extraordinary%20encounters

62 Close encounters of the third kind
perimenting with trance mediumship. In this
state he heard from Chung Fu, a spirit guide
who in his last physical incarnation was a student
of Lao-Tzu in China. In 1970, Lever and
his wife, Quinta, established the Circle of
Inner Truth to facilitate Chung Fu’s teachings,
which focused on spiritual development as the
way to break out of the reincarnation cyc l e .
These efforts included such quotidian matters
as diet, health care, and psychological we l l -
being, on which Chung Fu would offer guidance
in sittings with individuals.
The Levers traveled widely, abandoning
any permanent residence, to work for Chung
Fu. Inner Circles took roots in several American
cities, and one operated out of London.
Finally, Chung Fu was heard from no more,
and by the latter 1980s, the movement no
longer existed.
Further Reading
Melton, J. Gordon, 1996. Encyclopedia of American
Religions. Fifth edition. Detroit, MI: Gale Research.
Close encounters of the third kind
In The UFO Experience (1972), J. Allen
Hynek, a Northwestern University astronomer
and former scientific consultant to
the U.S. Air Force’s Project Blue Book, proposed
a classification system for UFO sightings,
including three varieties of close encounters.
He defined “close encounters of the third
kind” as those “in which the presence of animated
creatures is reported.” Prior to the
coining of the phrase (shortened to “CE3”),
ufologists had called these “occupant reports.”
The modern UFO phenomenon is two
centuries old. In the early nineteenth century
the first reports of arguably UFO-like phenomena
were recorded in scientific journals,
newspaper accounts, and other sources,
though such stories were relatively rare until
late in the century, when alleged sightings of
mysterious “airships” filled American newspapers
between November 1896 and May 1897.
Many were hoaxes, some concocted by the
press itself. Among them were claims that the
airships had landed. Reflecting a widely held
belief that an ingenious American inventor
had built the ships and that the occupants
were human, some reports even gave the inventor
a name, Wilson. Other accounts, however,
described grotesque aliens, sometimes
thought to be from Mars. “Hoax” probably is
too strong a word to characterize these tall
tales, which were apparently meant as jokes to
amuse a readership that was not fooled.
After 1947—the year “flying saucers” and
“unidentified flying objects” entered popular
consciousness—a number of seemingly sinc
e re individuals came forw a rd to speak of encounters
they had experienced in earlier
years, some reaching as far back as 1893,
when a man in the Australian state of New
South Wales told a newspaper that he had
seen a saucer-shaped stru c t u re land on his
farm. When he went to investigate, an oddly
d ressed man stepped out of the craft holding
a device that resembled a “t o rc h” (flashlight).
He aimed the device at the witness, who saw
a light shoot out from it and hit his hand.
He was knocked unconscious. When he
awoke, the object and occupant we re gone.
For the rest of his life, he claimed, his hand
was paralyze d .
New Zealand newspapers of 1909 recorded
a local airship-sighting wave, including an incident
in which a witness saw three figures in
a craft passing overhead. One shouted at him
in an unfamiliar language. In the United
States, early on the morning of February 29,
1916, according to a report in the Superior
Telegram that same day, workers along the
Lake Superior dock in Wisconsin saw a “big
machine . . . 50 feet wide and 100 feet long”
fly by at a high rate of speed about six hundred
feet in the air. Workers said they had
seen three “men” inside the craft. This is the
first known, seemingly credible, CE3 to be
published at the time of its occurrence.
A newspaper referred to these mysterious
craft by the name “flying saucers” for the first
time on June 26, 1947, two days after private
pilot Kenneth Arnold saw nine discs maneuvering
over the Cascade Mountains. This re-