extraordinary%20encounters

posite direction when he thought he heard
music. Looking outside, he saw a group of little
people—no more than three or four inches
high—dancing under the elm tree. They also
seemed to be humming along with the melody.
The scene was clear and unmistakable.
Yet, still unable to credit his senses, he
turned away, then glanced back. The strange
tiny fig u res we re still there. He got up and
looked through another window in case the
whole scene was simply a trick of light. He
could still see the fig u res. He moved about
v i g o rously to discharge any extant images
kept over from sleep. After five minutes the
little people began to fade away, and soon
only the grass on which they had been moving
re m a i n e d .
Exhausted, he returned to bed and fell
asleep. He would never forget the incident.
Recalling it many years later in his autobiography,
he reflected ruefully, “When I recall
that hour I am so sure that I was awake I
think maybe I am still crazy.”
See Also: Fairies encountered
Further Reading
White, William Allen, 1946. Autobiography. New
York: Macmillan.
Wilcox’s Martians
As he went about his chores on the morning
of April 24, 1964, Newark Valley, New York,
dairy farmer Gary T. Wilcox had a premonition
that something out of the ordinary was
going to happen that day. Driving his tractor
up a hill, he glimpsed a shiny object just inside
a nearby clump of woods. He stopped the
tractor, got off, and walked toward the woods.
The closer perspective allowed him to see that
the object was an egg-shaped structure,
twenty feet long and sixteen feet wide, hovering
two feet above the ground. All the while it
emitted a sound that to Wilcox’s ears was like
a car idling. Just after he touched the UFO,
two Martians came up from under it.
Wilcox did not learn of their planet of origin
immediately, but the figures did not look
earthly. Four feet tall and two feet wide, they
Wilcox’s Martians 267
were clad in silver suits that covered their entire
bodies. Each carried a small tray filled
with soil and plant samples. An eerie voice addressed
him, apparently from the chest of the
nearer figure (the other stood near the UFO).
The voice said, “We are from what you know
as the planet Mars” (Schwarz, 1983). Asked
what he was doing, Wilcox explained that he
was spreading manure. The Martian wanted
to know what manure was, and he asked a series
of questions about it. He said he would
like a sample of it, but when Wilcox volunteered
to go to the barn to retrieve some, the
alien changed the subject. They could come
to Earth only every two years, he said, and
warned would-be travelers from Earth to stay
away from Mars, since its conditions are inhospitable
to human life. They were here to
study the Earth’s organic life, and they said
something that Wilcox understood to mean
that “the earth and Mars, plus some other
planets, might be changed around.” They also
predicted that within a year two American astronauts,
John Glenn and Virgil (Gus) Grissom,
and two Soviet cosmonauts would be
killed. They said that other Martian ships
were surveying the Earth.
After two hours, the conversation ended.
The Martians said that Wilcox should not tell
anyone about the exchange “for your own
good,” though Wilcox did not interpret this
as a threat.
All the while, Wilcox would tell family
members, he suspected that he was at the receiving
end of a hoax engineered by the television
show Candid Camera. He found a jellylike
substance on the ground where the UFO
had been, but he could not pick it up. It
slipped through his fingers.
Wilcox confided the story to family members
and friends. The matter probably would
have ended there if two local women, who
worked with Floyd Wilcox, Gary’s younger
brother, had not heard the story. Both belonged
to a Washington-based UFO organization.
They asked permission to interview
Gary Wilcox, who provided them with a short
statement. A neighbor woman interested in