extraordinary%20encounters

carpet, and I got on the settee, and I didn’t
k n ow how long I was there. Ooh! I was
dead!” (Budden, 1988). She lay incapacitated
until five o’clock that afternoon. Fi n a l l y, her
s t rength was sufficiently re s t o red so that she
was able to phone her husband, a neighbor,
and the police.
In vestigators found an oval-shaped imp
ression in the backyard snow. Hingley complained
that her clock, radio, and television
we re no longer functioning. The cassette
tapes that she said the beings had touched
we re ruined. She suffered a range of physical
d i s c o m f o rts in her eyes, ears, and jaw. He r
doctor became alarmed enough about her
well-being that he ord e red her to stay home
f rom work for two weeks. As outlandish as
her story sounded, investigators did not
doubt her sincerity.
See Also: Close encounters of the third kind
Further Reading
Budden, Alfred, 1988. “The Mince-Pie Martians:
The Rowley Regis Case.” Fortean Times 50 (Summer):
40–44.
Miniature pilots
One day in 1929, according to a story she
told many years later, a five-year-old girl and
her eight-year-old brother were playing in the
garden of their Hertford, Hertfordshire, England,
home when they heard an engine
sound. It was coming from a nearby orchard
and over the garden fence. As its source came
into view, the children saw a tiny biplane,
with a wingspan of no more than twelve to fifteen
inches, descend and land briefly by a
garbage pail. During the few seconds that it
was on the ground, both children got a clear
view of a figure they described as a “perfectly
proportioned tiny pilot wearing a leather flying
helmet,” who they said, “waved to us as he
took off.”
The sight so unsettled the two that it wasn’t
until they were well into their adult lives,
around 1960, that they spoke of it to each
other. “I have no explanation to offer,” the
woman said, “but I do know that this was not
Monka 177
a figment of my imagination” (Creighton,
1970).
In a UFO-age counterpart to this strange
story, a Seattle woman reported that around 2
A.M. one night in late August 1965 she awoke
paralyzed. Unable to speak or move, she
watched helplessly as a football-shaped gray
object sailed through her open window and
hovered over a carpet in her bedroom. As the
tiny UFO prepared to land, three tripod legs
dropped from it. Once settled on the floor,
the UFO let out a ramp, down which stepped
five or six miniature beings clad in tight-fitting
uniforms. They then engaged in what appeared
to be repair work on their craft. On
completing the job, they walked up the ramp
and into the ship and flew away. At that
point, the witness found that she had regained
normal mobility.
It seems likely that this second incident was
a hallucination of a kind frequently associated
with sleep paralysis.
Further Reading
Creighton, Gordon, 1970. “A Weird Case from the
Past.” Flying Saucer Review 16, 4 (July/August):
30.
Hufford, David J., 1982. The Terror That Comes in
the Night: An Experience-Centered Study of Super -
natural Assault Traditions. Philadelphia, PA: University
of Pennsylvania Press.
Keel, John A., 1970. UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse.
New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons.
Monka
Monka first surfaced as the disembodied voice
of a Martian on a tape owned by contactee
Dick Miller. Miller played the message at the
April 1956 Giant Rock Interplanetary Spacecraft
Convention, telling the audience that
the voice had mysteriously appeared on a tape
inside a sealed can. The message had Monka
(“I am what you would call the head of my
government”) promising, “On the evening of
November 7, of this your year 1956, at 10:30
P.M. your local time, we request that one of
your communications stations remove its carrier
signal from the air for two minutes”
(“Mon-Ka of Mars,” 1956). From ten thou-