Close Encounters and the Plymouth, MN UFO
Remember the creepy poltergeist quality of Spielberg’s Close Encounters movie? Here’s a similar true story from Plymouth, MN with that same eerie, paranormal vibe. This one features a family harassed by a series of encounters spanning fifteen years, a strange blue light that seems to threaten a child in his crib, an object in the sky, and a case of mechanical-electrical interference with a moving vehicle. It’s like a series of scenes from Spielberg’s iconic movie, but it all happened two years before the movie was made.
Sheila’s Story
Sheila was a thirty-two-year-old housewife when the incident occurred. It wasn’t her first encounter. She and her family seem to have been almost haunted by UFOs. But the night of the blue light left her more frightened than any previous encounter.
We can understand how others might be skeptical, but we’ve seen so many of them.
She did not report the unnerving encounter until the opportunity arose in 1979 to present her story to Bradley Ayers, a field investigator for Dr. J. Allen Hynek’s Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) in Evanston, Illinois. Ayers covered western Wisconsin, Minnesota, the eastern Dakotas, and northern Iowa on behalf of the center from 1975-1979.
Along with reporter Carol Byrne of the Minneapolis Star, Ayers interviewed Sheila and her brother-in-law. The following is an excerpt from the May 8, 1979 Minneapolis Star feature story about the close encounter. Read More
MPLS Area UFO Abduction Story
Not all visitors are welcome.
UFO Stories often seem to take a dark turn. Here’s one about a woman chased by a UFO around several dark turns. It happened the same month as the Durand, WI sighting, at the beginning of 1975, an incredible year of UFO encounters in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and northern Iowa.
Kay was a young housewife and mother of two with a home in a Minneapolis suburb. At the time of the incident, she was taking night classes at a local college. On the way to school one night in January 1975, a mysterious light pursued her vehicle in a terrifying chase. That’s when life started to turn sideways for Kay. When her doctor could not help her, he referred her to a psychiatrist, and the psychiatrist referred her to the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) in Evanston, Illinois. They sent Bradly Ayers to investigate. Read More
Navy Hazard Reports and UFOs
We’ve got a flying suitcase, some balloons, and some drones.
The Navy just released new documents about the 2013-2014 encounters off the East Coast. That particular branch of our armed forces has been generously forthcoming lately, but the latest revelations are not the juicy type stuff that UFO followers hoped to learn. As reported on the The War Zone and in a new article in The New York Times, the Navy has responded to FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests about a series of encounters between Navy pilots and unidentified craft off the East Coast. Read More
BREAKING: Brazil UFO Crash
On the night of May 13, a circular blue light danced in the sky over a small city in Magé, Brazil before turning red and allegedly crashing. Some say the object descended and crashed into a lake, others say into a nearby forest. Then came the military, explosions and UFO crash site, all captured on video. (See UPDATE at end of article regarding military and explosions.)
Dozens of amateur smart phone videos from witnesses on the ground captured the nocturnal light’s movement, and some also included military helicopters flying over the city.
Lights in the Sky then Crash
“There is a light on the horizon, which has been standing still for over ten minutes,” says one person in a video. “And in the sky a lot of lights, lights flash, dim, increase and keep moving… As if it were coming from the other side. There’s a red one now.” Read More
UFOs over Durand, WI
In 1975, Dr. J Allen Hynek, formerly of the Air Force’s Project Blue Book, was called upon as a consultant regarding a UFO sighting in Durand, WI. The recently-cancelled History Channel show Project Bluebook has now made Hynek famous through a fictionalized and sensationalized telling of his story, but he was a real scientist leading UFO research in the mid-1970s.
The story kicks off on a cold January day in Durand, Wisconsin, a small town on the banks of the Chippewa River near its confluence with the Mississippi River. In 1975, the town had a population of 2000 or so, just a few hundred more than it does today. Durand sits near the Minnesota border, 25 miles south-east of Elmwood. Read More
UFO near 3M Oakdale, MN
The UFO that flew over Oakdale and Maplewood probably had nothing at all to do with the 3M corporation. But a flying saucer was apparently seen by multiple witnesses in the neighborhood of the famous corporation’s Maplewood campus. Maybe it was checking out our Magic Scotch Tape technology, or maybe it was just passing by.
Minnesota corporation 3M is famous for research and development of a wide range of products including abrasives, adhesives, synthetic rubber (used by astronauts), household products, Scotch tape, and the Post-it note. They also produce components for consumer-electronics, solar energy, medical devices, and lots more. In 1962 they established their global headquarters in Maplewood, MN, and in 1978, a flying saucer cruised the neighborhood near the 3M Campus. Read More
Project Blue Book Cancelled
I finally made it through the first season of Project Blue Book, just a few days before the History Channel announced that the show has been cancelled. I was initially reluctant to watch the series because it didn’t do serious UFO researchers any favors. Yes, it’s true, the episodes are loosely based on real Air Force files (code-named Project Blue Book) and some high-profile cases. It’s also true that Dr. J. Allen Hynek served as a consultant to Project Blue Book. The Air Force hired him to debunk UFOs by ascribing them to misidentified natural phenomena such as Mars, Venus, meteors, temperature inversions, and even swamp gas. Hyneck himself tells this story in his books on the subject. Eventually, over the course of more than a decade, Hyneck went from skeptical debunker to serious researcher and UFO believer.
This was a great show. At UFOdays.net, we might be biased, but it’s sad to see Blue Book pulled off the air. I’ll admit that, as a researcher in the field and an avid reader of Project Bluebook files, I was pretty excited about the release of the History Channel series. A lot of people were. The New York Times even did a feature on the show shortly after it premiered last year. Read More
Something Very Real
Flying Saucers 1947: Chapter Four
When the Arnold story first appeared in print, several corroborating stories immediately surfaced from earlier months in 1947 and, in some cases, even before. People who had recently witnessed a strange sight in the sky that they could not explain came forward and reported their stories to local newspapers. Most never caught the attention of government investigators. The incidents also occurred outside of the United States. International stories of the phenomenon are rare, but they do exist. Sightings occurred over Bombay, in Budapest, in Belgium, and in South America.[1] The hundreds of sightings that occurred in the United States in 1947 are more readily available because US newspapers eagerly documented them during the height of the wave. Many of the anecdotes can be easily dismissed as meteors, misidentified military aircraft, drifting weather balloons, and even unusual cloud formations. Some of the stories, however, seem to describe encounters with the type of unexplained phenomenon witnessed by Kenneth Arnold.
Burning the Wind over Tennessee
Summer 1945
Charlie T. Hamlet began reading reports about Kenneth Arnold and the flying saucer phenomenon in early July because he was in charge of the news copy room for the Kingsport Times News of Kingsport, Tennessee. He read the stories coming over the newswire with great interest; he had experienced something similar two years earlier. In the summer of 1945, not long before the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Charlie Hamlet saw several discs “burning the wind” over his house. The Associated Press picked up his retelling of the story, and it circulated in papers around the country.[2]
“They were disc-like in shape and looked to be the size of a man’s head,” he said. “They were of a bright aluminum color, were going at terrific speed and disappeared over the high school, about three blocks down the street.” Read More
Pentagon Releases UFO Videos
While world headlines are dominated by Covid-19, the Pentagon quietly and unceremoniously released to the public the three gun-camera videos of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena which have been circulating since 2017. CNN covered the story. This comes some seven months after the Navy confirmed that the videos in circulation were authentic and do indeed depict US pilot encounters with unidentified aerial phenomena.
The three videos popularly titled Gimbal, Tic-tac, and Go-Fast have become the most-featured UFO evidence in history, appearing in innumerable new stories, articles, films, television features, documentaries, and blogs like this. The new officially released versions of the video do not reveal any new information. They are the same videos we’ve been watching for more than two years. So what is the significance of an official Pentagon release of the videos?
Early Birds
Flying Saucers 1947: Chapter Three
By the time US Army Air Force Intelligence Officers Captain William Lee Davidson and First Lieutenant Frank Mercer Brown met Kenneth Arnold on July 12, the great Flying Saucer wave of 1947 was in full swing. The daily papers featured saucer sighting stories, some spurious and some serious. The Air Force was particularly interested in sightings reported by what they considered to be credible and qualified observers—people with military experience, people familiar with aircraft, scientists, and meteorologists. Sightings which reportedly occurred on or before June 24 carried additional potential to corroborate Arnold’s sighting or possibly reveal details which might explain the origins of the phenomenon. According to, Edward J. Ruppelt, onetime head of Project Blue Book, the Project Sign “Estimate of the Situation” pointed out that “reports hadn’t actually started with the Arnold Incident. Belated reports from a weather observer in Richmond, Virginia, who observed a ‘silver disk’ through his theodolite telescope; and F-47 pilot and three pilots in his formation who saw a ‘silver flying wing,’ and the English ‘ghost airplanes’ that had been picked up on radar early in 1947 proved this point.”[1]
The Balloon Man
Richmond, Virginia, April 1947
When Davidson and Brown interviewed Kenneth Arnold, they told him that he was not the first to have seen the phenomena. They had in their possession reports of other sightings, some from as early as April of that year. Thanks to the Air Force’s Project Blue Book files, we can examine the April case that Davidson and Brown had in mind, a case also referenced in the “Estimate of the Situation.” Read More
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