Jacques Vallee - Dimensions - A Casebook of Alien

Page 17 of 151

Page 17 of 151
Jacques Vallee - Dimensions - A Casebook of Alien

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came back, would he find new material for his theories on the nature of the strange and fugitive races of beings from the sky? We can safely assume that their attention would be immediately attracted to the modern files of UFO landings and abduction reports. One night in January 1958, a woman whose name I am not authorized to publish was driving along the New York State Thruway, in the vicinity of Niagara Falls, in the midst of a violent snowstorm. The exact time was 1:30 A.M. She was going to visit her son, then in the army, and she was driving very carefully, trying to find an exit, for she believed the Thruway was closed ahead of her. Visibility was extremely bad. Hence she had no chance to think when she suddenly saw what seemed to be an airplane wreck on the center parkway: A large shape was visible, and a slim rod at least fifty feet high was illuminated and getting shorter as though it were sinking into the ground. My motor slowed down and as I came closer my car stopped completely. I became panicky and tried desperately to start it as I had no lights. My first thought was to get out and see what was happening but I suddenly saw two shapes rising around that slim pole which was still growing shorter. They were suspended but moving about it. They seemed to be like animals with four legs and a tail but two front feelers under the head, like arms. Then, before I could even gasp the things disappeared and the shape rose and I then realized it was a saucer, it spun and zoomed about ten feet off the ground and up into the air and I could net even see where it went. My lights suddenly came on. I started the car and it was all right. I pulled up to that place, got out with a flashlight and walked over to where it had been sitting. A large hole was melted in the snow about a foot across and grass was showing on it. The grass was warm, 1. a 1 wa The woman, who met only with disbelief when she told her story to her family, reported the case in a letter to my correspondent Otto Binder when his syndicated series "Our Space Age" began to appear in a number of newspapers. The most puzzling element in this account is not so much what is described but the fact that such stories have become, since 1946, rather common in all parts of the world. To a physicist, of course, they appear unbelievable, just as the strange manikin met by St. Anthony would appear unbelievable to a biologist. And yet there are several cases on record in which similar accounts are associated with traces that can hardly be questioned. In the celebrated incident at Socorro, New Mexico, it was a policeman, Lonnie Zamora, who reported seeing two small beings, dressed in white, close to a shiny egg-shaped object, which rested on four pads before it took off with a thunderous noise, only to become perfectly silent as it flew away. The incident took place on April 24, 1964, and was the occasion for some interesting measurements (by local police officials and a Federal Bureau of Investigation man) of the traces left by the object. Here again we observe an emotional pattern strangely reminiscent of the medieval scene just surveyed: the witness in the Socorro case, when he was about to be interviewed by Air Force investigators, was so little convinced that he had observed a device of human construction that he asked to see a priest before releasing his report to the authorities. Another case hard to discount is the report of the Kentucky family who claimed to have been besieged by several "little men," whose appearance was completely fantastic. The incident occurred on the night of April 21, 1955, and was the occasion of many strange observations of the behavior of the "visitors." One of the creatures was seen approaching the farmhouse with both hands raised. When it was about twenty feet away, two of the witnesses shot at the intruder. It "did a flip" and was lost in the darkness. Then it appeared at the window when the man came back inside the house and Return of the Humanoids but nothing was dug up around there.