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D I S P A T C H E S Not-So-Close Encounters
Jerry Black knows they’re out there, he just hasn’t found them yet Jerry Black is looking for UFOs. A sighting has been reported somewhere over rural Blanchester, Ohio, and as the cool fields grow dark, he monitors the sky expectantly. For Black, maybe tonight will be the night. Perhaps, for just an instant, he will see something unusual moving above the tree line, blotting out the clean, bright stars. More likely, though, like last night and the night before it, he will see nothing. Balding and soft-spoken, his vowels drawn out by country living, Black has been investigating UFOs for more than 40 years from his home northeast of Cincinnati. He even met his wife in 1973 after she claimed aliens abducted her. Together, they have collected thousands of local eyewitness accounts of UFO sightings and other close encounters. He’s met women who are convinced they’re pregnant with an alien child; normal-looking adults who profess to be half-alien and half-human; and others who are seeking to "return home" to their planet. Even so, Black is quick to acknowledge that there isn’t a shred of evidence UFOs are extraterrestrial, or that they have ever landed on Earth. And, despite his wife’s claims, he has no irrefutable evidence that aliens have abducted people, either. By Black’s own estimations, roughly 92 percent of UFO cases reported by rattled eyewitnesses turn out to be aircraft, mistaken celestial bodies and other natural phenomena — or elaborate hoaxes. He’s even come to believe that the luminous objects he saw in 1988 while driving home one night along a dark highway were most likely ’spiritual” in nature and did not originate in outer space. But there’s still that 8 percent that remain unsolved, and it is these cases, the ones that cannot easily be explained, that most interest Jerry Black. Armed with the determination of Mulder and Scully, Black tries to expose the hoaxes and false claims and focuses on the cases that, even after thorough investigation, remain mysteries. He’s aware that his is a lifestyle largely misunderstood — and maligned — by the public, and he blames the glut of misinformation marketed each year to UFO enthusiasts. “The industry has kind of gone to pot,” the 61-year-old Black says wearily, referring to the amount of misleading information and unsubstantiated claims perpetrated, he says, in books like Intruders by Budd Hopkins, an account of human abductions, and Whitley Strieber’s bestseller, Communion: A True Story, which was adapted into a 1989 feature-length film starring Christopher Walken. “It seems like everybody out there is more interested in money than telling the truth about UFOs,” Black says. Still, he believes there have been enough sightings of strange objects in the sky to warrant serious and proper investigation. “There’s something out there,” he says. “You can believe what you want to believe, but there’s something out there.” And plenty of people agree. To get some idea of the number of UFO eyewitness reports logged each year, one need look no further than The UFO Evidence, Volume II (Scarecrow Press, 2001) by Richard H. Hall — an exhaustive collection of 30 years worth of reported UFO sightings dating back to 1964. It’s all here: glowing objects outpacing airplanes; scorched landing sites and mutilated livestock; objects shaped like cones, cigars, balls and spheres; silver-suited beings and stocky humanoids with grayish skin; alien abductions, followed by abrupt weigh-loss, burned skin, and amnesia; secret desert rendezvous; and, of course, government cover-ups, conspiracies and interrogations. The story really began July 3, 1947, when something strange happened in the arid scrubland near Roswell, New Mexico. According to the Air Force, a weather balloon crashed in the desert. Almost immediately, however, rumors surfaced of disc-shaped objects, little men, deep gouges in the ground and a trail of scattered debris. There in the thin desert air, as confused reports were confirmed and then abruptly denied, the study of UFOs, or ufology, was born. Regardless of what really happened at Roswell, the uncertainty surrounding it added to the atmosphere of suspicion in American culture. That same year, for example, the House Un-American Activities Committee convened to investigate suspected Communists; the CIA was formed; and the Cold War began in earnest.
More than 50 years later, government secrecy and conspiracy theories — as well as ufology — continue to thrive. Thousands of people like Black follow every lead of reported UFO sightings like some people follow the stock market. Today there’s even a musical based on the Roswell incident, imaginatively titled Roswell: The Musical. Billed as a comedy/drama in two acts, it’s expected to open for a fifth season this year at Roswell Amphitheater. In addition to dramatic interpretations, UFO watchers and conspiracy theorists alike can feed their insatiable appetites with TV shows like The X-Files and Roswell, currently in their eighth and second seasons respectively. As for Jerry Black, his interest in UFOs began not too long after Roswell, in the mid-1950s, while still attending Hughes High School in Cincinnati. “I was actually researching and investigating UFOs when I was 16 years old,” Black says, noting that he shunned the sci-fi of Buck Rogers in favor of the real thing. Recalling an early investigation, Black says one of his schoolteachers claimed she was seeing UFOs, always from the same window of her house. Black went to her home and told her, somewhat regretfully, that the bright object above the treetops was just the moon. “She gets real close,” he says, “and she whispers in my ear, “How do you know it’s the moon?”" Black nurtured his interest in UFOs while working in down-to-earth jobs, first as an inventory control clerk for Pure Oil Company in the 1950s and 60s, and later as a secretary for Continental Can Company, until finally retiring on disability in 1984 with severe arthritis. He has a son from a previous marriage and four stepchildren with his second wife, Peg, whom he met during a local radio show devoted to UFO phenomena; he was a guest on the program, she called in to report her abduction. Apart from one of his stepsons, Black admits that his children neither share, nor understand, his fascination with UFOs. “They support me as a parent,” he says. Since his retirement, Black has investigated fewer and fewer cases each year and he says the number of calls reporting a UFO sighting has dwindled as well. “The last five or six years, I would say I’m lucky to average three or four [calls] a month,” he says. To properly investigate cases, Black has assembled what he calls “a little empire” comprised of photographic experts, soil analysts, psychologists, other UFO investigators, and staff in the air traffic control towers of three local airports who can verify sightings.
Some cases can be solved in a matter of hours while others last months, even years. Black has thoroughly investigated as many as 15 to 20 UFO sightings or alien abduction claims, in addition to accumulating thousands of eyewitness accounts. Large-scale investigations can require photographic analyses, examination of soil samples and retrospective weather studies, plus interviews with eyewitnesses, neighbors, and airport control tower employees. Sometimes Black uses voice-stress analysis techniques, lie detector tests and hypnosis. Black says two local TV stations have his name and contact number so that they can direct UFO eyewitnesses his way. The library and police department also keep his number on file, but he doesn’t harbor any illusions about his popularity. “Did they hang [the number] up on the wall? I doubt it,” Black says. During the late 1980s, Black researched a much-publicized spate of UFO sightings in Gulf Breeze, a sun-drenched coastal town on Florida’s Panhandle, near Pensacola. Beginning in November 1987, a resident captured images that clearly showed a brightly-lit disc suspended in the night sky. Over the next few years, the man took several other photographs and also claimed he regularly was being abducted by aliens. “Gulf Breeze cost me $2,000 to $4,000 and I didn’t even leave my house,” Black says. “I spent four and a half years and almost lost my wife over it, seriously, because I spent so much time and so much money. I became obsessed with the Gulf Breeze sightings.” Black later discovered that the man photographed homemade UFO models and then double-exposed the film to make it appear as if the UFO was flying over the trees near his home. “He took a picture himself of this model, with a light underneath it, and then left it in the camera, went outside, took a picture of the night sky, and there it was — a UFO.” * * * The Gulf Breeze sightings, and those of Black’s schoolteacher, both represent the bulk of cases that can be explained with careful investigation. Whether by untangling well-wrought hoaxes or making sense of confused eyewitness accounts, most of Black’s other cases have been resolved, too. But in 1976, after 20 years of researching UFOs, Black finally worked on a case that couldn’t be solved, a case that still baffles him today. On Jan. 6, 1976, around 11 p.m., driver Louise Smith and passengers Mona Stafford and Elaine Thomas were traveling along US Route 27 in Stanford, Ky., south of Lexington.
“All of a sudden they saw this object in the sky,” Black recalls. “The object appeared to be red in color and coming, dropping from the sky. They assumed this was an airplane on fire and were bracing themselves to see if it was going to crash somewhere near there. All of a sudden the object stopped on a dime — that’s one of the characteristics of UFOs that [man-made vehicles] don’t have.” Although Smith took her foot off the gas pedal, the car continued to go faster, Black says, reaching speeds of 85 mph. As Smith struggled to control the car, the women never lost sight of the brightly-lit UFO, which hovered over the treetops, less than 100 feet above the ground. The car was then pulled backwards and dragged over a cattle grid across the highway. “They saw a blue light come into the car,” says Black. “The next thing they remember was back on the highway, riding in the car. They were quite hot, just like they had been subjected to extreme heat, or put under a sunlamp “When they got back home they realized they had lost an hour and 25 minutes worth of time.” The women, burned and shaken, immediately went to a neighbor’s house, says Black, and the neighbor told them to draw what they had seen and write down what they remembered about it. Black started investigating the case several months later. He subjected all three women to lie detector tests and they all passed. Under hypnosis, they reported that they were taken aboard the craft. “Elaine was put in a glass cubicle. It was pretty dark, but she could see the figures of small beings walking around the glass outside. She had a skin scraping taken off of her chest. Mona had her eyes actually removed from her sockets, she claims, laid on her cheeks, and replaced again,” Black says, adding that the women said their arms and legs were twisted in a very painful manner, but when they were asked if they felt like they had been tortured they all said no. “We’ve got eight hours of tapes of hypnosis of these women and, believe me, they’re not pleasant to hear,” Black says. “Most of it, they’re crying. To this day I have no reason to believe those women were perpetrating a hoax.” According to Hall’s The UFO Evidence, which includes a report of the incident, all three women suffered eye inflammation, excessive thirst, abrupt weight loss, and skin burns that took weeks to heal; in 1978, two years after the incident, Elaine Thomas died of unknown causes. A few months after the Stanford abduction, Black investigated another alleged abduction that took place just a few miles down the road. Again, a UFO was sighted by a man driving a pickup truck along a quiet Kentucky highway. “This object actually took control of his car,” Black says. Allegedly, the vehicle was lifted off the road, its wheels spinning in the air. Black recalls interviewing the driver’s son, who drew pictures of the UFO for him. He still wonders if the two abductions were connected in some way. “Those two cases there are the two most compelling cases that really keep me going,” he says earnestly. Although he investigated the cases almost 25 years ago, Black still keeps in touch with the two surviving Stanford women. As each year passes, he says he believes less and less that UFOs could be extraterrestrial in origin; if it wasn’t for the Kentucky abductions of 1976, he might have stopped believing altogether. * * * The abduction claims of Louise Smith, Mona Stafford and Elaine Thomas are unusual, says Black, but by no means unique.
”There’s still thousands of people on this planet, sincere people like yourself, like me, like anyone walking out on the street today, who sincerely believe they were abducted,” he says. “Thousands of women, sitting in their home, housewives looking out the window, see this strange object in the daytime approach the house. And all of a sudden the next thing they remember, the food on the stove is burning or the kids are home from school and they can’t account for the lost time.” Recent research has provided scientists with several credible explanations for UFO sightings and abductions, most of which involve some kind of psychological disorder or neurological problem. According to a 1993 paper published in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, people who report UFO sightings are “psychologically or psychosocially disturbed” or “fantasy-prone individuals who ” confuse their vivid imaginings with external happenings.” Researchers also found that 81 percent of alleged abductions occur at night, and, according to victims’ accounts, almost 60 percent are linked with sleep, either occurring as they fall asleep, while they dream, or when they are waking up. In light of these results, scientists think many accounts of alien abduction are just descriptions of ’sleep paralysis’ — an episode of total body paralysis that occurs just prior to sleep or upon awakening. Some studies claim that alien abduction experiences are really fetal memories stored at the moment of birth. Other findings suggest that the temporal lobes of the brain might be responsible. Located on either side of the brain, where its surface crowds into ridges and deep grooves, the temporal lobes organize sensory information as it first enters the brain. Acting as a gate to all kinds of incoming information, especially sound and smell, the temporal lobes tell us a lot about our surroundings; when they stop working properly, patients suffer visions, hallucinations, and altered behavior, and often have intense religious experiences.
Armed with these findings, researchers believe temporal lobe damage probably accounts for UFO sightings and alien abduction claims that can’t be ruled out by other causes or hoaxes. But the medical explanations don’t explain every single case. For one, they do nothing to address UFO sightings that involve crowds of people. Michael Persinger thinks he has the answer. A professor of psychology and neuroscience at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, Persinger believes UFOs, or “luminous anomalies’ as he calls them, are generated by movements or stresses in the Earth’s tectonic plates. Persinger has been studying the link between earthquakes and UFOs for more than 30 years and says there is often an increase in the number of UFO sightings in the six-month period leading up to an earthquake. Appearing as strange lights, luminous displays can move around, change color, rotate, and change shape, says Persinger, but they are not UFOs; instead, they are little pockets of electromagnetic energy produced when energy that has built up in the Earth’s crust is released through natural fault lines. “Their color reflects their temperature,” Persinger says. “If they rotate, different areas will have different temperatures and different colors, which to the na’ve eye may be perceived as a craft or whatever.” In a 1989 paper published in the journal Perceptual and Motor Skills, Persinger writes that the short pulses of energy that cause strange moving lights in the sky might also be powerful enough to affect the temporal lobes of the brain, triggering an imaginary abduction experience. “The movement of these phenomena follow local fault lines or other strain release mechanisms. That’s why you often find them along riverbeds, and, of course, very often riverbeds became paths, paths became trails, and trails became the highway,” says Persinger. “Very often, you find these luminous displays moving along with cars and the way they interact with cars simply reflects the dielectric and conductive characteristics of a car as it travels,” he adds. Lights like these are seen often in California, where there are lots of fault lines. They also were reported on the Yakima Indian reservation before the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington state. Beginning in November 1981, and continuing for several years, residents of Hessdalen, Norway, reported hundreds of luminous displays, which also were accompanied by audible underground rumblings. Most recently, after the earthquake in Turkey in August 1999 that claimed more than 7,000 lives, Persinger received numerous reports describing similar events. “Afterwards, our lab was inundated with requests from scientists in Turkey,” says Persinger, “pointing out that, for two weeks before the big event, fishermen were reporting their nets being burned and bizarre lights in the sky and strange vibrations and all kinds of odd things going on.” Persinger hopes one day his research will be used to predict earthquakes, allowing those in danger to evacuate ahead of time. Meanwhile, as night cools the dusty fields, the quiet lanes, and the rows of corn, Jerry Black will continue to search the sky over Blanchester for anything unusual. He says it’s a good place for a UFO investigator to live, away from the city lights and the highway, where the sky is clear. Enter the Pop Forum Christopher Kemp is a freelance writer based in Cincinnati whose work has appeared in numerous publications, including Salon and CityBeat. Related Sites |
