Jacques Vallee - Dimensions - A Casebook of Alien

Page 35 of 151

Page 35 of 151
Jacques Vallee - Dimensions - A Casebook of Alien

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This section is devoted to several types of artifacts claimed by popular tradition to be of supernatural origin, such as fairy rings and saucer nests. Although such phenomena are treated as borderline cases by specialists in UFO investigation, I believe the nests deserve more than passing attention and should also be considered in the light of specific traditional beliefs about the meaning of the "magic circles" that for centuries farmers have found in their fields. The literature on this subject 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 of Montsoreau, Maine-et-Loire, France. All of a sudden, they saw a red sphere cross the sky like a meteor. It did not behave quite as a meteor, however, because it seemed to touch the ground and then rise again — and hover at mid-height for a while before it was lost to sight. A check was made for military experiments in the area. There were none. The next day, a Montsoreau farmer, Alain Rouillet, reported that a nine-square-yard area of his wheat field had been flattened and covered with a yellowish, oily substance. Further investigation disclosed additional details on the identity of the witnesses and substantiated the idea that a peculiar object had indeed landed. Mr. Lacoste is a photographer in Saumur but, unfortunately, did not carry a camera with him at the time. He described the light given off by the sphere as being so intense that it lit up the countryside. The sphere hovered, he said, for a few seconds, then it maneuvered close to the ground. The witnesses felt sure it was a guided military gadget and walked to a distance about four hundred yards from the object, which went away and was lost to sight behind some woods. The whole sighting had lasted four minutes. Six months earlier, a rash of similar sightings had made headlines in Australia. "More flying saucer nests!" was the big news on the front page of the Sydney Sun-Herald for January 23, 1966. Three nests had been discovered in Queensland, circular clearings of dead reeds surrounded by green reeds. 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, was driving his tractor in the vicinity of a swamp called Horseshoe Lagoon when he suddenly heard a loud hissing noise. It "sounded like air escaping from a tire," he said. Then, twenty-five yards in front of him, he saw a machine rising from the swamp. It was blue-gray, about twenty-five feet across and nine feet high. It was spinning and rose to about sixty feet before moving off. "It was all over in a few seconds; it moved at terrific speed," said Pedley. Then he found the first nest, with reeds flattened in a clockwise direction. The Sydney Sun-Herald sent a reporter, Ben Davie, to investigate the sighting, and it was discovered that dozens of people in the area had seen strange saucer-like craft similar to the one reported by Pedley, most of them before his sighting. Davie found a total of five nests and published the following description: I saw clearings in the reeds where "they" took off, and it was as everyone described it. In a circle roughly thirty feet in diameter reeds had been cut and flattened in a clockwise direction. One of the nests is a floating platform of clotted roots and weeds, apparently torn by 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, but hidden by dense scrub. In the third nest, which seemed quite recent, the reeds were flattened in a counterclockwise direction. All the reeds were dead, but they had not been scorched or burned. A patch of grass, about four feet square and three feet from the boundary of the first disk, had been clipped at water level, thereby adding a new element of the mystery. Altogether, the rings varied in diameter from eight to thirty feet. In all but the smallest, the reeds had been flattened in a clockwise 1 direction. Rings in the Moonlight Policemen collected samples for tests, scientists came with Geiger counters, and the Royal