When David Stephens and Glen Gray woke up that night in October 1975, they found themselves a mile further down the road, their windows down, and the doors themselves open again.
Up to this point, everything that happened to the two men, as strange and frightening as it may seem, was nothing different from other face-to-face contacts reported over the previous fifteen years. Indeed, one of the main features that distinguishes this case is that bystanders are accustomed to being awake in the early morning hours, unlike others who participated in nighttime contacts in a state of fatigue and disorientation. But if you delve into their story, what happened then seems really amazing.
The first thing that the friends noticed when they came to their senses and looked at each other in the semidarkness was their eyes glowing with orange light. (Gray's pupils even seemed to disappear.) Then they saw that the UFO was still in their field of vision, receding across the sky to the east. Still crazy, they drove a couple of miles before the UFO light disappeared into the sky. At Stephens' suggestion, they turned and drove back until Gray, in some inexplicable impulse, turned the steering wheel and swerved onto a lane leading to Tripp Pond, south of Lake Thompson.
As soon as he did so, a glowing, bright white cylindrical UFO appeared in front of them, hovering about 500 feet away. The engine of the car stopped and the radio went silent. Then the object rose higher into the sky and hovered a quarter of a mile away. Friends watched him for about three-quarters of an hour - another of the many mysteries in this case: neither Stephens nor Gray could explain why they stayed there for so long - until two more flying machines appeared in the night sky. The newcomers were disc-shaped and sparkled with blue, green, and red lights as they scurried around, making - as one friend noted - something like an "air show," gliding across the surface of the pond, turning sharply at right angles and suddenly move.
At the end of this performance, friends noticed that a thick gray fog was rising from the stationary water surface of the pond. Their car stopped a good half mile from the water, but Stephens and Gray thought they were suddenly only fifty feet from the pond, which, only a few hundred yards wide, suddenly expanded to the size of an ocean and stretched out to the horizon. An island appeared in the center of a huge water mirror (there is no island in a real pond), and one of the disc-shaped UFOs hovered over it.
At the same moment, the fog rising from the water enveloped the car, the radio itself turned on at full volume, and the voice of the announcer promised a clear, sunny day. The cylinder-shaped UFO was still hanging in the sky above them, but the engine of their car started up again and the guys were able to leave. It was already 6:30 in the morning. The contact lasted for about three and a half hours.
The bizarre memories of Stephens and Gray were called "increased strangeness" as an incident characterized by complete illogicality, fantastic imagery and improbability of the events described. Such messages often have parapsychological components. Since the complexity of such cases makes it difficult to evaluate them properly and it is simply difficult to believe in them, ufologists who keep up with the times sometimes ignore them.
Another case of "increased strangeness" took place in Rio de Janeiro on September 15, 1977. On his way to work at 2:20 a.m., bus driver Antonio La Rubia saw a brightly glowing hat-like object hovering over the football field. Frightened, he tried to run away, but found himself paralyzed by a blue beam. At the same instant, three strange creatures materialized next to him.
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“They were about four feet tall and had antennae over a foot long in the middle of their (American) football-shaped heads. The tip of each antenna was in the shape of a teaspoon that spun rapidly. In the middle of their heads, a row of something like small mirrors sparkled in two shades of blue …
Their squat bodies were covered in scales - clothing or leather - that looked like dull aluminum. Their arms were like elephant legs and tapered to narrow fingertips. At their "waists" they wore belts with hooks, from which hung syringe-like devices. The rounded body of each creature was supported by one single leg - on something like a narrow pedestal, ending in a small circular platform.
While three identical creatures "floated" around La Rubia, one of them directed his "syringe" at him, and he suddenly found himself in the corridor inside the ship. In a spacious hall, in which there was some kind of device that looked like a piano, and there were two dozen of these strange creatures, La Rubia underwent a kind of examination. He was shown several "slides" showing himself - dressed and undressed, a horse with a cart on a country road, traffic and a dog trying to attack one of these creatures. To La Rubia's horror, the dog turned blue and melted. On another slide, he saw a "UFO factory" with millions of robots. During the display of the pictures, one of the creatures took blood from La Rubia's finger using a syringe. Suddenly La Rubia thought that he was "thrown overboard", for he found himself on the street opposite his bus station. One of the robots stood next to him. When La Rubia looked around, the creature was gone."
One of the characteristic properties of cases of "increased strangeness" seems to be the absence of exotic background. Perhaps the strangest contact of all known happened in January 1979 in the town of Rowley Regis west of Birmingham in the heart of the UK. It all started early on the morning of January 4, when Jean Hingley escorted her husband to work outside her Bluestone Walk home. As she turned to return to the house, she saw a large orange sphere hovering over the carport, and three small figures darting past her through the door, making a shrill buzz as they went. Each figurine, Hingley recalled, was about three and a half feet tall and wore a silver tunic with buttons on the front. Their heads were covered with helmets that looked like "round goldfish tanks"through which the eyes on their broad white faces sparkled "like black diamonds." Even stranger were their large transparent wings, strewn with tiny dots. Their limbs taper towards the ends. The creatures fluttered and flew, their arms clasped to their chest and their legs hanging freely downward. Every creature was surrounded by a halo
The strange creatures made their way straight to the living room, where two of them began shaking Hingley's decorated Christmas tree. Then this couple flew up to the sofa and began to jump on it like children. When Jean asked them not to do this, one of them directed a beam of light onto her forehead, which seemed to blind and burn her. Nonetheless, the creatures accepted Jin's plate of pies. When she spoke to them, they began to press the buttons on their tunics and then answered her in rude male voices. After a while they flew out through the back door of the house to their "spaceship" - a sphere with a tail like a scorpion.
The ship took off, leaving a pattern of parallel lines an inch wide in the snow. The strangest thing, perhaps, was that two days after this meeting, their tree disappeared from Hingley's living room. On January 8, she reappeared, but in the backyard, disassembled into twigs and without decorations. The latter appeared in the kindergarten over the next several days.
The cases of La Rubia and Hingley are completely unique, for there is nothing like this in the archives of ufologists. But in some cases of "heightened strangeness" certain moments are repeated over and over again. Perhaps the best example is the problem of the mysterious "men in black" - sinister, but outwardly quite earthly agents who periodically appear in order to silence witnesses and remove indisputable evidence of direct contacts.
Men in black tend to travel in twos or threes and are often credited with oriental appearances. While they usually claim to be working for the government, it is surprising how they get such detailed information about UFO sightings. Sometimes they find themselves in the house of the witness even before he has the opportunity to tell someone about what he saw, and they know much more about him than he does about himself.
One of the first visits of the "Men in Black" was recorded in 1953. The director of one of the first and largest organizations dealing with UFOs - the International Bureau of Flying Saucers, Albert K. Bender, was visited by three men in dark suits who, he said, first entrusted him with the "solution" of the UFO riddle, then threatened him with jail if he will reveal the secret to anyone else. Bender was so frightened by this visit that he closed his office and refused to actively participate in ufology.
Over the next few years, similar dashing and elegantly dressed guys visited other witnesses of UFO sightings in large black cars without numbers and scared them until they lost their pulse (however, it seems that they never carried out their threats). As time went on, these visitors became more inhuman. In May 1967, a witness in Minnesota was visited by a man with an olive complexion and a pointed face who identified himself as "Major Richard French." When he complained of an upset stomach, the woman offered him a cup of jelly. He took it and tried to drink the jelly. In the end, she had to "show him how to eat jelly with a teaspoon."
Perhaps the most unusual detail of all the Men in Black incidents is what happened in Maine in 1975. About six months after the UFO encounter, local physician Herbert Hopkins received a call from a man who identified himself as vice president of a UFO organization. The caller heard that Hopkins was talking to Stephens and Gray and asked to be admitted to discuss their case. Hopkins agreed, and a few seconds later - much faster than one might imagine - the man was knocking on the back door of his house. Hopkins, who was at home alone, let him in without even asking for some reason his name.
The visitor looked, he said, like a "funeral home owner" dressed in a freshly ironed black suit. When he took off his black hat, Hopkins noted that he was bald and devoid of eyebrows and eyelashes, his face was white, his lips were bright red. He asked questions in a colorless voice without an accent. While Hopkins spoke, the visitor ran a gloved hand over his face, and the doctor was surprised to see a red spot on the glove - the man was wearing lipstick.
Threats followed. At first, the visitor did an amazing "trick", slowly dematerializing the coin in the doctor's hand, and casually threw in: "Nobody will ever see this coin on this planet." Hopkins was then ordered to destroy all of his tapes, including tape, of conversations with Stephens and Gray. Otherwise, the man threatened, the doctor's heart would disappear just like the coin.
“As he spoke the last words,” Hopkins recalled, “I noticed that his speech slowed down. He stood up, staggering, and very slowly said: “My energy is running out. Have to go. Goodbye . The man walked stiffly out of the house to the bright spot of light in the driveway, and Hopkins never saw him again.
What is common in cases of increased oddity? They are distinguished by the fact that the witnesses were almost always alone during their "adventures". This may mean that physically real beings are waiting for the right moment to contact, but it can just as well be assumed that such cases are a figment of the imagination of witnesses. With this in mind, it should be noted that the British ufologist Nigel Watson, who specializes in the study of cases of increased weirdness, believes that many bystanders who observed UFOs or other phenomena at an early age tend to experience even more dramatic paranormal as adults " Adventures".
Such contacts are highly subjective, and Watson notes that witnesses often experience a kind of mental shift during such adventures. It is difficult to say on the basis of the available evidence whether such schemes apply to the cases of La Rubia and Hingley. If Watson is correct, then the biography and psychology of the UFO sighting becomes critical in any attempt to understand the mystery. This observation is especially true for a new phenomenon that almost turned the whole of UFOlogy - alien abduction.