Some Notable UFO Landing Cases From the 1960s

September 2, 2021 People's Tonight 527 views

Brent Swancer August 31, 2021

There are plenty of reports of UFOs up in the sky above our heads, and they can take many shapes and sizes, often inspiring debate, wonder, and awe. Yet even more amazing than such cases are those times when these enigmatic objects drop down from their place in the clouds to descend to earth and land, often entailing alien beings and a whole new list of high strangeness. UFO landing cases also go way back in time, and here we will look at some of the weirder ones from the 1960s.

On April 24, 1964, a farmer by the name of Gary Wilcox was doing his daily chores out on his rural 300-acre farm in Newark Valley, New York, on what was up until then a usual, uneventful day. At around 10 a.m., something very weird lying on the ground by the edge of the woods nearby caught his attention and he drove his tractor in that direction for a better look. Whatever it was looked somewhat oblong in shape, and about 20 feet long and 4 feet high, but most strangely of all was that it seemed to not be lying on the ground, but hovering just very slightly over it. Throwing all caution out the window, Wilcox apparently bravely approached it to find that it was smooth and metallic, and he even touched it and kicked at it, noticing there were no vibrations emanating from the mysterious device. This was when things would get bizarre.

UFO1According to Wilcox, two diminutive 4-foot-tall humanoids in white metallic overalls suddenly appeared from underneath the object, holding trays filled with what the farmer would say were “alfalfa, roots, soil, leaves and brush.” The beings spoke to him and told him not to be afraid, and Wilcox would describe their voices as singularly strange and beyond description. They then began interviewing him about the tractor, what he had been doing out in the field, and many other aspects of farming, especially about how fertilizer worked, allegedly talking to him for a full two hours before they made preparations to head out. Wilcox apparently asked them if he could go with them, but they informed him that he would not be able to survive on their world. They asked him for a bag of fertilizer but he had none on him at the time, so they merely nodded, climbed upon their craft, and shot up into the sky. That afternoon, he would leave a bag of fertilizer at the same spot and it would disappear by the following morning. What in the world was going on here? Why would they want fertilizer? Was this just the ramblings of a derailed mind or is there something more to it?

In 1965 we have a case from East Fort Myers, Florida, where on March 14 of that year a man named James Flynn was out hunting in the Everglades with his hunting dogs. That evening his dogs ran off into the wilderness in hot pursuit of something, perhaps a deer, and he shortly after heard a sound like a booming gunshot. Thinking that something had happened to his dogs, he went out to investigate and came across a large mysterious object like an upside-down cone, an estimated 200 feet in the air above some cypress trees in the near distance, which was slowly moving away. It then returned to hover over the wilderness before shooting away and then returning once again. It then seemed to drop down beyond the trees. Flynn crept closer and observed the craft through his binoculars, describing it as sitting upon the ground and being around 25 feet high and 50 feet in diameter, with four levels of windows along its side emanating a yellow glow. The bottom of the craft had a reddish light along it, which illuminated the ground below, but he couldn’t discern more than this because he suddenly blacked out and lost consciousness.

Flynn woke up on the muddy ground sometime later, experiencing blurry vision and unable to move. As he regained the function of his limbs and the vision came back to his eyes, he realized that it was now late afternoon and he had no recollection of what had happened during his lost time. When he got home and had his eyes checked, his vision was far worse than it had been before, and his right eye seemed to have no retina. Flynn also complained that he had numbness throughout his limbs but there could be found no physical cause for these symptoms. Out of curiosity, Flynn would return to the site of his encounter with some others to find that there was a burned circle in the earth measuring around 72 feet in diameter, and there were several cypress trees that had been scorched by a high heat. Although Flynn would believe that this must have been some sort of secret military experimental aircraft, it has never really been solved.

Ship1In July of 1965 a very weird series of events went down in the quaint region of Valensole, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, France. It all started near the small village of Valensole, and on July 1, 1965, a farmer by the name of Maurice Masse was taking a cigarette break before starting his morning chores. As he puffed out wisps of smoke into the air, something caught his attention through the haze of cigarette smoke, and he could see some sort of strange object descend from the sky to land in a field of lavender flowers not too far away. At this point he did not take it to be a UFO, thinking it instead to be a helicopter, but when he extinguished his smoke and took a look out across the field, his eyes met with an oval shaped object perched up on four leg-like apparatuses. Stranger still was that there appeared to be two humanoid figures standing in front of it.

The figures were described as standing approximately 4 feet high, and dressed in tight gray-green clothes, seemingly not human. Their heads were oversized and bald, holding within them large, almond shaped eyes and small, pointed chins, and they seemed to be making some sort of low grumbling noise. As the farmer stood there mouth agape in awe, one of these curious figures allegedly turned to him and raised into the air a device of some kind, which looked cylindrical and “pencil-like” in nature. Before Masse could even really register what was going on he says that the device projected some sort of beam that caused him to lose all control of his limbs and go crumpling to the ground in a heap. He would claim that as he lay there in a daze the figures boarded their craft and then flew off at great speed. It would later be found that the ground had a deep indentation in it and a hardened area like concrete. It would also be found that Masse was honest, very sincere, and was considered to be telling the truth.

Moving along to 1966 there is a case from the children of Westall High School, in Melbourne, Australia. On this day the students were going about their daily business and out playing in the school yard. There was nothing at all that marked this as anything other than an ordinary day, until something very strange appeared in the sky above them. Coming in from the distance was a greyish saucer-shaped craft with a slight purple hue, also described as “a round humped object with a flat base,” which then came in low over the high school’s south-west corner to disappear behind a nearby stand of trees, beyond which was a paddock and an overgrown field and wilderness area called the Grange. After a few moments it then popped up over the trees again and moved off into the distance, with some witnesses later claiming that it was then pursued by what appeared to be several military aircraft, and the entire bizarre scene played out in front of over 300 students and teachers.

drawingAs more witnesses came forward, a clearer picture began to emerge about what happened. It would be discovered that some witnesses had actually seen more than one of the objects, and that it seemed as if the military craft had been chasing any trying to engage them, although there could be found no records of any aircraft scheduled to be in the area, either commercial or military. It was also found that the UFO had left a mark in the ground, which appeared as a circle of yellowed grass with a “swirly pattern,” and that some witnesses had seen official looking men in blue uniforms inspecting this mark. One of the most interesting pieces of the puzzle uncovered was during an interview with one of the witnesses at the time, a science teacher from the Westall school by the name of Andrew Greenwood. In a recorded interview with UFO researcher Dr. James E. McDonald, Greenwood would divulge a good amount of information on what was seen that day. McDonald would describe what Greenwood had told him:

Greenwood told me the UFO was first brought to his attention by a hysterical child who ran into his classroom and told him there’s a flying saucer outside,” McDonald says on the recording. He thought this child had become deranged or something so he didn’t take any notice, but when the child insisted that this object was in the sky he decided to go out and have a look for himself. He called it the most amazing flying he had ever seen in his life. The planes were doing everything possible to approach the object and he said how they all avoided a collision he will never know. Every time they got too close to the object it would slowly accelerate, then rapidly accelerate and then move away from them and stop. Then they would take off after it again and the same thing would happen.

Greenwood would explain that the whole spectacle had lasted around 20 minutes, and that shortly after the headmaster had warned the faculty and students not to talk about what they had seen with anyone, even going so far as to threaten to fire or expel anyone who did. Some even spoke of some sort of military-looking figures lurking about. According to him, this was enough to get many of the witnesses to shut up about it all, and is one of the main reasons the whole story just sort of fell off the media’s radar, only really being unearthed years later. Yet, even now decades later, the witnesses have stuck to their stories and insist on what they saw, leaving us to try and figure out what it could have been. To this day one can still see an information board at the school commemorating the event, although it seems to be just as obscure a case as ever. What did these people see that day and why exactly were they so reluctant to talk about it? Did the military have some hand in trying to cover this up? There are not many answers, and it remains a very curious mass UFO sighting that has been sort of mostly forgotten.

drawing1A particularly harrowing case comes from 1966, in Roaring River, Missouri, where a landing UFO seems to have caused quite a lot of damage. On November 22, 1966, two hunters were out looking for deer in the wilderness of the area when they saw a strange object descend from the sky right onto their camp. They ran to see what was going on, and as they did, they could see smoke billowing up from the location. Upon reaching the camp, they saw that their tent and all of their equipment was either burned to a crisp, on fire, or still smoldering, with the aluminum cots in the tent having actually been warped and melted. Rather strangely, nothing else around the camp had been affected, the trees still in pristine condition. They then heard a low humming noise and saw the object rise up over the trees and shoot off out of sight. The witnesses would later claim that the object had intentionally wrecked their camp, although why this should be is something we will never know.

Such cases are certainly intriguing and spectacular, taking the UFO phenomenon down from the skies to plop it right down in front of our faces, often to completely bizarre results. What truth do any of these cases have and just what did these people see? Were these misidentified mundane phenomena, figments of the imagination, or something else? Whatever the case may be, reports of landing UFOs rank high among the most bizarre accounts of UFOs there are, and there are no solid answers.

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