extraordinary%20encounters

44 Bird aliens
same kind of trees we have on earth” (Davis,
1957).
See Also: Aura Rhanes; Contactees
Further Reading
Beckley, Timothy Green, ed., 1970. The People of the
Planet Clarion. Clarksburg, WV: Saucerian
Books.
Bethurum, Truman, 1954. Aboard a Flying Saucer.
Los Angeles: DeVorss and Company.
———, 1953. “I Was Inside a Flying Saucer.”
Saucers 1, 2: 4–5.
Davis, Isabel L., 1957. “Meet the Extraterrestrial.”
Fantastic Universe 8, 5 (November): 31–59.
Moseley, James W., 1961. “Recent News Stories:
1961 Giant Rock Convention Is Disappointing.”
Saucer News 8, 4 (December): 12–13.
Reeve, Bryant, and Helen Reeve, 1957. Flying Saucer
Pilgrimage. Amherst, WI: Amherst Press.
Bird aliens
A French businessman who insisted on
anonymity confided a strange tale to ufologist
Lyonel Trigano about a decidedly unsettling
encounter on a rural road in Var one dark,
rainy night in November 1962. As he
rounded a curve, he saw, some fifty to sixty
feet ahead of him, a group of figures standing
close to one another in the middle of the
highway. He slowed down, and as he did so,
the group “jerkily” broke into two parts.
“My window was down,” he related, “and I
leaned my head out slightly to see what was
the matter; it was then that I saw beasts, some
kind of bizarre animals, with the heads of
birds, and covered in some sort of plumage,
which were hurling themselves from two sides
toward my car.”
Shocked and frightened, he quickly rolled
up the window and accelerated. After moving
a few hundred feet to what he thought was a
safe distance, he looked back to see these
“nightmarish beings” flapping what looked to
be wings and heading toward a glowing, darkblue
object hovering over a field on the other
side of the road. The UFO looked like two
upside-down plates placed over each other.
When the creatures or beings reached the
UFO, they “were literally sucked into the underpart
of the machine as if by a whirlwind.”
A dull thudding sound followed, and the
UFO streaked away.
The witness told Trigano that he had said
little to others about the experience for fear of
being thought mad.
See Also: Close encounters of the third kind; Mothman
Further Reading
Trigano, Lyonel, 1968. “Strange Encounter in Var.”
Flying Saucer Review 14, 6 (November/December):
18.
Birmingham’s ark
A bizarre experience is recorded in a fifteenpage
document left by a nineteenth-century
Australian, Frederick William Birmingham,
who lived in Parramatta, New South Wales.
Birmingham was an engineer, surveyor, and
alderman for the city, today a suburb of Sydney.
His tale is reminiscent in some ways of
the flying-saucer contactee tales that would
circulate decades later.
The document came into the hands of a
well-known Australian ufologist, Bill Chalker,
in 1975. Investigating its background, he
traced it to a teacher named Haywood, who
lived at the location where Birmingham
(whose existence and occupation Chalker was
able to verify) was dwelling when his encounter
occurred. Haywood, apparently, later
gave it to another family, which had had the
manuscript in its possession since at least the
early 1940s and showed it to Chalker. Chalker
could find no evidence that it was a recent literary
or historical hoax.
Birmingham wrote that on the evening of
July 25, 1868, “I had a wonderful dream, a vision,”
while standing under the verandah of
the cottage he rented. Looking up into the sky,
he saw “the Lord Bishop of Syd n e y’s head in
the air looking intently upon me in a frow n i n g
half laughing mood.” As it passed in an easterly
direction, it faded out, then re a p p e a re d
b r i e fly twice more. “I retraced the course the
head had taken and just in the spot where I
first saw the head I saw an ‘A rk,’” he wrote. As
he stood and studied it, he said aloud to hims
e l f, “Well, that is a beautiful ve s s e l . ”