extraordinary%20encounters

On May 7, 1955, a Caracas, Venezuela,
newspaper, El Universal, carried a sensational
story of an incident supposed to have taken
place almost exactly five years earlier. A man
claimed that while driving down a rural highway
in Argentina, he spotted a flying saucer
that had landed on the side of the road. Curious,
he stopped his car, approached the craft,
and eventually boarded it. Inside, he found
the bodies of three little men lying near an instrument
panel. After touching one, he panicked
and fled, to return the next day to see
UFOs hovering over the site. Where the original
craft had been there was only a pile of
warm, gray ashes. Years later, a retrospective
investigation by Argentine ufologists determined
that the “witness” had made up the
story.
More intriguing was an account given in
confidence to Isabel L. Davis, one of the most
intelligent, hard-headed, first-generation ufologists
and a fierce critic of the more outlandish
saucer tales. Davis never published the
account in her lifetime, but she found it intriguing,
given that the informant, a medical
scientist, seemed serious and credible. Even
so, the scientist’s claim was a fantastic one. In
the late 1950s, she told Davis, she was directed
to a secure, government-run facility
and ordered to examine body parts that she
quickly recognized as humanlike but not
human. Her superiors provided no explanations
or further details, and when her work
was completed, they instructed her to tell nobody.
As she remarked to Davis, she would
not have done so anyway, since no one would
have believed her.
Another tale—this one circulated by saucer
personality and publisher Gray Barker—concerned
Nicholas von Poppen, an Estonian
refugee who had fled his native country when
Soviet troops overran it and slaughtered his
family. That much of the story seems true (the
real Von Poppen died in Los Angeles in
1976). Beyond that, however, Barker and
truth parted company. He took an unpublished
science-fiction manuscript written by a
subscriber to his magazine The Saucerian and
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transformed it into a “true” story. In the original,
the writer/subscriber had taken a colorful,
real acquaintance, Von Poppen, and placed
him inside a fantasy in which Von Poppen
took photographs in New Mexico of a crashed
UFO and its occupants. Barker took this story
and embellished it further, then marketed it as
an account of an authentic incident—not the
only hoax Barker would perpetrate on his impressionable
readers.
In the 1970s, ufologist Leonard H. Stringfield,
in the face of criticism and skepticism
from some colleagues, began collecting
crash/retrieval claims and rumors and publishing
them in a series of monographs. None
amounted to much as evidence, though some
were undeniably interesting, such as the testimony
of a Presbyterian pastor. This man—
Stringfield protected the names of his informants—alleged
that when he was a boy, he and
his father (also a clergyman) visited the Museum
of Science and Industry in Chicago.
During one visit, they got lost. In their search
for an exit, they accidentally entered a room
where a number of humanoid beings lay preserved
under a glass-covered case. Before they
could fully grasp what they were seeing, they
were discovered. The father was pressured to
sign papers swearing him to silence.
In another alleged instance, said to have
taken place at a New Jersey air force base in
January 1978, a sergeant—who insisted on
anonymity—told Stringfield that in the early
morning hours a military policeman had shot
and killed a humanoid being that he had encountered
while chasing a UFO in his car.
The body was then shipped off to Wright-Patterson
Air Force Base. The sergeant eventually
provided an official-looking “incident report,”
with the names of witnesses and investigators
inked out. Stringfield’s informant talked and
acted in a manner that he and fellow ufologist
Richard Hall, who interviewed the man in
person on two occasions, deemed sincere, but,
despite a serious effort, they uncovered nothing
that conclusively verified the claim.
Perhaps the most interesting of Stringfield’s
informants were several “medical people” who