ is now total and we are now strangers on this Earth. We realize that you would have wanted to know all about this, but we would not have enjoyed the “popularity.” If ‘they’ would think like humans wouldn’t you think they would have been the most popular in our Solar System? We needed to proceed the same way as they. We are headed to the ‘Galactic Center.’ In our private library there are a series of books on ‘cosmic literature’ which we gladly offer you with great pleasure so you will study and investigate as much as possible and, who knows? Maybe one day you will also be called upon.”

A Cosmic Salute, W. K. T. S. 88”

What are we to make of this case? Were these two men in contact with aliens or were they two UFO nutjobs who killed themselves in pursuit of some delusional fantasy? Another bizarre case occurred in 1979 when two hunters in the Bliss and Jerome area of Idaho were out hunting when they stumbled across the mostly nude body of a man sprawled out there in the middle of nowhere. When the hunters drew closer, they could see that the dead man was only wearing underpants, but what really caught their attention was that the man had been horribly mutilated, with his sexual organs removed, his lips cut off with surgical precision, and several organs removed with similar expert cuts. 

What made it particularly odd was that although the country was rugged, with many sharp rocks and thorns, the man’s bare feet were not scuffed, scraped or scratched in any way - they were in pristine condition, even though the nearest road was miles away. There were also no footprints around the corpse and no tire tracks. How had he gotten there through the rough landscape miles from the road in his bare feet without a single cut or scratch? Had someone dumped him there? How or why would they have carried him out there without leaving a trace and why had they mutilated the corpse? Authorities were notified and scoured the area, but could find no clues, and it was over a week later that they found the man’s possessions, many miles away from the body and similarly in the middle of the woods. It certainly sounds very much like a classic cattle mutilation scenario, and all the more so in that the region where the body was found had experienced several UFO reports and reports of cattle mutilations at around the same time. 

Some mysterious UFO deaths have managed to become almost legendary beyond their own circumstances. These are the strange unsolved deaths that are orbited by various weird clues that have never been solved and which serve to propel them on into a whole other realm of bizarreness as the speculation and discussion go on. One of the most talked about strange deaths that has managed to become firmly entrenched within UFO lore is that of a humble coal miner in England, who would turn up dead under some very strange circumstances and whose passing has managed to take on a life of its own to become one of the great unsolved mysteries out there.

Zigmund Jan Adamski was a Polish immigrant who in 1960 had moved to the quaint, small town of Tingley, near Wakefield in Yorkshire, England. A coal miner by trade, he had a rather simple life, and there was not that much that was particularly remarkable about him. He and his wife, Leokadia, were well-liked enough by their neighbors but other than the wife’s multiple sclerosis they were for the most part unassuming, that is until June 6, 1980, when Adamski would carve out a place for himself in the annals of strange unexplained disappearances and deaths. That day was the eve of his goddaughter’s wedding, and the family was full of good cheer, looking forward to the festivities the following day. It was in good spirits that at around 3:30 PM, Adamski went off to do some shopping for the next day’s lunch. As he made his way towards the market he passed some neighbors who would say that he seemed to be in a good mood, with nothing seeming to be odd. Yet this would be the last time anyone would see him alive.

When Adamski did not return that evening his wife saw it as strange, as the market was just a short walk away down the road, it had been a perfectly pleasant day, and her husband had not mentioned making any other stops or errands. As the minutes turned to hours, she finally contacted police to report him missing. It was soon found that he had indeed made it to the market in Wakefield and had bought his groceries, with the clerk saying he had seemed to be in a cheerful mood, but after that, no seems to have seen him. A sweep of the area turned up no sign of him, no one had talked to him, and it looked as if he had just evaporated into thin air. He had been happily married and looking forward to his goddaughter's wedding, so it didn’t seem as if he would just run off without warning, and although his health had deteriorated in recent years due to his heavy smoking he was still mostly able to get around, so it didn’t seem likely that he had just gone off somewhere to die. With no clues and no leads as to where he had gone, it was just assumed that he had wandered off and would come back. He never did, and it would not be until 5 days later that his fate would be revealed.

On June 11, 1980, a coal worker by the name of Trevor Parker was doing his rounds at Tomlin’s Coal Yard in the town of Todmorden, around 30 miles away from Tingley, when he saw something quite grim at the top of a 12-foot-high heap of coal. There, splayed out face up above, was the body of a dead man, and when police were notified it was soon ascertained that this was the missing Adamski. There were numerous strange clues immediately apparent when authorities arrived on the scene. Although he was well-dressed in a suit, his shirt was missing, as were his wallet and his watch, and his trousers and shoes seemed to have been put on very crudely, as if they had been taken off and then put back on by a child who didn’t know what they were doing, and the suit jacket was also oddly mis-buttoned. All of it was curiously lacking smears of coal dust as if he had been carefully placed there. The wallet and watch might have been taken after death, but why would anyone take his shirt, or remove his trousers and shoes to put them back on again and how had he gotten up there?

There was also the positioning and condition of the body. It was lying face up on that formidable pile of coal as if he had just tried to take a nap, yet there was no sign that anyone had climbed up or down it, the coal undisturbed. There was also no sign of physical injury, struggle, or foul play. Indeed, he was described by officers on the scene as looking peaceful, like “he’d just got into bed and was fast asleep.” The only marks that could be found on the body were a series of tiny burn marks on the back of his head, neck, and shoulders, as well as some minor scuffs on his palms, but it could not be determined what had caused these. Making those burns even stranger was that some sort of yellowish gel-like ointment had been slathered on them, but the coroner could not determine just what the ointment was. Adamski himself was found to have been well-fed when he had died, despite being missing for 5 days, and a call to hospitals of the area showed that he had not checked in anywhere. Nor was there any sign that he had been living like a tramp on the streets, as his clothes were impeccably pressed and as clean as the day he had left his home, and also he had only one day’s worth of beard growth. So where had he been? At the time, Police Constable Alan Godfrey pronounced that Adamski had died of a heart attack, but this did very little to answer the myriad questions surrounding the body. Where were his belongings, how did his body get to the top of that pile, what were the burns, and where had he been for the past 5 days?

A coroner examination could not conclusively find an exact cause of death and was forced to go with the heart attack theory for lack of any evidence otherwise. All that could be determined for sure was that Adamski had likely died a day before his body had been found and that the burn marks seemed to have been inflicted 2 days previously. Theories flew. It was surmised that he may have suffered some sort of shock after sustaining the mysterious burns, after which he had become disoriented and had climbed to the top of that coal pile to look around, finally dropping dead. Yet, there was no sign of anyone having climbed the pile, nothing to see there anyway, and the man who had found the body would swear that it had not been there just hours earlier. There was also no evidence at all that Adamski knew anyone in Todmorden and no clear reason why he should have been there in the first place. Another theory was that he had been kidnapped and then finally killed and put up on that coal heap, but why dispose of the body there and how did they do it? Was it lowered with a crane? If that were the case wouldn’t someone notice that?

It did not take long for speculation to veer off into the bizarre, as a lot of people were noticing that the area of Todmorden was a hotspot for UFO activity, and indeed there had been a flap of sightings right around the time Adamski had disappeared. Rather bizarrely, the very same police officer who had first come to examine the scene of Adamski’s death, Godfrey, would have his own very weird encounter with the otherworldly, when he claims he had seen a UFO and experienced 30 minutes of missing time. His subsequent hypnosis session would be pretty creepy, to say the least, and he would say while under:

“They’re horrible…..small…three to four feet, like five year old lads! There are eight of them. He’s touching me…..He’s feeling at my clothes. They have hands and heads like a lamp. They keep touching me…they are making noises.. Joseph, I know him as Joseph. He has told me not to be frightened. They are robots! They’re not human! They’re robots! They’re his! They are Joseph’s robots! There’s a bloody dog…..it’s horrible! The size of an Alsatian!”

Whether this has anything to do with Adamski’s death or not is unclear, but the idea here is that a UFO abducted him, performed experiments that left the burn marks behind, and then killed him, perhaps even accidentally by giving him a heart attack, after which they had redressed him and lowered the body onto that coal pile where it would be found. The media would take the UFO angle and run with it, splashing out headlines that suggested Adamski was killed by aliens, and this went a long way towards sensationalizing it all and muddying the waters. Indeed, because of this the strange case of Zigmund Adamski would in later years become more well known as a UFO case than as that of a mere mysterious death, and with so many strange clues and a lack of any further evidence it has remained a favorite theory among many.

In more recent years there have been some little bits of new information that have come in. For instance, there has been evidence by John Hanson and David Sankey of BUFORA, the British UFO Research Association, that Adamski might have been involved in a bit of a family feud with his cousin and her husband, leaving open a motive for foul play. It is possible that someone in the offending family could have abducted Adamski and tortured him, explaining the burns, after which he unexpectedly died of a heart attack after making a bid to escape, or had died while being detained and was dumped in a panic, but not before they pilfered the wallet and watch. There is still not much concrete evidence of this and it does not tie all of the disparate strange clues together, leaving us in the end just as much in the dark as ever. In the end, what are we to make of all of the weird clues and pieces of evidence on offer here? What happened to Zigmund Adamski? Whether it be from foul play, suicide, or UFOs, the fact is that the case has never been satisfactorily solved, and it is sure to invite much debate and speculation in the years to come.

Perhaps one of the most famous cases of an apparent case of mysterious, inexplicable human alien mutilation occurred in Brazil in 1988. At the the Guarapiranga Reservoir was found the body of a man who was in a very strange state indeed. Although it was determined that the person had been dead for several days, there was no smell when it should have been redolent with the stench of decay, no noticeable decomposition, and there was no sign that the body had been fed upon by scavengers or even insects. Upon his body were found to be numerous smooth round holes, and the man’s lips, eyes, tongue, and ears had been cut away with expert precision, not torn or ragged in any way. Other tissue and organs had been removed as well for reasons unknown, and there were other anomalies in addition to all of this. The coroner tasked with examining the body would later say of it:

“Although the victim had been dead for 48 to 72 hours there was no sign of being eaten by animals or starting to rot, as would be expected. There was no smell. Bleeding from the wounds had been minimal. The lips and flesh from the face had been cut away. The eyes, ears, and tongue had been removed. Neat round holes, one to one and a half inches in diameter, had been made on the shoulders, arms, head, stomach, and anus and tissue and muscle had been extracted. The holes had not been made through which extensive digestive organs had been extracted. The scrotum, but not the penis had been removed, and all pubic hair had disappeared. The rectum had been cored out. Despite these devastating mutilations, there was no sign that the victim had been bound or had struggled in any way.”

The mysterious body was photographed and the pictures shown to Dr. Goes Rubens, who concurred that it was all very odd indeed, and seemed inexplicable by normal definitions. It was also pointed out by an associate of Rubens that the mutilations on display with the mysterious body had many of the same hallmarks of the more well-known cattle mutilations, such as a lack of decomposition, organs seemingly selectively removed, precision, almost surgical cuts, and anomalous holes bored into the corpse. It appears that the dead man was never identified and his strange death has from then on had many questions surrounding it. Who or what did this to him? Why was there no decomposition? Why were some organs missing and not others and why had they been removed so cleanly and precisely? Why had those holes been made in the body? Why hadn’t the victim struggled or shown signs of being detained? What happened to him and who was he? We will probably never know.

Another case uncovered by UFO investigator Don Ecker supposedly occurred in 1989, when Ecker was contacted by ufologist and cattle mutilation expert Wm. “Bill” Knell, of the Long Island Skywatch organization, who came with a very strange story, indeed. Knell claimed that he had been contacted by an Asst. Medical Examiner from Westchester County, New York, who was familiar with Knell’s work and needed some advice on a mysterious set of corpses that had arrived at two morgues in New York and one in Connecticut at around the same time and in the same grim condition. Knell would claim that the three mysterious corpses had been mutilated by removal of the face, genitals, eyes, parts from the stomach, the rectum, and thyroids, all in exactly in the same way and apparently on the same night. According to Ecker, these corpses coincided with a number of animal mutilations that were occurring in New York and Connecticut at the time, and the medical Examiner who had contacted knell had allegedly claimed that the incidents had been immediately concealed from the media and public. The main theory was that these mutilations had been carried out by some sort of Satanic cult, which is also often put forward as an explanation for cattle mutilations, but Ecker would disagree, saying:

“The Satanic explanation was examined, and according to the reporting witness, did not hold water. After having been personally involved in an investigation of cattle mutilations as a police officer back in 1982, I was very familiar with the “cult” theory of perpetrators. The Idaho Department of Law Enforcement drags it out every time there is a new rash of mutilations. The problem is, and everyone is aware of it, that no one has yet been brought to trial, or arrested yet for these crimes. Out here in the west, people know that you are flirting with a rancher’s bullet if you are caught fooling around with the ranchers’ cattle. They are his livelihood, and he will defend it. Yet, the mutilations keep occurring, and no one is any the wiser, or are they?"

The 1990s brought in an era of shady deaths laced with whispers of dark government conspiracies in connection to UFOs, with 1993 seeing astronaut Deke Slayton die of an aggressive cancer conveniently right before he was expected to come forward with his inside knowledge and experiences on UFOs. In 1994, an investigator for the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), Ann Livingston, died of an extremely aggressive and ferocious form of ovarian cancer. Rather spookily, this happened just a mere 2 years after she had claimed to have been harassed by ghoulish faceless, pale, and sinister Men in Black. Also in 1994 was the death of another MUFON investigator, Ron Johnson, who was actually the deputy director of investigations for the organization. He would die under very strange circumstances when after a slide presentation at a conference in Austin Texas, the lights came on and he was found unresponsive in his seat, with blood coming out of his nose and a weird purple coloration to his face. A few years later, 1996 saw the death of UFO author Karla Turner, who died of breast cancer. Turner was known for constantly attributing her cancer to actions taken by aliens due to some of the things she had written of in her UFO-themed books Masquerade of Angels, Taken, and Into the Fringe. In 1999, author of numerous UFO and conspiracy books, Jim Keith, also died when a blood clot stopped his heart as he was receiving routine surgery for a broken leg.

Perhaps one of the most bizarre individuals to have died a suspicious death for their whistleblowing of alleged information on aliens and UFOs is the American engineer Phil Schneider. An engineer-geologist, demolition specialist, and civil engineer, Schneider worked for the military and aerospace industries, and was allegedly heavily involved with the construction of underground military bases, eventually being assigned to work at the Dulce base in New Mexico. It is here where he would allege that he had come into contact with all manner of information and experiences dealing with aliens, UFOs, and government cover-ups, and he would have quite the bizarre tale to tell, indeed.   

In the 1990s, Schneider began coming forth with what he claimed to be information that he had gleaned from his alleged top secret security clearance at Dulce. He claimed that aliens had already had a base beneath Dulce, and that his team had accidentally stumbled across it as they drilled in order to expand the base. It apparently wasn’t a warm welcome, devolving into what he calls a “massacre” and of which he would say:   

“I was involved in the expansion of the deep underground military base at Dulce, which is possibly the deepest base. It descends seven levels and is over 2.5 miles deep. At this time we were drilling four different wells in the desert, intending to tie them together, but this required blasting. My job was to go deep into the wells, research the characteristics of the black rocks, and recommend the explosives that would be suitable in each case. However, as we made our way down, we found ourselves in a large cavern that was full of extraterrestrial aliens known as the "big Greys". I killed two of them. At that time there were about 30 people there, and 40 more came there later, when it all started - they were all killed. We were surprised by the existence of an entire underground base filled with aliens. Later we learned that they have been living on our planet for a long time. In my opinion, this can explain a lot of what is behind the theory of ancient astronauts.”  

The incident would allegedly leave Schneider with severe burns from the aliens’ alleged energy weapons, as well as later giving him cancer from the radiation emitted by them. After this rough start and “unfortunate misunderstanding,” the U.S. government supposedly reached a truce with what Schneider calls the “Zeta Reticuli,” also known as the “Greys,” signing a treaty he called the “Greada Agreement.” After this, Dulce served the secret function of serving as a place to house aliens and their technology, as well as to conduct both genetic and mind control experiments using alien technology. He was very specific in detailing the specifics of the base, explaining that it was divided into seven levels, each one housing things such as living quarters, storage facilities for alien craft, alien bodies, and “alien embryos,” laboratories, housing for such varieties of aliens as "Greys" and "Reptoids,” and meeting halls for conferences with representatives of the alien civilization. Schneider would claim that many of the technologies we take for granted every day, as well as military technologies such as stealth technology, were developed with the help of these aliens, and in exchange, the U.S. government had established numerous secret underground bases for them to carry out experiments on humans, indeed there were supposedly 1477 underground bases built around the world, all as part of their agreement. This isn’t even the weirdest part yet.   

Schneider would claim that the aliens had broken this treaty and that this would boil over into a disagreement that often ended in violence. According to Schneider, the Greys were secretly plotting to overthrow the government and install a New World Order, all controlled by the UN, which they had infiltrated and secretly controlled. He also claimed that there are seven benevolent alien species and four evil species on Earth. As a result, a resistance movement against some of them has developed and there are some incidents Schneider says are tied to this. For instance, he would claim that the Bikini Atoll was the site of a nuclear explosion not to test the bomb, but to wipe out an underground alien base that had gone rogue, that the World Trade Center bombing and the Oklahoma City bombings were carried out using miniature nuclear devices. and that the Strategic Defense Initiative ("SDI" or Star Wars”) was actually intended as a defense against alien invasions. In addition to all of this, Schneider would make all sorts of off-the-wall claims about what the government was developing with alien tech, including that the U.S. had an earthquake machine and that AIDS was created in a lab. He would explain of some of this in one of his lectures:   

“The federal government currently has an earthquake-causing device. I'm a geologist and I know what I'm talking about. During the earthquake in Kobe (Japan) there was no pulse wave, as is usually the case in normal earthquakes. She wasn't there. In 1989 there was an earthquake in San Francisco, and there was no pulse wave or anything like that either. This is a Tesla device that is being used for evil purposes. Shadow budget programs distort the essence of science as we know it. Look at AIDS - it was created by government order in a laboratory in Chicago, Illinois, in 1972. It was a biological weapon that was used against the people of the United States. I know this because I have seen the documentation of the Office of Strategic Services, which, by the way, is still working to this day through the CDC in Atlanta. They used the glandular secretions of animals, humans and humanoids to create a virus. These humanoids have friendly relations with the government. There is absolutely no defense against what they create. It is a biological weapon with potentially dire consequences. Every alien on our planet must be isolated.”

Schneider became very outspoken about these “facts” and the government’s attempts to blind the public to the truth, publicly speaking at lectures and seminars in the USA, Canada, England, and Japan, often showing samples of some materials allegedly obtained using extraterrestrial technologies. Listening to how outlandish his claims are, it would be easy to write him off as a kook, but things took a sinister turn when he turned up dead under mysterious circumstances.   

On January 17, 1996, Phil Schneider was found dead at his home in Wilsonville, Oregon, with his neck wrapped with piano wire and his own catheter tube, and there were signs of what looked like torture. At the time, there was the persistent idea among Schneider’s believers that he had been killed for divulging too much top-secret information, assassinated for knowing too much, or at least by someone who truly believed he did. The official stance was that it was a suicide. Forgetting for a moment that torturing oneself and then strangling oneself with piano wire isn’t a very traditional method of suicide, there are several other details that make it all the more ominous. Schneider had claimed that his life had been threatened on numerous occasions by the government and that 11 people he knew with similar information had been fatally silenced, often explained away as suicides. One of these was Ron Rummel, a former Air Force intelligence officer and publisher of the publication “Alien Digest,” who was found dead on August 6, 1993, of a gunshot wound to the head. Although it was also deemed a suicide, there had been no blood on the gun, no fingerprints on the barrel and handle of the weapon, and there had been a suicide not written by a left-handed person when Rummel was right-handed. Interestingly, no autopsy had been performed and Rummel’s body was cremated less than 24 hours later. Does this have any connection to Schneider’s strange death? Was he killed for something he divulged? Or was this just a delusional individual who killed himself in such a way as to make it look like that? Unfortunately, we may never know for sure.

Moving into the 2000s we have several more strange cases along these lines. In April of 2001, prolific author of unexplained phenomena, Ron Bonds, mysteriously died of a common food poisoning bacterium that rarely leads to death, but for some reason turned deadly for him. More sinister still was the death of prominent UFO researcher Paul Vigay in 2009. In February of that year, the 44-year-old was found bobbing about in the churning sea off the coast of Portsmouth, Hants, leaving a series of strange cryptic passwords behind on his phone that no one could figure out. Although authorities were quick to label it as a suicide, Vigay’s friends and family are adamant that he was not suicidal, and the coroner was also not able to verify whether it was suicide or not, saying, “I cannot say beyond reasonable doubt that yes Paul has taken his own life. The only person who could tell us what was going on in his mind and what happened that night is sadly not here to tell us."

Perhaps one of the weirdest cases of all is also the most recent. Conspiracy theorist and UFO expert Max Spiers was well-known for delving into government cover-ups, and in July of 2016, he was in Warsaw, Poland, visiting a friend and also planning on attending a conference on conspiracy theories and UFOs. On July 16, Spiers' friend found him on the sofa, unresponsive and having vomited up a viscous “black liquid.” It would turn out that there were some pretty suspicious details surrounding the death, one being a text message he had written to his mother just before his death, which reads, “Your boy's in trouble. If anything happens to me, investigate." Also odd is that there was never any actual official autopsy done on the body, and adding to this was that Spiers was a healthy young man with no history of physical issues, making it odd that he should just drop dead on that sofa. There would be very little word on the state of the investigation until 2019 when authorities would rule the death as being caused by drug use and pneumonia. Max’s mother would say of it all:

“Max was a very fit man who was in good health and yet he apparently just died suddenly on a sofa. All I have is a death certificate from the Polish authorities that it was from natural causes, but no post-mortem was done so how can they tell that? They are also refusing to release any paperwork about it to me because, absurdly, I don’t have his written permission. Apparently, he had not suffered any obvious physical injuries but he could have been slowly poisoned, which is why the results of toxicology tests from his post-mortem are so important. Again, we are left to wonder, if this really was an accident, or did some nefarious agency deem him to be a threat and have him erased? It really is quite the conundrum, and the case seems to be in a limbo of strangeness and pure speculation.”

The main conspiracy idea behind all of these deaths is that these people were removed from the equation by nefarious parties, with government agencies and even the Men in Black coming into play. Skeptics would point out that people die, it is a fact of life, and that of course UFO researchers are going to fall victim to this as well. Yet, with the strange circumstances and details surrounding some of these cases it makes one wonder what is really going on. Is this all just coincidence and reading things into it all, or is there something more sinister going on? The question remains, and if you are one of those who delves into UFOs it might be best to keep a set of eyes on the back of your head. You just never know.

Here we have looked at a range of strange deaths linked to UFOs covering human mutilations, bizarre suicide pacts, dark nefarious conspiracies, and beyond. Although we may never know the answers to the many questions they conjure up, they are an odd addition to the already odd landscape of the UFO phenomenon.