Loch Ness Monsters and Raining Frogs The Worlds Most Puzzling Mysteries Solved Read Free Page A

good reason why else you'd be all the way out here. Let's go and see what we've got for you in that chicken shed over there.” Presumably the alien pays in dollars for a roll of rusty hog wire and is on his way back to Mars by sundown. Perhaps he even takes an old hoe with him too—as a souvenir. Now, you can believe that if you want to …

    But why jump to the conclusion that it was a spaceship that had crashed? Even back in 1897, before planes were invented (or at least ones that could fly very far), there could have been an alternative, rather more plausible explanation. Flying over Texas, an early airship, not unlike a zeppelin—or, for younger readers, the Good year blimp—might have sprung a leak and lost altitude. It might then have crashed into Judge Proctor's windmill and destroyed his flower bed. The resulting explosion would have melted the metal framework, which would then have re-formed into new and unrecognizable shapes when it cooled. The poor pilot might have lost his limbs in the explosion and ended up burned to a crisp, so that he didn't look human anymore. But no one in the UFO community would have bought this rather more down-to-earth explanation. Hayden Hewes can still now be seen on several television documentaries standing wistfully outside the cemetery or pictured pointing forlornly at the well, no doubt wondering how he is going to remove the six tons of concrete slab that stands between himself and his place in history.

    The final word on the Aurora spaceship crash should go to the man who had the very first word, journalist S. E. Haydon. Years later Haydon, a notorious practical joker, admitted he had simply made up the story in an attempt to draw attention to the plight of his hometown and to help the dying community. He certainly did that—even if publicity took some decades to arrive—as Aurora, the town we would otherwise never have heard of, is still talked about throughout the UFO-hunting community as one of the most famous sightings of all time. They should put up a statue of him in the town square in Aurora, if there is a town square, that is.

    Most UFO encounters can be explained as optical illusions, natural phenomena, meteors, or hoaxes, but a good many remain unexplained. In cases of alien abduction, it is interesting to read reports of victims who have been hypnotized and who describe their ordeals in great detail while under hypnosis. Yet when we compare these reports with those of volunteers who do not claim alien abduction, but instead are asked simply to imagine it, their recollections under hypnosis are almost exactly the same. I think this says more for the power of the imagination than it does for the likelihood of alien encounters, but then again, ours is a big universe. Infinite, in fact. Only a fool would completely rule out the idea of life on other planets in other solar systems, the closest of which are so far away they would take us seventy-five thousand years to get to in the fastest craft we currently have, which means unless aliens visit us (and possibly they do—see “Beware of USOs,” page 221), then you and I will never know if there is life out there. Maybe, just maybe, we are not alone after all …

What is it about this infamous stretch of ocean
(and sky) that causes ships and planes
to vanish without a trace?

    At ten past two in the afternoon of December 5, 1945, five U.S. Navy Avenger torpedo bombers took off from the naval air station at Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The commander of Flight 19, Lieutenant Charles Taylor, had been assigned a routine two-hour training flight of fifteen men on a course that would take them out to sea sixty-six miles due east of the airbase, to the Hen and Chickens Shoals.

    There the squadron would carry out practice bombing runs, then fly due north for seventy miles before turning for a second time and heading back to base, 120 miles away. Their plotted flight plan formed a simple triangle, straight forward to execute,