extraordinary%20encounters

of the pancakes. It tasted like cardboard, he
thought.
The story of the Eagle River pancakes attracted
national attention and a torrent of
ridicule. Even UFO groups disagreed on its
s i g n i ficance, some championing Simonton as a
n a ï ve, sincere witness to an extraord i n a ry
e vent, while the conserva t i ve National In ve s t igations
Committee on Aerial Ph e n o m e n a
(NICAP) sneeringly dismissed the story as an
a b s u rd contact claim. Even Project Blue Book
got drawn into the case, sending Dr. Hynek to
the site to interv i ew Simonton and local people.
Few of Si m o n t o n’s friends and acquaintances
deemed him a hoaxer or even a man
with sufficient imagination to make up such
an outlandish tale. Still, laboratory analysis
found nothing out of the ord i n a ry in the pancake
sample it examined. In common with just
about eve rybody else who looked closely at the
claim, the air force ended up confused, stating
at one point that Simonton was a “balanced
person of good mental health,” and, at ano
t h e r, that he had suffered “an hallucination
f o l l owed with delusion” (Mallan, 1967). Se p ar
a t e l y, a lone witness and a nearby farm family
re p o rted seeing a UFO over Si m o n t o n’s re s idence,
in the first case, at the time of the supposed
landing; in the second, the next eve n i n g .
Cases such as Villas-Boas’s and Simonton’s
suggested a degree of communication between
witnesses and UFO beings. To some
ufologists, many never very enthusiastic about
CE3s to start with, that suggested the despised
contactees, even if neither man acted
much like one. These ufologists were more
comfortable with a CE3 report from Socorro,
New Mexico, on April 24, 1964, from Lonnie
Zamora, a police officer of undisputed reliability.
Around 6 P.M. Zamora spotted a small,
egg-shaped UFO resting in an isolated area on
the city’s outskirts. Close to the object were
two small figures dressed in white coveralls,
apparently examining the craft. On seeing
Zamora, they ran behind the craft and disappeared.
The flame-spewing UFO departed
with a roar. Police, Project Blue Book, and
civilian investigators found burn marks and
Close encounters of the third kind 65
impressions at the site. Despite its hostility to
UFOs and its tendency to reach for sometimes
far-fetched “conventional” explanations
for reports, Project Blue Book declared the
case an “unknown.” It has since become a
classic UFO incident, often cited by those
who argue for the anomalous nature of the
phenomenon.
If Zamora’s experience seemed relatively
straightforward, Gary Wilcox’s claimed encounter
of the same day and a few hours earlier
appeared as bizarre as Villas-Boas’s and Simonton’s,
though not much like either in any
other context. Wilcox, a young Newark Valley,
New York, dairy farmer, asserted that he
had spoken with two short, spacesuit-clad
UFO occupants for two hours. They said that
they were part of a Martian expedition,
Wilcox said, engaged in Earth exploration.
Wilcox’s story did not come to light until a
Police Officer Lonnie Zamora, who saw a UFO land near
Socorro, New Mexico, April 24, 1964 (Fortean Picture
Library)