extraordinary%20encounters

ported account ushered in the UFO age. The
same afternoon as Arnold’s sighting, Oregon
farmer Bill Schuening claimed to have seen a
spherical object hovering five or six feet above
a field. Just beneath it were “two little guys in
green suits with white helmets” (McCune,
1987). They were no more than three feet tall.
A few seconds later they vanished. Schuening
did not see them enter the craft, which then
flew off toward the Cascades.
In the early UFO era, however, such reports,
relatively rare but hardly nonexistent,
received little attention. In 1950, when the
first book with “flying saucers” in its title,
Donald E. Keyhoe’s paperback The Flying
Saucers Are Real, saw print, the occupants of
the vehicles—Keyhoe believed them to be
peaceable extraterrestrials who deliberately refrained
from contact—could only be speculated
about. Another book published that
same year, Frank Scully’s Behind the Flying
Saucers, asserted that the U.S. government
had recovered crashed spacecraft, containing
the bodies of little men “dressed in the style of
the 1890s” and believed to be from Venus.
(Subsequent investigations determined that
two veteran confidence artists had concocted
these tales in order to peddle bogus oil-detection
devices tied to advanced extraterrestrial
technology.) Scully’s notorious book had the
effect of leading some early ufologists—as opposed
to the saucerians who embraced the
contactee movement—to shy away from any
reports of humanoids, whatever the source.
A significant proportion of the reports described
the occupants as humanoids. The specific
descriptions may have varied, but witnesses
mostly testified that UFO occupants
had two arms, two legs, and generally humanlike
head and facial features. Usually the beings
were small. Sometimes they were
grotesque-looking. Sometimes they looked
like small humans. A minority were of normal
human height, and a few were said to be more
than that, seven or eight feet tall. Such reports
came from all over the world, including remote
Third World locations where UFOs
were little known and the occupants were
Close encounters of the third kind 63
sometimes taken to be American or Russian
pilots. A wave of humanoid and other encounters
in France in the fall of 1954 received
international attention and caused even the
most cautious UFO researchers to reconsider
their bias against CE3 reports. In the summer
of 1955, the air force’s Project Blue Book investigated
a bizarre episode in which members
of a rural Kentucky family claimed to have
spent a night besieged by floating, big-eared
humanoid entities from a UFO.
CE3s were different from the contact
claims of George Adamski, Howard Menger,
George Van Tassel, and other 1950s contactees
in some important ways. For one, the
beings seldom looked much like the goldenhaired,
angelic spacemen and spacewomen
who figured in the contactees’ tales. For another,
they had little if anything to say. Communication,
if any (and there seldom was),
was brief, sometimes enigmatic, and always
devoid of inspirational content. Unlike contactees,
CE3 witnesses fit the profile of witnesses
to less exotic UFO phenomena; in
other words, they were ordinary citizens without
a background in occultism and other esoteric
pursuits, as contactees tended to be.
They also did not embark on lecture tours or
write books, as the more flamboyant contactees
did.
A spectacular CE3 took place over Boianai,
Papua New Guinea, in late June 1959. The
best-known witness, the Rev. William Booth
Gill, was an Anglican missionary from Australia.
On the evening of June 26, thirty-eight
persons observed a large, disc-shaped craft
with four legs hovering in the northwestern
sky. Gill estimated its apparent size to be that
of five full moons lined up end to end. At the
top of the UFO, behind a glass-covered cockpit,
four humanlike figures, surrounded by illumination,
moved back and forth, apparently
working at an unknown task. The object
and its crew ascended into gathering clouds
after forty-five minutes. Other UFOs, though
not their occupants, were intermittently visible
over the next three and a half hours.
Twenty five of the witnesses signed a state-