Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact - Above Top Secret

Rings in the MoonlightThis section is devoted to several types of artifacts claimed by popular tradition to be ofsupernatural origin, such as fairy rings and saucer nests. Although such phenomena are treated asborderline cases by specialists in UFO investigation, I believe the nests deserve more than passingattention and should also be considered in the light of specific traditional beliefs about the meaningof the "magic circles" that for centuries farmers have found in their fields. The literature on thissubject is abundant, and we shall select only a few cases to illustrate the point.On Thursday, July 28, 1966, in the evening, Mr. and Mrs. Lacoste were walking in the vicinity ofMontsoreau, Maine-et-Loire, France. All of a sudden, they saw a red sphere cross the sky like ameteor. It did not behave quite as a meteor, however, because it seemed to touch the ground andthen rise again – and hover at mid-height for a while before it was lost to sight. A check was madefor military experiments in the area. There were none.The next day, a Montsoreau farmer, Alain Rouillet, reported that a nine-square-yard area of hiswheat field had been flattened and covered with a yellowish, oily substance. Further investigationdisclosed additional details on the identity of the witnesses and substantiated the idea that a peculiarobject had indeed landed. Mr. Lacoste is a photographer in Saumur but, unfortunately, did not carrya camera with him at the time. He described the light given off by the sphere as being so intensethat it lit up the countryside. The sphere hovered, he said, for a few seconds, then it maneuveredclose to the ground. The witnesses felt sure it was a guided military gadget and walked to a distanceabout four hundred yards from the object, which went away and was lost to sight behind somewoods. The whole sighting had lasted four minutes.Six months earlier, a rash of similar sightings had made headlines in Australia. "More flying saucernests!" was the big news on the front page of the Sydney Sun-Herald for January 23, 1966. Threenests had been discovered in Queensland, circular clearings of dead reeds surrounded by greenreeds. Hundreds of sightseers were searching for more by the time the reports were published.On January 19, 1966, at 9:00 A.M., a twenty-seven-year-old banana grower, George Pedley, wasdriving his tractor in the vicinity of a swamp called Horseshoe Lagoon when he suddenly heard aloud hissing noise. It "sounded like air escaping from a tire," he said. Then, twenty-five yards infront of him, he saw a machine rising from the swamp. It was blue-gray, about twenty-five feetacross and nine feet high. It was spinning and rose to about sixty feet before moving off. "It was allover in a few seconds; it moved at terrific speed," said Pedley. Then he found the first nest, withreeds flattened in a clockwise direction.The Sydney Sun-Herald sent a reporter, Ben Davie, to investigate the sighting, and it wasdiscovered that dozens of people in the area had seen strange saucer-like craft similar to the onereported by Pedley, most of them before his sighting. Davie found a total of five nests and publishedthe following description:I saw clearings in the reeds where "they" took off, and it was as everyone described it. In acircle roughly thirty feet in diameter reeds had been cut and flattened in a clockwisedirection. One of the nests is a floating platform of clotted roots and weeds, apparently tornby tremendous force from the mud bottom beneath five feet of water.The second and third nests had been found, respectively, by Tom Warren, a cane farmer of Euramo,and Mr. Penning, a Tully schoolteacher. They were about twenty-five yards from the first one, buthidden by dense scrub. In the third nest, which seemed quite recent, the reeds were flattened in acounterclockwise direction. All the reeds were dead, but they had not been scorched or burned. Apatch of grass, about four feet square and three feet from the boundary of the first disk, had beenclipped at water level, thereby adding a new element of the mystery. Altogether, the rings varied indiameter from eight to thirty feet. In all but the smallest, the reeds had been flattened in a clockwisedirection.Policemen collected samples for tests, scientists came with Geiger counters, and the Royal