 This episode is dedicated to the men and women of our Armed Forces and First Responders. Whether you are currently serving or have served in the past, you are appreciated. It is because of your courage and sacrifice that we enjoy the freedoms and liberties we hold dear. And I for one, appreciate every single one of you for protecting what many of us take for granted. So thank you. Welcome, Weirdos, I'm Terran Marlar and this is Weird Darkness Radio, where every week you'll find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore, the strange and bizarre, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre, unsolved and unexplained. Coming up this hour, sightings of unidentified flying objects might seem like a recent phenomena, with most reports occurring in the 20th and 21st centuries, but UFO sightings go a lot further back in human history. In our ancient ancestors we're just as shocked, confused and sometimes terrified as we are today. But first, when you hear the name Transylvania, the immediate image in your mind is probably that of Dracula. But this Romanian town has more creepiness than just the Count's Castle. It's also a hotspot for UFO activity and mysterious unexplained happenings. Some even think it could be the location of a portal to another dimension. We begin there. If you're new here, welcome to the show. And if you're already a member of this Weirdo family, please take a moment and invite someone else to listen in with you. Getting Weird Darkness to others helps make it possible for me to keep doing the show. And while you're listening, be sure to visit WeirdDarkness.com and click on Contact Social to follow Weird Darkness on social media. And also on the website you can find the Daily Weird Darkness podcast which comes out seven days per week. You can enter monthly contests, find Weird Darkness merchandise and more. You can even send in your own true story of something paranormal that has happened to you or someone you know. You can find it all at WeirdDarkness.com. Now, bolt your doors, lock your windows, turn off your lights, and come with me into the Weird Darkness. Apparently, extraterrestrials have always carefully observed humans and their actions, no matter the time or place. They observe us. They found us a very long time ago but do not want to make contact with us. Ask yourself why. Perhaps because we're not enough civilized? Transylvania, one of the most mysterious landscapes of Europe, is such a place. This particular region of Romania has been a UFO hotspot for centuries. Most of us perceive Transylvania as a mountainous, mist-shrouded place surrounded by mystic and closely related to Dracula, the most infamous vampire in the world. But Transylvania is much more than only Dracula's never-never land hidden deep in the Carpathian Mountains, a region located in present-day Central Romania. Who knows what's lurking in inaccessible ravines shadowed by high mountain peaks of the Southeastern Carpathians. The land of Transylvania still remains a mysterious place where unexplained powers, superstitions and UFOs ruled for a long time. People used to say that time had stopped in Transylvania, but a centuries-old tradition of paranormal activities continues and unidentified flying objects have been spotted in this region for centuries. One can say with considerable certainty that a first account describing a UFO phenomenon observed in the Romanian airspace was documented in The Chronicles of the Land of Moldavia, covering the period from 1359 to 1594. According to other Romanian records, on October 18, 1595, the city of Targovist, ruled by Michael the Brave, the Prince of Transylvania, who fought and won a great and crucial battle against the Ottoman Empire. On the day of October 15th, a large comet appeared over the battlefield. It stayed stationary for about an hour. Many ancient people, including the Hindu, Babylonians, Chinese and Egyptians, kept elaborate written records of astronomical events. One of such extraordinary events was the comet observation. In this particular case, there is no mention in ancient records of this comet appearance except for an ancient engraving from 1665. Considering the duration of the observation, about an hour, the event was not any other natural phenomenon, but rather an unidentified flying object. If we follow some other ancient records, we learn that in the afternoon, December 6, 1737, a large symbol made an appearance in the western sky over Bucharest, located between Transylvania's Carpathian Mountains and the Black Sea. The remarkable red-as-blood and very broad occurrence remained stationary in the sky for two hours and then split up into two parts. Later, these two parts reunited once again in the western sky. On November 27, 1793, another strange incident was reported to happen in Floresti, a commune in Cluj County, Transylvania, when the moon carried out a miracle. She made a journey along the sky for half an hour. On August 17, 1968, the crew of the commercial airline Terrum had an encounter with an unidentified flying object and it was the beginning of the 1968 UFO flap over Romania, with several encounters in the next period of time until the end of September 1968. During routine night-weather observations in August 1986, an unidentified flying object was spotted by the team of meteorologists of the National Institute of Meteorology and Hydrology in Bucharest, Romania. On the radar screen appeared very well-defined, a horizontal line about one centimeter in length. The object was stationary at a distance of 275 to 280 kilometers southwest of the station around the city of Sofia in Bulgaria at a height of 30,000 meters. A few minutes later, it made a swing-like movement and disappeared in the blink of an eye. Based on the team's experience in aircraft observations on the radar, the object did not behave in a typical manner as any conventional aircraft do. Probably the same object of an unknown origin was systematically observed every day for three to four weeks in the same place above the city of Cluj-Dapoca, Transylvania, located approximately 300 kilometers northwest of the capital of Romania, Bucharest. What do the aliens now about the strange Hoya-Bachu Forest of Transylvania? Why are there so many UFO sightings in this particular region of the country? Do they know something we don't? Hoya-Bachu Forest is a bizarre place that's been the scene of unexplained happenings for centuries. Is this Romanian place Europe's Bennington Triangle also known as a haunted hotspot? Many people have visited the strange forest. At first, they were unable to see anything unusual except for UFOs frequently spotted in this area. Later, their videotapes and photographs revealed objects having strange forms from round plasma to animal-like shapes. These strange, incapable of being explained appearances were otherwise unseen by the naked eye. People saw ghost-like shaped figures which many believe are protectors of the old forest. The trees have odd shapes and strange, whispering, difficult to define noises are heard. The forest is more dark than green. Many stories circulate around the weird Baichu Forest and its own spirit has been known for centuries. Those who entered the forest never left it. They disappeared. No rescue teams or local police forces could find them. Others who visited the forest told about their experiences. They had numerous sightings of weird things. One woman who walked through the forest told that she had the feeling that time had stopped for a while. She could not say what happened to her, but she later discovered an ancient coin from the 15th century in one of her pockets. It seems that supernatural powers rule this place. Is it a gateway to another world, to another dimension? The forest area known as the round field with a number of symmetrical circles on a radiated dark soil is considered as the landing zone for the UFOs. The place, however, is very difficult to find and probably only a handful of people know its location. Many UFOs have been seen in the Baichu Forest of Transylvania. A spectacular sighting of a silvery daylight disc occurred at 1.23 p.m. on August 18, 1968 in the Haia Baichu Forest near Cluj de Poca, Transylvania. Along with three other witnesses, Emil Barnia, a 45-year-old technician, sighted a large, metallic appearance unidentified flying craft in the sky. Reflecting the sunlight, the noiseless vehicle slowly flew above the woods. He managed to take a first photograph of the UFO when it suddenly began to accelerate. Emil Barnia had just the time to take two more photographs before the object quickly ascended out of sight. On Friday, June 6, 2008, the Romanian Defense Ministry officially confirmed that a MiG-21 Lancer fighter plane engaged in a check flight on October 31, 2007 and was hit by four unidentified flying objects. According to an official statement issued recently, a fighter jet was involved in a collision with several UFOs. The incident occurred during a routine flight near Gurla, a city of Cluj County, Transylvania, while flying at 6,500 meters from the ground. Baffled Defense Chiefs passed the UFO incident on to the Security Committee of European Air Forces for investigation. On August 15, 1991, newspapers, radio, and television informed that a crew of nine aboard a plane from Bucharest to Timasora, Romania, crashed in the Transylvanian Alps. There were no survivors. Place of the accident? The Redizat Mountains, one of the highest massifs in Romania and part of the so-called Transylvanian Alps, the Southern Carpathians. In an official statement of the Ministry of Transport, it was said that the tragic incident was caused by a powerful storm. The problem is that, according to weather forecast maps issued for the region, there was no storm that unfortunate night. Also, debris found at the disaster site was not helpful enough to establish the cause of the crash of one of the best and long-lasting airplanes of that time. After nearly a year of hearings and thorough research by a strange coincidence, it has been discovered a notice entitled Mysterious Phenomenon in one of the newspapers. As the article informed, a group of tourists went on a small climbing adventure in the Redizat Mountains of Transylvania. While climbing one of the higher peaks, about 600 meters from Gentiana Refuge, near Sauea Bacuri, some persons noticed a strange light behind them. They still continued to climb while the light was moving quite quickly. At first, the light was moving with approximately constant velocity along a linear trajectory. Then began to move in zigzag, increasing its speed and changing its color from red to white and then to blue, and at last the light, apparently an object, showed a wide variety of colors and formed an ovoid shape which turned into a cylinder-like, well-contoured and very bright appearance. Suddenly, the object began to ascend higher and higher and disappeared. Many similar unidentified flying objects have been observed traveling or hovering over just below the mountain range of the Redizat Mountains of the Transylvanian Alps. Could the object be responsible for the crash of the plane Il-18 flying over the sky-reaching peaks of the Transylvanian Alps on August 13, 1991? Transylvania has its secrets. The UFO phenomenon is not a modern invention. According to sources originating in ancient, long-gone cultures, legendary masters of antiquity were able to traverse the skies. There are countless examples of mysterious, unidentified flying objects reported in ancient times and not just in Transylvania. We'll look at just a few when Weird Darkness returns. Almost 400 years ago, no flying vehicles as we know them were present in the sky. And yet, some kind of an unidentified flying object suddenly appeared and hovered over Rubazero Lake in 1663 for one hour and a half. It is the most famous sighting of an unidentified object in the history of ancient Russia. This flying object should not be observed over the area of Rubazero Lake, approximately 80 miles southwest of Belozersk, or White Lake Town. Officially, no flying vehicles were present in the sky almost four centuries ago. They did not even exist. Still, this amazing event witnessed by many people took place and it cannot be explained as a missile, ball lightning, or an airplane. An official document describing the incident originates from the files of the Archaeological Research Center and was first published in historical files compiled and issued by the Archaeological Commission Part 4, St. Petersburg, 1842. The document's authenticity is unquestionable. Today, many newspapers worldwide would feature large headlines on their front pages like, Enormous Ball of Fire Creates Panic, or Ball Lightning, or Something Else Over the Lake? Three centuries ago, there were no newspapers. What did exactly people observe that day? On this Saturday between 10 and 12 o'clock local time, inhabitants of the district of Belozero, White Lake Town, went to their local parish church in the village of Rubazero. While they were there, an object emitting fire and a loud noise appeared in a clear sky. It had a diameter of around 40 meters or 131 feet, which is the approximate height of a modern 12-story building. The object traveling from south to west suddenly stopped over the Rubazero Lake, which surfaces about two kilometers by one. It gave out blue smoke and had two beams of fire about 20 sauzons. One sauzon means seven feet, coming from the object's front. When a great crash sounded, many people left the church to see what was happening outside. According to the report, the object appeared from the direction from which we get winter and moved across from the church to the lake. Then the observed object suddenly vanished out of sight, some distance above the lake, in order to reappear over the lake less than an hour later. The people again came out to the square and the same fire suddenly reappeared over the same lake, from the same place where it first disappeared. It darted from the south to the west and must have been 1500 feet away when it disappeared, but it appeared in a short while back again from another place, moving this time to the west. The third time the same fireball appeared more terrific in width and disappeared, having moved to the west, and it had been remaining over Rubazero over water for an hour and a half. And the length of the lake is about 7,000 feet and the width is 3,500 feet. The incident was observed by multiple witnesses, now experiencing yet another reappearance of the mysterious flying vehicle. It went from the south to the west and was about 500 meters away when it vanished again. The last time the object returned, it was traveling westwards and then stopped. Its size appeared to be much larger than before. It stayed over the lake for an hour and a half. A group of fishermen in their boat located on the lake approximately a mile away were seriously affected, suffering severe burns because of the scorching heat. The lake water, according to the witnesses, also looked strange. It was illuminated to their greatest depth of 30 feet and the fish swam away to the shore or fleeing to all directions. They all saw that. And where the fireball came, the water seemed to be covered with rust under the reddish light. It was then scattered by the wind and the water became clean again. In his book, Astronomical Phenomena in Russian Chronicles, 1915, the Russian astronomer Dysfajotsky wrote that the eyewitnesses saw only pieces of a meteorite that flew apart after an explosion. The explosion of the meteor on 15 August 1663 probably occurred in a southwestern direction during the morning before 12 o'clock and in clear skies, Dysfajotsky wrote. Two fragments were projected in a southerly direction over the lake whilst a third and fourth came down in the west, according to the official explanation given by Dysfajotsky. However, this does not account for the sighting of the people in the boat approaching a hovering body. P. Stonehill, the Russian UFO researcher says, and at the same time for all who proposed another interpretation of the phenomenon. Stonehill explains that the lifespan of lightning is short. Also, its diameter is no more than three feet, certainly not 130 feet. Moreover, ball lightning appears under stormy weather conditions and the weather was beautiful on August 15, 1663. It was a sunny and warm day and the sky was perfectly clear. Here we are dealing with a large flying object which approached suddenly and from nowhere. The behaviour of the reported flying object was definitely unlike that of a meteor. The object was seen by many witnesses in at least two locations three times at different time intervals. Fragments of meteorites are ejected simultaneously as a rule. The duration of the sighting is unclear, but we can hardly expect more details from the witness's report, which is today almost four centuries old. Is it possible that the hour and a half refer to the whole sighting or its part only? As for meteorites, it is generally known that they penetrate space with a velocity of 30 to 40 km per second, which corresponds to the speed of our globe in its journey around the sun. The meteorite's fate depends upon its mass. The larger it is, the greater the velocity. At the Earth's surface, small meteorites weighing 10 to 100 grams develop a speed of several tens of meters per second. The larger ones weighing a couple hundred kilograms show a velocity of about 500 meters per second. More unidentified flying objects from our ancient past and Weird Darkness Returns. If it was a meteorite that showed up over the lake 350 years ago, it must have been a large one weighing from 30,000 to 250,000 tons. The speed of such a monster must have been enormous. No one, not a single witness, would survive its approach. But in fact, all witnesses did. If the object, despite its large size, traveled with a speed of less than 5 km per second, it was not then a falling meteor. The fishermen, who also observed the object from their location in the boat, said that they were unable to come closer to the object because of the great heat coming from it, not because of its large speed. Apparently they could approach the object and even pursue it because its velocity was most probably similar to that of the fisherman's boat itself. In other words, the velocity of both the boat and the unidentified flying object was very low. Whatever its speed, a meteorite must finally fall somewhere and the meteorite plunging to the ground could hardly pass unnoticed. Still, nothing like this was documented because no fall was reported. The UFO that came from nowhere made three visitations in the area and disappeared into the unknown. Three months later, on November 30th, a similar incident took place over the same location. Was it the same unidentified flying object back on yet another mission? No one knows. To this day, no known scientific theory has explained the phenomenon. A UFO sighting occurred during the night of September 24th, 1235, in Japan. While General Yordsumi and his army were encamped, they spotted mysterious lights in the sky. The lights were seen in the southwest for many hours, winging, circling and moving in loops. In 1361, another flying object described as being shaped like a drum about 20 feet in diameter ascended from the inland sea of western Japan and a dark object which made a sound like a wheel flew from Mt. Kasuga toward the west at midnight. Another very interesting sighting took place in the first hour of the night of November 4th, 1322 AD. There was seen in the sky over Uxbridge, England a pillar of fire the size of a small boat, pallet and livid in color. It rose from the south, crossed the sky with a slow and grave motion and went north. Out of the front of the pile, a fervent red flame burst forth with great beams of light. Its speed increased and it flew through the air. In 85 BC, the Roman historian Pliny mentioned how a burning shield scattering sparks ran across the sky and in 398 AD, in the Byzantine Empire, people observed a thing like a burning globe presenting a sword shown brilliantly in the sky over the city. It seemed almost to touch the earth from the zenith. On November 1, 1461 AD, a fiery thing like an iron rod of good length and as large as one half of the moon was seen in the sky over Eris France for less than a quarter of an hour. This object was also described as being shaped like a ship from which fire was seen flowing. Jacques Vallée wrote in his UFOs in Space, Anatomy of a Phenomenon, and so did Harold T. Wilkins and his flying saucers on the attack. A strange sighting of an unidentified flying object took place on Thursday, December 16, 1742 at about 8.40 pm. A witness, a fellow of the Royal Society in London, was returning home from a meeting when he suddenly spotted a mysterious light arising from behind the trees and houses. His experience took place in the vicinity of the middle of the parade in St. James Park. The witness signed himself as CM, and his real name remains unknown, most probably because he wanted to avoid ridicule by the members of the Royal Society. Almost three centuries ago, ufology and sightings of unidentified flying objects were not subjects for public discussions. However, the question still remains, who and what could traverse the sky in 1742? The mysterious object, the witness described this unknown flying object as celestial, was very large, bright and moved slowly. Some kind of flame was coming out of its back, and it had a frame on one end like bands of iron as described by the witness. As I was returning home from the Royal Society to Westminster on Tuesday, December 16, 1742, the hour of 8.40 pm, being about the middle of the parade in St. James Park, I saw a light arise from behind the trees and houses in the south by West Point, which I took at first for a large skyrocket. But when it had risen to the height of about 20 degrees, it took a motion nearly parallel to the horizon, but waved in this manner and went on to the north by East Point over the houses. It seemed to be very near that I thought it passed over Queens Square, the island in the park across the canal, and I lost sight of it over the Haymarket. Its motion was so very slow that I had it above half a minute in view, and therefore had time enough to contemplate its appearance fully, which was what is seen in the annexed figure. It seemed to be a light flame, turning backwards from the resistance the air made to it. Bebe, a bright, fire-like burning charcoal enclosed as it were in an open case, of which the frame CCC was quite opaque, like bands of iron. At D, issued forth a train or tail or light flame, more bright at D, and glowing gradually fainter at E so as to be transparent more than half its length. The head seemed about half a degree in diameter, the tail near three degrees in length and above one-eighth of a degree in thickness. Here is one a bit more recent, but still ancient if you consider 1906 a long time ago. The observed saucer-shaped object fell into the sea approximately a mile away from the Phoenix-lined steamship St. Andrew. Had it struck the ship, all hands would have been killed in a few seconds. Was it a rare oceanic super-belide or something else with an unusual flight trajectory? The New York Times wrote on November 5, 1906 that the day before, the steamship St. Andrew just arrived in New York from Antwerp. Captain Fitzgerald reported a strange event that he and his crew experienced on October 30, 1906, about 600 miles northeast of Cape Race. What happened at 4.30 o'clock on that day? It was Tuesday afternoon, and the ship St. Andrew was sailing in the region of the North Atlantic, approximately 600 miles northeast of Newfoundland, Canada. The weather was clear and bright, although there was a little sunshine, Chief Officer V.E. Spencer told later. He was on the bridge and witnessed the sighting. I saw three meteors fall into the water dead ahead of the ship, one after another at a distance about five miles. Although it was daylight, they left a red streak in the air from zenith to the horizon. Simultaneously, the third engineer shouted to me. I then saw a huge meteor on the port beam falling in a zigzag manner less than a mile away to the southward. We could clearly hear the hissing of water as it touched. It fell with a rocking motion, leaving a broad red streak in its wake. The meteor must have weighed several tons, and seemed to be 10 to 15 feet in diameter. It was saucer-shaped, which probably accounted for the peculiar rocking motion. When the massive metal struck the water, the spray and steam rose to a height of at least 40 feet, and for a few moments looked like the mouth of a crater. If it had been night, the meteor would have illuminated the sea for 50 or 60 miles. The witness described the hissing sound as very similar to that of escaping steam when it struck the water. The noise was so loud that the chief engineer turned out of his berth and came on deck, thinking the sound came from the engine room. I've seen meteors all over the world, but never such a large one as this, the witness commented. When asked what would have happened if the flying object fell on the ship, Mr. V.E. Spencer answered the following. The ship would have been burnt out immediately, and every soul on board destroyed. I have no doubt that many of the vessels which have been lost at sea and apparently fine weather have been destroyed by falling meteors. There were also others who became witnesses to this extraordinary celestial event on October 30, 1906. Captain Russ and his crew of the Hamburg American Steamer Brasília were also in the area where the event occurred. They reported seeing a large meteor at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, October 30, in latitude 47 degrees north and longitude 48 degrees west. Their sighting could have been a part of that which was observed by the crew of the St. Andrews ship. However, Brasília's crew did not see the mysterious object around the same time. They witnessed the incident much later. A falling missile or satellite fragment fits much better the above description of the event, but in 1906 such technology did not exist, or did it? So the question remains, was the crashing saucer-shaped object with rocking motion really a super-belied, a very rare impacting body brighter than magnitude negative 17 of which precise nature is unknown? The above described observation can be considered well-documented and definitely controversial. Shouldn't a shockwave occur earlier already during the object's falling? The impact of the object on the water surface was also not powerful considering the size of the falling body even if the witness said the spray and steam rose to a height of at least 40 feet. If there really was a meteorite that appeared to be 10 to 15 feet in diameter and the impact occurred in the ocean then a large steam cloud would be produced by the sudden evaporation of the seawater. The water vapor and CO2 would remain in the atmosphere long after the dust settles. The belied impact heats the ocean so much that a massive hurricane forms. In this case no hurricane was reported. Did the crew of St Andrews see a super-belied or something they wanted to see as a belied? Interestingly, on November 12, 1887, Charles Fort reported that a huge object was seen to rise out of the sea off Cape Race. According to the report, an object described as a large ball of fire was seen to rise from the sea near Cape Race. We are told that it rose to a height of 50 feet and then advanced close to the ship, then moving away remaining visible about five minutes. Details in the American Meteorological Journal recount that the British steamer, the SS Siberian, Captain Moore in command, had observed this phenomenon and that the object had moved against the wind. Captain Moore also stated that, about the same place, I have seen such appearances before. I have another story about a UFO sighting that took place in 1952 that you can hear in the sudden death overtime content of tonight's show, which you can find in the podcast, which will be posted early Monday morning. You can find Weird Darkness everywhere podcasts are found, or visit WeirdDarkness.com slash listen. Coming up, you know you have a very haunted county when an author can write a series of articles about just the hotels that are haunted where you live. We'll look at the Gadsden Hotel in Cochise County, Arizona, up next. When most people think of road tripping through Arizona, they think of some of the larger and more well-known tourist attractions, hiking through the Grand Canyon, possibly skiing up north of Flagstaff, shopping in Scottsdale. One thing that each of these locations has in common is that they are all located in the northern half of the state, and it is a big state. In fact, probably the most well-known haunted hotel in Arizona is the Jerome Grand Hotel located in the mining town of Jerome, Arizona, north of Phoenix, and a little southwest Flagstaff. What many visitors to the Grand Canyon State miss is a small southeastern county that is full of haunted mysteries. Cochise County sits right in the southeast corner of the state of Arizona. Its southern border runs along the American-Mexican border, and its eastern edge connects with New Mexico. When you talk about Arizona with people who aren't familiar with the state, many do not realize that there is a whole portion of the state that lies below Tucson. Cochise County is one of these areas. Rich in history, Cochise County receives its name from Cochise, a leader in a group of Chiricawa Apache who resided in this area before European colonization. In fact, there is a beautiful campground in the area, Cochise Stronghold, where Cochise's remains are rumored to be hidden. When settlers were expanding to the west, the area that became Cochise County boomed with miners and mining interests. Two towns that experienced a mining boom were Visby and Tombstone. There was a third town, Douglas, that benefited indirectly from the mining interests as it was the local smelter for any of the minerals found in the area. Unfortunately, mines dry up and boom towns shrivel. Each of these towns have had struggles to find a foothold in modern society post-mining. Visby and Tombstone do so by embracing the tourist industry. On the other hand, Douglas straddles the Arizona-Mexico border with its sister city Agua Prieta and in 2023 is still trying to find its rebirth in the modern economy. Out of these three towns, Douglas is the largest, but still its population is just around 15,000. Visby and Tombstone each have populations between 3,000 and 5,000, much smaller than their prime during the Copper and Silver boom. The Douglas of today does not have a lot of frills, amenities or entertainment. The Supercenter Walmart is the main shopping resource. While there is an old downtown area, Douglas has not had the resource of a tourism industry to support revitalization. Its sister city across the border, Agua Prieta, is much larger and contains more of the modern conveniences and entertainment. Douglas does have one shining star that remains from its frontier Golden Age, the Gadsden Hotel. The Gadsden, named after the Gadsden purchase, originally opened its doors in 1907, however the first hotel was destroyed by a fire and rebuilt in 1929. Besides ghosts, the Gadsden has hosted Thornton Wilder, who ended up extending his stay to two months, and Eleanor Roosevelt. There is a chip in the large marble staircase that extends out through the lobby. Local urban legend attributes the chip to a story that Poncho Villa once rode his horse into the lobby of the hotel and up that staircase. While Villa did stay in the hotel, the horse in the lobby story does seem a little outlandish. It doesn't take a lot of digging or talking to locals and hotel faculty to hear ghost stories associated with the Gadsden Hotel. Because they received so many claims of paranormal activity, employees of the hotel began keeping records of the paranormal reports that were brought to them by guests. If you ask the front desk to see the paranormal records, they will allow you to sit and enjoy the primary accounts of encounters with the Gadsden's ghosts at your own pace. It shouldn't be surprising that the beautiful marble staircase that of Poncho Villa's legend is at the center of many of the guests' ghost stories in the Gadsden. The most common and mild stories involve seeing ghostly figures ascending or descending the beautiful staircase. I have to admit, it is such a gorgeous staircase, I can see why someone would want to continue visiting it in the afterlife. Following the staircase, the room with the most activity seems to be room 333. Former guests who have stayed in room 333 say that they have heard disembodied knocks throughout the room, the TV turns itself on enough, and they have heard conversations that appear to be coming from invisible visitors right inside their room. However, I spoke with a former employee who had a darker story about room 333. He stated that when the room is empty, there are many times where hotel staff will hear a deep growling that comes from inside of the room as they walk past the door. He said that they have also heard what sounds like scratching coming from inside the room when it is unoccupied. There is truly no single ghost story that accompanies room 333. Many hotels will have a particular ghost who has a tragic story, like one that we will look into with the Bisbee Grand Hotel. Is whatever remains in room 333 an entity left behind after the Gadsden's tragic fire? Is it something darker? The ghosts of the Gadsden do not stay in one room or on the staircase. Former managers and former employees have encountered spirits throughout the hotel. The former employee who spoke about their encounter in room 333 told a story about an arcade game that had been placed in the lobby to entertain guests who visit the lobby's bar, restaurant and coffee shop. However, employees who worked the night shift started hearing the game being played throughout odd hours after all of the businesses had closed down and the lobby was empty. They eventually decided to unplug the machine for some peace and quiet. Unfortunately, even unplugging the machine did not quiet the spirits that wanted to play games late into the night. The staff continued to hear the game after it had been unplugged. Finally, the game was removed from the lobby. The lobby ghosts also enjoyed calling to the employees of the hotel. Those working the night staff would occasionally hear their names being called from somewhere in the lobby well after the hotel had gotten quiet for the night. When they went to look for the source of the disturbance, there was nothing and no one in the lobby. This is one of those occurrences at the Gadsden that the staff has acknowledged just comes with working at the historic hotel. Arizona is a state with lots of history and with history comes ghosts and paranormal activity. Cochise County is a small rural area built mainly by mining, farming and ranching around the turn of the century. Cochise County embodies much of the legends of the Wild West associated with American legend and it holds many fascinating ghost stories. Some of these ghosts have chosen to continue to inhabit beautiful hotels in the region. The Gadsden in Douglas is just one hotel with both a rich history and exciting spirits. Even if you don't encounter something paranormal, the beauty of the hotel is worth a visit. content that I did not have time to share, such as a famous UFO incident from 1952 and the Ghosts of Hunger Valley. It's only in the podcast version of tonight's show which will be uploaded early Monday morning. You can find the Weird Darkness podcast at WeirdDarkness.com slash listen or search for Weird Darkness wherever you listen to podcasts. You can follow Weird Darkness on social media by visiting the contact social page on the website and please tell others about Weird Darkness who love the paranormal or strange stories, true crime, monsters or unsolved mysteries like you do. Doing that helps make it possible for me to keep doing the show. If you'd like to be a part of the show, you can send in your own paranormal experiences by clicking on Tell Your Story at WeirdDarkness.com. You can also email me anytime at Darren at WeirdDarkness.com. All stories in Weird Darkness are purported to be true unless stated otherwise and you can find links to the stories or the authors in the show notes which I will upload to the Weird Darkness website immediately after tonight's show is ended. Is there a dimensional portal in Transylvania and ancient UFO sightings were both by a Sutherland for a message to Eagle and the haunted Gadsden County Hotel is from Paranormality Magazine. Weird Darkness is a registered trademark. Copyright Weird Darkness. And now that we're coming out of the dark, I'll leave you with a little light. Psalm 118 verse 6, The Lord is with me, I will not be afraid. What can mere mortals do to me? And a final thought, sometimes you've just gotta look back at your past and smile at how far you've gotten. I'm Darren Marlar. Thanks for joining me in the Weird Darkness. Break checkers, trucklets, 18-wheelers, deadheads, yard dogs, get your ears on, whatever you call yourselves or whatever call sign or moniker is thrust upon you. This episode is dedicated to all you truckers driving the Boulevard, keeping our bellies full, shelves stocked, septics cleaned and brains entertained with what you're hauling. In the eyes of this ratchet jaw, I'm honored to have you listening. Maybe once in a while grab your CB, head to Sesame Street and tell other drivers how to join this weird oak convoy. Appreciate it. May your break checks be with you, your shutter trouble be absent and your bare bites non-existent. Keep it cool on the stool. This is Spooky Santa and I'm tan and on the side. Welcome, Weirdos. I'm Darren Marlar and this is Weird Darkness Radio, where every week you'll find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore, the strange and bizarre, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre, unsolved and unexplained. Coming up this hour. In the 1960s, Brian Lethly Andrew investigated and reported on numerous cases of strange objects in the sky, trying to get to the truth of what people were seeing. But when sinister events began happening to him, he knew he had to walk away from his career in ufology, or the government might make him go away. Saying the disappearance of David Glenn Lewis is bizarre doesn't even begin to scratch the surface. What started out as a strange, missing person's case would eventually be resolved, but the answer that would come would pose even more questions, proving the adage that truth is stranger than fiction. But first, the idea of a person changing into a wolf or shapeshifting into some type of animal or cryptid is mostly confined to the authors of fictional horror, but not all societies and cultures are so quick to label shapeshifting as make-believe. We begin there. If you're new here, welcome to the show, and if you're already a member of this Weirdo family, please take a moment and invite someone else to listen in with you. Recommending Weird Darkness to others helps make it possible for me to keep doing the show. While you're listening, be sure to visit WeirdDarkness.com and click on Contact Social to follow Weird Darkness on social media. And also on the website you can find the Daily Weird Darkness podcast, which comes out seven days per week. You can enter monthly contests, find Weird Darkness merchandise, and more. You can even send in your own true story of something paranormal that has happened to you or someone you know. You can find it all at WeirdDarkness.com. Now, bolt your doors, lock your windows, turn off your lights, and come with me into the Weird Darkness. For countless years, humans have sat around campfires and regaled one another with tales of mythical shapeshifting beasts. These become creations horrify and thrill in equal measure. They chase us through our nightmares. They play tricks on the mind during those dark winter nights. We seem equally fascinated by the idea of humans transforming into animals or therianthropy. The transformation seen from an American werewolf in London remains an iconic depiction of this otherworldly change. Such horror reminds us of our own animalistic roots. In modern times, most cultures see shapeshifting and therianthropy as the work of active imaginations or the remnants of a superstitious past. But as some of the entries in this list will show, shapeshifting demons and witch-therianthropes are not quite in the rearview mirrors of all cultures. For example, the Tanuki. Go to Japan and you will find the landscape peppered with statues of creatures bearing inordinately large testicles. These ceramic sculptures are depictions of the Tanuki, small raccoon-like animals that are common to Japanese folklore. Actually, Japanese raccoon dogs are also referred to as Tanuki. Japanese legend speaks of a tile maker who was made wealthy from a dancing tea kettle. The kettle was said to be a shapeshifting creature called a Tanuki. These mythical beings were raccoon dogs that used their shapeshifting abilities to reward the kindly acts of strangers. The teal begins with a Shinto priest repairing an old kettle. He places the kettle now spic and span on a hot stove. The priest is horrified when all of a sudden the object sprouts arms and legs. Ouch! cries the Tanuki. Thinking the kettle is cursed, the priest gives it away to a local tile maker. Now in the possession of a new master, the shapeshifter strikes a deal. It promises to serve as the man's dancing kettle in exchange for his kindness and respect. Some Tanuki are said to have a much darker side to them. In the tale of the farmer and the badger, a Tanuki shapeshifter destroys a Japanese farmer's rice field. The farmer ensnares the mischievous animal and vows to turn it into Tanuki's soup. But the farmer's wife takes pity on the Tanuki and lets it escape. In an act of vengeance, the Tanuki murders the woman and turns her into soup. The Tanuki then transforms into the farmer's wife and tries to make the farmer eat a bowl of his beloved's delicious remains. The story gets stranger yet. An enraged rabbit, one of the farmer's friends, takes exception to the horror show. The rabbit punishes the Tanuki by playing a series of tricks on it. The rabbit hurls a bee's nest on the Tanuki, sets him on fire and thwarts him in a boat race. Then there are changelings. It was once believed that fairies, elves or witches would abduct human infants and replace them with their own sinister offspring. The original babies were either raised by the mythological creatures or handed over to the devil as a sacrificial gift. While the changeling takes on the guise of a small child, there are obvious signs that a swap is taken place. Changelings were said to speak with greater wisdom than that expected of a normal child. They also liked to dance, drink and eat. However, despite their insatiable appetite, the creatures often displayed stunted growth. Changelings are common to European folklore and may even have pre-Christian roots. The first documented case of a changeling was described by the Bishop of Paris, William of Auvergne, in 13th-century France. They say they are skinny and always wailing in such milk drinkers that foreign nursemaids do not supply sufficient milk to feed one. These appear to have remained with the nurses for many years and afterward to have flown away or rather vanished. The brewery of eggshells test was commonly used to confirm the presence of a changeling. The child was placed in front of a roaring fire. A series of eggshells were filled with water and set ablaze. The display was enough to impress the changeling, prompting it to exclaim, I have seen the acorn before the oak. I have seen the egg before the white chicken. I have never seen the equal of this. Parents who felt that they were the victims of changeling swaps took extreme measures. It was thought the fairies would return the original baby if the changeling was harmed. This meant the counterfeit children were often burned, beaten, or starved. In reality, the changeling was probably just a sickly child. The parents were likely confusing simple childhood disorders like autism or birth defects like spina bifida with superstitious manifestations. More shapeshifters and therian throats coming up when Weird Darkness returns. We continue looking now at various shapeshifters and therian throats. The Puca A mythical theory of Celtic folklore, the Puca is a dark-furred creature that assumes a variety of forms. The name stems from the Old Irish word for goblin, Puca. Legend has it that the Puca have used their shape-shifting powers to change into cats, rabbits, horses, ravens, goats, goblins, and even humans. One of the most famous stories of a Puca is a film starring James Stewart and his best friend, an invisible giant rabbit named Harvey. The title of the film and stage play was based upon as well. When asked by others what Harvey is, Jimmy Stewart's character says that Harvey is a Puca. Any Puca's motives are usually unclear, demonstrating both malevolent and benevolent intentions. According to most folklorists, the Puca usually comes out to wreak havoc at night. These sly pranksters leave their mountaintop homes to roam the countryside, smashing fences and spoiling crops. Its most common form is reported to be that of a black horse with golden eyes. The horse gallops around remote areas looking for a suitable rider. Those who fail to answer the creature's calls have no alternative but to watch as the horse destroys their earthly possessions. It is said that Ireland's king, Brian Boru, once tamed the fabled beast. He leashed the Puca with a bridle made from its own tail. The king rode the Puca until it was utterly exhausted. He made the creature promise to leave both Christians and Irishmen in peace. The Puca was given a slight concession, though it was still permitted to play its devilish tricks on unsuspecting drunkards and evildoers. Puca can, on occasion, show a more caring side. Some of the more superstitious parts of Ireland believe the Puca reveals prophecies and warns people about evil fairies. They also reward acts of kindness by helping out with manual labor. Skinwalkers Skinwalkers were once normal members of the Navaha and Ute tribes. But after embracing dark magic and witchcraft, these former tribesmen ended up traveling a very different path. The skinwalker cloaks itself in the skin of whatever animal it wishes to become. These therian throats can then become bears, wolves, owls, coyotes, and crows. According to Navaha mystics, the skinwalker takes on the properties of that animal. For example, a tribal shaman could change into a wolf to gain speed and agility. To become a skinwalker, a medicine man must commit an act of great evil, like killing a close family member or friend. These disgraced shamans are permanently exiled from Navaha's life. They have become, in Navaha's tongue, ye nah old ushi. With it, he goes on all fours. Skinwalkers are often cast out because of necrophilia, murder, or grave robbery. They also play sadistical, practical jokes on others. They plant dismembered fingers in homes to lure apparitions and chase frightened motorists in the dead of night. But the skinwalker's secret weapon appears to be corpse powder. The powder induces convulsions and causes the recipient's tongue to drop out. Because they possess such formidable knowledge of spiritual medicine, the Navaha people blame skinwalkers for death, disease, and famine. The Kumijo. Popularized in Korean folklore, the Kumijo, or a Gummyho, is a nine-tailed fox that they penchant for young men. The Kumijo is actually a demon who tries to lure men to their deaths by shapeshifting into a seductive woman. The demon fox uses a magical stone to extract the soul of its besotted victim. In some versions of the story, the fox rips out the liver or heart. This can take place while the demon is engaging in sexual acts. In the story of the jewel of the fox's tongue, a shapeshifting Kumijo slays 99 schoolboys, siphoning off their human energy. In accordance with similar tales of the Kumijo, the fox needs to claim just one more soul to reach heaven. But she is bested by her final victim. The fox tries to take the boy's energy by rolling an enchanted jewel over his mouth. He sees through the fox's ploy and swallows the jewel. This grants him great wisdom. He sees no other option but to rally his fellow villagers and hunt down the deceitful Kumijo. While calling a woman a fox in Western culture typically refers to her beauty and desirability, the Korean word for fox, yawu, has negative connotations. It is often used to describe women who are cunning and manipulative. Tales of Kumijo aim to promote Confucian principles, warning Korean women against engaging in sexual deviancy. The Nagwal The Aztecs believed that animal spirits were linked to each person's life energy. The nature of this spirit was determined through the Mesoamerican calendar. Sorcerers who had the power to transform into animals and were born on certain dates were known as Nagwals. The Omex and the Maya thought Nagwals were stealthily night stalkers who drank the blood of innocent mortals. Other reports suggest that they could control the weather and cast bizarre illusions. The historian Antonio de Herrera penned one of the earliest accounts of these mysterious figures. He argued that the devil would assume the form of a lion, tiger, coyote, lizard, snakebird, or other animal to con the Maya tribespeople of Kirkwin-Honduras. Herrera spoke of a tribesman who, in a desperate bid to achieve the wealth of his ancestors, embraced Nagwalism. After performing a sacrificial ritual in which he laid waste to a dog or a fowl, the man slept. Talking spirit animals filled his dream and delivered the following prophecy. On such a day, go hunting and the first animal or bird you see will be my form, and I shall remain your companion and Nagwal for all time. It is likely this prophecy was the work of a intoxicating plant called peyote. Its hallucinogenic properties were often mistaken for supernatural divinations. In many parts of rural Mexico, the legend of the Nagwal lives on. Recent sightings suggest the beast has now taken on a more feral appearance, looking like a large dog or wolf. The Nagwals have been blamed for missing persons, stolen goods, damaged property, and dead livestock. Madame Palais and the Hogg Child Madame Palais is an ancient deity who played a major role in shaping the Hawaiian islands. It is no wonder, then, that Palais plays such a pivotal role in Hawaiian culture. Stores feature her memorabilia. The Hawaiian Volcano's National Park is a large painting of the goddess. There is even a volcanic rock formation called Palais' Chair. The shape-shifting goddess is also known by the name Pelehanumea, or she who shapes the sacred land. Locals said that they have seen their goddess in the form of a white dog or a beautiful woman. Legend has it that Madame Palais was born into Hedi. She was forced to flee, however, after seducing her sister's husband, a wise decision considering that her sister was the goddess of the sea. The voyage took her to the island of Hawaii, where she used a divining rod to create a series of fire pits. These pits represent the region's many volcanoes. Madame Palais eventually settled down in Hawaii and created the most active of the island's volcanoes, Kilauea. Today's volcanic activity is said to be more pronounced when Palais is angered. It is therefore not unusual for local islanders to leave offerings to ease her mood. In 2018, many locals celebrated the eruption of Kilauea. The event triggered a number of earthquakes and destroyed many homes. My house was an offering for Palais, explained retired schoolteacher Monica Devlin. It is an awe-inspiring process of destruction and creation and I was lucky to glimpse it. The goddess was romantically pursued by another shape-shifter, the demigod Kemapua'a, or the hog-child. Kemapua'a could transform into fish, plants, and a powerful human hog hybrid. Madame Palais was repulsed by the hog-child's advances, attacking him with a torrent of fire. In the ensuing battle, Kemapua'a wielded an unstoppable army of hogs to defeat Palais and her relatives. The Illamue Horrifying accounts of a predator demon have spread through parts of Africa, one of the Bantu tribes of Kenya, the Kakuya, named this evil hunter the Illamue. Some tribe members say the Illamue takes on the form of a healthy man. Others claim he looks like a deformed village elder, with one of his feet jutting from the back of his neck. According to Kenyan folklore, the Illamue is a flesh-eating terror that can shape-shift into a replica of another human. To do this, the Illamue must steal the target's hair, nail clippings, or blood. The demon can also possess a range of animals, most often lions. Some African tribes attribute lion attacks to Illamue activity, consulting medicine men for solutions. In 1898, the British Empire coordinated the construction of a railway bridge over the Savo River. A large camp was established near the site to accommodate thousands of Indian workers, and this served as an ideal hunting ground for a pair of highly intelligent lions, the Savo man-eaters, also known as the Ghost and the Darkness, which they made into a film. The duo worked together to outmaneuver their prey. During a series of nightly skirmishes, the lions negotiated their way around the camp's man-made traps and fortifications. They would then target the slumbering workmen one by one, spiriting them away into the undergrowth. These attacks went on for months, prompting hundreds of workers to flee. News of demon tigers had spread like wildfire through the camps. The bridge project's overseer, Lieutenant Colonel John Henry Patterson, spent weeks hunting the animals, but they were too clever to fall victim to Patterson's many and varied traps. Eventually, after several direct encounters, Patterson shot and killed the man-eaters. Incredibly, one of the lions took nine bullets before succumbing to its injuries. The Layak On the Indonesian island of Bali, the Wichweto Rangda reigns supreme. She uses a formidable cult of child-eating witches to terrorize the island's superstitious population. Together, they are known as the Layak. During the day, the Layak bland in with the crowds. It's only after sunset that the Layak reveals its true form. They might spend their nights desecrating gravesites, looking for body parts to steal. These organs are used to craft a magical concoction that grants the Layak its shape-shifting power. Layak can transform into monkeys, goats, lions, or other animals. If that's not bizarre enough, a Layak can deliberately rip off its own head. The head then flies around, entrails dangling in the wind in search of sustenance. While the creature will happily feast on almost any animal, it favors the blood of mothers and their newborn babies. According to Balinese legend, Rangda's witch army once waged a war against the king of good spirits, a lion-like beast called Barong. Rangda cast a spell on Barong's warriors, forcing them to fall on their own swords. But the great guardian prevented this massacre by turning his people invisible. Barong used his mighty powers to overcome the Wichweto, restoring balance to the Hindu island. The events of this battle are proudly depicted in Balinese ceremonial dances. Brian leafly Andrew chronicle reports of a plethora of strange craft in the late 1960s. Press cuttings at the time suggest that in the swinging 60s, the truth was definitely out there, and lurking in the skies over the West Midlands. But this work made shadowy figures in the halls of power twitchy, Brian believes. They were concerned, he reckons, that he'd tripped upon dark technology being developed in secret locations. This former electrical engineer said, society is being watched by the department of them. Say hello to System X. Quite clearly, I had problems with phone tapping, bloody crude phone tapping. You could hear the click. There were too many people looking in hindsight. It's been more than 50 years since Brian turned his back on the UFO Bureau, and his interest in close encounters has diminished. These days, I'm retired, he admits. I struggle to find time to tie my shoelaces. But he's convinced of the validity of some of the sightings, even if work was sometimes bogged down by hoaxers. He's also adamant that Big Brother was indeed watching and listening in. His personal security, even safety, he says, were compromised. There were a lot of mickey takers, he admits. One man sent me pictures of a UFO. It was the lid of exactly the same hand cream my wife used, the jar there on the table in front of me. Half a century on, the work of Brian's Bureau lives on through the yellowed archives of the Coventry Telegraph. On December 3, 1968, Brian publicly admitted he was a scared man. Under the banner headline, worried UFO man gives up, he announces the organization's closure. In the Bombshell article, Brian alleged that he'd been watched by a man with a glowing orange face. His phone cut off whenever he attempted to talk about UFOs. He had a phone message from a caller speaking unusual English. I've given this thing up and destroyed all the papers, he told the Telegraph. There have been happenings which have worried me and frightened my wife. For Brian, the alarm bells rang while repairing his mother's car. Suddenly, I noticed a man standing by the next door garage, he told the paper. Nobody had been there before. His face was glowing orange. As I watched, the face changed to that of an old man before my eyes. Then he turned and walked away. You could not describe the first face in normal terms. It had eyes, nose and mouth in the proper places, but not of the shape that we associate with the human figure. Soon afterwards, a visit to a fellow UFO watcher in Stoke was strangely scuppered. All the lights in the house suddenly dimmed as though a huge electrical load had been put in the circuit, he said. This will happen once in a while normally, but it kept on happening. This is most unusual. All this started two days after I opened my bureau. I want to publicly warn all teenage hobbyists that this is nothing to dabble in lightly. Judging by the flood, it reports Brian was in the right place to experience extraterrestrial activity. At the time, the Coventry Telegraph carried page after page of sightings, and he was not alone in being gripped by E.T. Fever. He believes the flood of sightings coincided with experimental research by the government. The Rolls-Royce factory was nearby, he pointed out. Coventry folk, even city policemen, were experiencing close encounters on a daily basis. The dramatic reports can best be described as of their time. Frankly, some of the Coventry Telegraph reporters seem to approach the topic with tongue firmly in cheek. For example, headline UFO became a mum, September 28, 1968. A flying saucer which gave birth over Willingham has been reported to the Unidentified Flying Object Information Center of Mr. Brian Leithley Andrew. An eyewitness phoned Mr. Leithley Andrew to report that the Mother UFO was a giant sphere-like object seen in 1953. Sparks came from the underside of the UFO which gave birth to a small sphere. The incident was seen by people in a bus queue near Willingham Traffic Island. And there's more. Headline, flying saucers not a load of tripe, September 24, 1968. Flying saucers were the greatest mystery of our time and should not be dismissed as a load of tripe, Mr. Wilf Grinnaugh told Non-Eaten Rotary Club. Mr. Grinnaugh is managing editor of the Austin Motor Carriage Company which has works at Solly Hole and Non-Eaten. Mankind, he said, has been seeing strange things in the sky since the beginning of recorded history. Mr. Grinnaugh spoke of making two sightings himself over Coventry through binoculars. He said, as a result, I believe in UFOs. All I can repeat is UFOs must be piloted by beings from other worlds or else they are a natural phenomena in our atmosphere. And yet more. Headline, saucer over city, say women, March 31, 1969. Two Coventry women believe there may have been a flying saucer over the city during the weekend after they were awoken by an unearthly high-pitched whining accompanied by a glowing light. I've been all over the possibilities and that's the only explanation I can think of, said 28-year-old Patricia Hughes. Do not be too skeptical about UFOs. Back in the 1960s and early 1970s, members of the constabulary were less than shy about admitting that they had seen UFOs. After all, the whole nation were closet believers. On February 24, 1971, four Bobbys gave their story to the Coventry Telegraph. It reported, PC Brian Hewitt of B Subdivision said, We were attending a job at Leithel's Lane at 6.15 am when we all saw a strange object in the sky. It was not a meteorite or anything like that. There were three single white lights in the sky over the Nunn-Eaton area and moving at a great speed in a westerly direction toward Birmingham. They then turned northwards. They were at the height of about two miles and the lights did not belong to the same object because they were so far apart. They appeared to be in formation. They were also traveling at a tremendous speed because an aircraft flying at, say, 600 miles per hour at that height would appear to be going very slowly. I don't know what they could have been. I don't believe in flying saucers or anything like that, and I have tried to look at it in a recent way. I've checked with air traffic control at Birmingham Airport and the first aircraft to land there was later than the time we saw those lights. I cannot explain it. Such was the space fever that the police actually appealed for UFO sightings. On January 4, 1972, Warwickshire police sergeant Mike Davies told the Telegraph, Don't be too skeptical about UFOs. I asked people to whom sightings are reported to listen to what is said. Then they can deduce what the object was not and speculate what it was. I believe there is something beyond our comprehension and our technology. The tendency is to take a few statements and then to make a sweeping statement about what an object was. People are too prepared to dismiss the subject. The officer added, I have yet to be convinced that some information about UFOs is not withheld by the authorities, but supposing there was a statement that we were being invaded by people from another planet, what do you think the reaction of the public would be? Coming up, saying the disappearance of David Glenn Lewis is bizarre doesn't even begin to scratch the surface. What started out as a strange missing person's case would eventually be resolved, but the answer that would come would pose even more questions, proving the adage that truth is stranger than fiction. Although the case of David Glenn Lewis is so bizarre, there really isn't much out there about it. Information that's available comes from a few scant newspaper articles, online entries and several detailed posts from a family friend on a message board. David Glenn Lewis was born on December 11, 1953 in Borger, Texas. He graduated in 1979 from Texas Tech University School of Law with a doctor of jurisprudence. After practicing law for several years, he was eventually elected as a court of law judge in nearby Moore County, Texas from 1986 to 1990. After recently losing his bid for reelection, he once again was practicing law in Amarillo, Texas. He lived in nearby Dumas with his wife Karen and their nine-year-old daughter Lauren. He was very active in his church as well as several charitable organizations. He was also a night instructor at nearby Amarillo College. The last weekend in January in 1993 was Super Bowl weekend. It was Super Bowl 27 that featured the Dallas Cowboys versus the Buffalo Bills. David Glenn Lewis was looking forward to watching the game as he was said to be a big Cowboys fan. His wife and daughter had decided to spend that weekend flying to Dallas and doing some shopping. David would be able to have a nice relaxing weekend at home rooting his team on. That was the initial plan, anyway. David Lewis' wife and daughter would arrive home from their trip late at night on Sunday, January 31, 1993. They did note that the light and the TV had been left on and the VCR had recorded the Super Bowl. David's wedding ring and watch were on the kitchen counter. The dryer was on and what appeared to be two freshly made turkey sandwiches were in the refrigerator. There was only one thing missing from the house. David. At first, David's wife wasn't concerned that he wasn't home. She thought perhaps he'd gone in to work to get some things done or even decided to watch the Super Bowl somewhere else. The next morning, her husband still wasn't home. Karen started to become concerned and when she learned that he had missed two appointments that day, she called the Amarillo Police Department and reported her husband as missing. The police did begin an investigation into the disappearance of David Glenn Lewis. After interviewing friends and colleagues, here's what appears to be the actions of David in the days before he vanished. On January 28, David's wife and daughter depart on their weekend trip to Dallas. David leaves work at the Buckner, Laura and Swindell law firm early that day, telling co-workers he wasn't feeling well and was going to go home. That afternoon, his credit card was used to purchase gas. He was also said to have taught his government class that night at Amarillo College. The class ended around 10 p.m. On January 29, a friend from his church reports seeing David hurrying through the Southwest Airlines terminal at the Amarillo Airport. They said he wasn't carrying any luggage. On January 30, it's said to be the last day that David was verified to have been seen, but it's unclear who did see him. Someone did deposit $5,000 in the couple's joint bank account that day. Neighbors also report seeing his red explorer parked at his house. On January 31, the day he went missing, there weren't any confirmed sightings of David Lewis at all. It was thought that whoever taped the Super Bowl, presumably Lewis, would have had to have been there that night to start the recording. The VCR either did not have a timer function or it wasn't set up because the recording appears to have been started manually. By estimation, the recording was started around 5.15 p.m. that night. On February 1, after missing two appointments, David's wife reports him missing to Amarillo Police Department. An investigation is started. On February 2, police found David Lewis' red explorer in the front of the Potter County Courts Building in downtown Amarillo. His house and car keys were found underneath the floor mat. His checkbook, credit cards, and driver's license were all found in his car as well, which was customary of David, reports say. During their investigation of David Lewis' disappearance, police discovered that two plane tickets were purchased under the name David Lewis around the time he went missing. The first ticket was purchased on January 31 and was from Dallas to Amarillo. The second ticket was purchased on the next day, February 1, and was from LA to Dallas, with a stopover in Amarillo. Back in 1993, however, you didn't need show ID to buy a ticket or show ID to fly, so it's unsure if it was actually David who purchased the tickets or if they were even used. David's family was convinced he would never leave voluntarily. They said he was too devoted to his family to even consider that. According to his wife, David had gotten death threats during his time as a judge from 1986 to 1990 and had recently told her his life was in danger but wouldn't give her any details. David was also said to fly to Dallas the next week for a deposition in a $3 million conflict of interest lawsuit brought against his former law firm, Ham Irwin Graham & Cox, by a wealthy client. However, David's lawyers didn't think the deposition would be anything that would cause any harm to come to his client. I'll add David's wife said that after he went missing, his files concerning the deposition apparently were missing too. After investigating David's case for 11 months, with no developments, the Amarillo Special Crimes Unit cancelled their probe into David Lewis' disappearance. They could find no evidence of foul play and believed that David purchased the two tickets willingly. They declared David Lewis was missing voluntarily. I do want to mention a few other possible sightings of David Lewis around the time he went missing though. These are not confirmed, but if they are him, certainly add to the odd circumstances around the time he went missing. On February 1st, a sheriff's deputy saw a man resembling David Lewis outside the Potter County Court's building, taking photos of a red explorer. Remember, that is what David drove and his vehicle would be discovered there, unattended the next day. Later that same day, a cab driver said he drove someone resembling Lewis from a hotel to the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport. He said the man seemed very nervous and paid in cash and said he had a watt of $100 bills. 11 years would go by and there would be no leads or information about the whereabouts of David Glenn Lewis. Then, across the country, a most unlikely break in the case would come to light that would shock everyone. In 2003, the Seattle Post Intelligencer printed an investigative series titled Without a Trace. It documented serious shortcomings in the way police handled adult missing persons cases in and outside the state. It also talked about the problem with law enforcement missing persons data bank, namely the NCIC, National Crime Information Center. It stated that many of these cases sadly slipped through the cracks. Washington State Police Detective Patrick Dutter read the article with interest. His thoughts were, if it can be wrong there, it can be wrong here. Detective Dutter then had an idea. He would do an extensive search on Google of some John and Jane Doe's that they had never identified in the area and see if he could come up with any leads. He painstakingly put details in like height, weight, etc., and it took him to various missing persons websites. Within a week, Dutter had accomplished what expensive law enforcement databases were unable to do, a list of possible victims. One of the John Doe's from Washington looked very much like a missing person out of Texas. His name was David Glenn Lewis. The only thing that gave Detective Dutter pause with the photo of the John Doe is he wasn't wearing glasses, whereas David Glenn Lewis wore distinctive glasses. Dutter did a little more digging and located the evidence list of the John Doe in question and discovered the John Doe did have eyeglasses in his pocket when his body was recovered. They looked very similar to David Glenn Lewis's glasses. After contacting the Amarillo Police Department and sending a tissue sample of the victim that had been preserved since 1993, as well as the victim's shoes, a DNA sample was then compared with the missing person's mother in Amarillo. It was a match. David Glenn Lewis had finally been found. The circumstances of David Glenn Lewis's death are even more bizarre than his disappearance. He was killed in a hit-and-run on a lonely two-lane highway close to Moxie, Washington, about 10 miles from the Yakima Airport. He was killed at 10.24 p.m. on February 1st, the day after he went missing. So David Glenn Lewis had traveled about 1,600 miles and was killed only about 29 hours after he was thought to be at his home recording the Super Bowl. The circumstances of David's last moments, according to witnesses, absolutely defy logic. It was reported that David was walking down the centerline of the road in the pitch dark. One concerned driver turned their vehicle around to warn other motorists that there was a man in the road, but it was too late. They returned to find David's crumpled body on the pavement deceased. It is reported that a Chevy Camaro was seen leaving the scene, but the identity of the car who hit David Lewis has never been discovered. There were no drugs or alcohol in his system. Another completely bizarre revelation was what clothes David Lewis had on that night. He was found wearing worn military fatigues and work boots, clothing that his wife was adamant David did not own. When the unknown person was hit that night, it is also reported that he was not wearing glasses, yet glasses were found in his clothing. David Glenn Lewis is said to need glasses badly in order to see. David Glenn Lewis' family was completely baffled by the circumstances leading to his death. They said he had no known ties to the Yakima area. The trip would have taken about 23 hours by car or several hours by plane. There were no direct flights to Yakima, so it is unknown how he even got to the area, especially in the short amount of time that he did. The family had concerns that their loved one may have even been kidnapped and that perhaps David Lewis' thoughts of his life being in danger could be true. Although I don't think the two mysterious disappearances are related, there is another person who went missing not too long after David Lewis vanished and not too far away that I want to mention. Johnny Lee Baker, 47, also from Borger, Texas, vanished on June 21st, 1994 from his home. He was reported to have grown up with David Glenn Lewis in the same small town. Baker called his son 9.30 p.m. the night of his disappearance and after speaking with him, vanished. None of his belongings, wallet or vehicle had been taken and the only thing missing was his garage door opener. Johnny Lee Baker was a pharmacist and said to be a prominent figure in the community. He has never been found. Back to David Glenn Lewis. This is definitely one of those cases where one theory doesn't make perfect sense and will answer all the unknowns. I'll break it down into three possible scenarios that could have happened but first I'll say what I don't think happened. I don't think David Glenn Lewis was kidnapped or murdered. It wouldn't make sense to take him so far away so quickly. There were no signs of a struggle at his house or in his car. There were never any sightings of him with anyone. He was always alone. Also, he wasn't murdered. Things just don't add up that there were others involved. The first theory, what if David Glenn Lewis' life really was in danger? If he had actually been threatened, his first concern would probably be protecting his family. Perhaps he left the area so they wouldn't be in danger. He did all these things that didn't make any sense in an effort to throw the people after him off track. The fact that he was killed wasn't something he anticipated, just a very unfortunate accident. The second scenario is that David Glenn Lewis was battling some inner demons. He did tell his wife his life was in danger. What we don't know is if that was actually true or in David's mind it was true. I can envision a possible scenario where David wanted to flee and in his mind protect his family from the perceived danger that they were in. He leaves everything behind including ID, ring, watch, even clothing so he can't be identified. If the plane tickets were not used they could have just been a red herring to throw people off the track as he didn't want to be discovered. I also can't understand why if David needed his glasses so badly why he wouldn't have been wearing them late at night on a dark road. So many of the things David did in the last few days of his life didn't make sense and showed that David was not thinking clearly. The third scenario I'm going to bring up I first read about when a clinical psychologist commented on an online post about David Lewis' case. He said his actions sounded like a dissociative fugue state. After doing some research here on some of the symptoms sudden and unplanned travel away from home, inability to recall past events or important information from the person's life, confusion or loss of memory about their identity, it's also said that in dissociative fugue people lose some or all memories of their past and they usually disappear from their environments leaving their family in job. I think this could be another scenario for why David Glenn Lewis disappeared abruptly that night and why his actions in his final days made no sense. By all accounts David Glenn Lewis was a very kind and loving man who enjoyed helping others. There was nothing but words of praise about him and all of my research. The tragic and unexplained way he disappeared and later died shouldn't take away from that or the upstanding life that he lived. When David was finally discovered his remains were brought home to Texas for a proper burial. Here is what part of the obituary read. Your love and devotion have been missed so very much you touched so many lives while you were here. How sad that many of your dreams were left unfulfilled. We know that God is using you for his almighty work. David Glenn Lewis had so much of his life left to live and it's tragic how and why his life was cut short. This is one of those cases where we won't get the answers we seek. Only David Glenn Lewis knows what was going through his mind in those final days and while he traveled on a cross country conundrum. A UFO incident which we have covered before but it's worth looking at again is an incident in 1952. This was one of the first admitted entity sightings and probably also one of the earliest close encounters of the third kind investigated officially at the time it took place. The incident occurred just northeast of Frontenac and about seven miles northeast of Pittsburgh, Kansas on August 25, 1952. At 5.30 am William Squires, a K-O-A-M radio entertainer in Pittsburgh, was driving through farmland along Highway 60. He was on his way into town to work early this morning. As he drove through a heavily wooded area, suddenly something shiny and odd caught his attention in a pasture field usually occupied by a large herd of cattle. Squires drew closer and saw an oval-shaped object hovering with a rocking motion just above the ground. He saw the waving grass and vegetation affected by the down blast of the UFO's hovering system. The object was silver-gray in color, approximately 21 meters or 70 feet across and 3.7 meters or 12 feet high. Based on the witness's more detailed description, the UFO was rather like two soup bowls placed rim to rim and then flattened somewhat. William Squires drove up until his car was alongside the field at only about 90 meters or 300 feet from the UFO. He then stopped the car and began to study the object more closely. The witness could clearly distinguish the underside of the object and its faint blueish glow. The unidentified flying object parked in the field approximately 100 yards off the road. The object's rim that could also be a walkway was especially interesting. From this rose a number of vertical poles, each topped by what seemed to be a series of 6-7 inch spinning propellers revolving at high speed. At one end of the UFO, there were slightly opaque window-like openings through which Squires could observe indistinct objects moving all the time. According to Squires, the activity behind these windows was rather obscured, like a window shade pulled down. I could see figures behind it. At the other end, the unknown vehicle was equipped with another, a rectangular window through which a man, perhaps a pilot, could be seen inside. The stranger whose head and shoulders were clearly visible was working with controls or some kind of other instruments onboard the vehicle. I definitely saw a human being through the window, the witness said. Squires thought that the man observed by him looked entirely human. Fascinated by what he saw, he got out of his car and began to approach the hovering vehicle to take a better look. He approached the UFO to within a hundred feet or so and almost instantly the UFO began to rise vertically into the air. The pulsating dull noise that all the time accompanied the hovering UFO began to increase in volume. It was like a covey of a hundred quail taking off, the witness said. The object continued to rise slowly for some seconds, then suddenly accelerated and flew off at high speed. Squires reported the incident to the U.S. Air Force. A few days later, an Air Force officer contacted him and asked to be taken to the site of the incident. It has been found that in the center of the field, the long grass had been flattened in a large circle about 18 meters or 60 feet in diameter. Also, the grass stems had been bent over, but not broken. The affected grass in the field was like the backwash of where the thing took off and formed a swirling spiral pattern. Samples of grass and soil were collected and sent for analysis. However, experts found nothing particularly unusual in them. Officially, the encounter with the UFO was classified as a close encounter of the second kind. The sighting of a pilot of the flying object was considered as nothing more than the witness's hallucination. However, the flattened grass found in the area was definitely not any hallucination. It is confirmed the presence of the UFO which landed in the field for an undefined period of time. A later investigation, however, confirmed the reliability of the witness, William Squires, and was termed good in the Special Report No. 14, completed March 17, 1954, where the case was mentioned among many other UFO incidents considered as reliable. The UFO incident described by William Squires coincides with another UFO sighting that occurred at about the same time in August 1952 and was experienced by Mrs. Suzanne E. Knight, a resident of Maryland, USA. Certain features regarding these two UFO encounters reported by William Squires and Mrs. Knight seat pleasant Maryland are indeed strikingly similar to each other. In August 1952, at around 9.30 p.m., Mrs. Suzanne E. Knight was in her kitchen when she suddenly heard a strange buzzing noise similar to that of a large insect. The woman approached the window of her kitchen and looked out. A flying object that bore a striking similarity to a fuselage of a plane was descending rapidly at about a 45-degree angle. Smoke was coming from the rear of the craft and her first thought was that an airplane was just going to crash, but nothing like that happened. Instead of an impact, the object of a dull silver color came to a hovering position approximately 300 feet above ground level and at a right angle to Mrs. Knight looking out of her kitchen window. It was equipped with a row of large square windows and in one of them, Mrs. Knight noticed a helmeted man-like figure looking straight ahead. No instruments or controls were visible. On the underside of the UFO was an undercarriage with a row of smaller square windows lit up by a brilliant yellow light. Through these windows, Mrs. Knight was able to recognize the backs of little seats. Another interesting detail was a small mast or perhaps an antenna placed at the front of the UFO. This small vertical construction seemed to be very similar to vertical poles observed by William Squires in his sighting on August 25, 1952. The UFO incident lasted approximately three minutes and at least for two minutes the witness was continuously observing the object, having it in a clear view. Mrs. Knight left the window only once when trying to call local media. When she returned to the window, the UFO's lights suddenly went out. The object began to glow red and the witness watched its back and forth rocking motion. The helmeted man-like figure was no longer visible and surprisingly the undercarriage with small windows also disappeared. I thought maybe it had moved up into the fuselage because not even an outline of the car was visible but it should have been because the street light would have shown it, she said. Soon after, the UFO left the area. Mrs. Suzanne E. Knight witnessed a UFO at a close range but reported her sighting for the first time 15 years later in 1967. Who was the stranger Mrs. Knight saw that summer evening in 1952? According to mycap.org, at present there is not sufficient information concerning occupant reports to make any final judgments on their authenticity, although there is good evidence in a few cases to suggest that at least some of the witnesses could be telling the truth about such encounters. The more credible UFO sightings often come in clusters and one of the most famous clusters of sightings took place in 1973, with one specific sighting being nothing less than incredible. This is the most credible UFO incident of the 1973 wave considered as one of the most intense sighting waves in UFO history. The event took place in the midst of a great UFO wave that hit the United States that month. On the night of October 18, 1973, an alarming UFO close encounter occurred near Mansfield, Ohio, United States. An Army Reserve UH-1 Huey helicopter with pilot Captain Lawrence J. Coyne in command was en route to Cleveland from Columbus, Ohio. The other three airmen present on board were Crew Chief Robert Yannisek, co-pilot Aira Gojezi and Staff Sergeant John Healy. Just before 11 o'clock, as the helicopter cruised at 1200 feet over the hills and woods of North Central Ohio, about 2500 feet above sea level, Heal, seated at the left rear, spotted a steady southbound red light. The light looked like the port wing light on an aircraft, but it was brighter. Additionally, the other lights normally required by FAA regulations were missing. Suddenly, the red light disappeared from sight behind the helicopter. Only some minutes later, Yannisek in the right rear seat spotted the red light on the eastern horizon, about 90 degrees to the flight path of their UH-1 Huey helicopter. About 30 seconds later, Crewman Yannisek informed that the object was converging on the helicopter at a high rate of speed of more than 600 miles an hour. Coyne took over the controls of the aircraft and initiated a powered descent from 2500 feet to 1700 feet. When the helicopter and its crew reached approximately 600 feet over the treetops, the large object was filling their entire wind shield. A radio call was initiated to Mansfield Tower, who acknowledged the helicopter. Mansfield, this is Army Helicopter 15444. Do you have any high-performance aircraft in your area? He asked. Mansfield responded. This is Mansfield approach. Go ahead, 15444. Coyne did and then waited for the response. There was no response from the tower. The red light was now approaching the helicopter traveling at a dangerous rate of speed. Normally, under 10,000 feet, aircraft are not allowed to fly at more than 250 knots or 285 miles per hour. The object, the pilots observed, apparently did not know such limitations. It was moving at about 600 knots or 684 miles per hour. Now the crew of the helicopter expected only impact from the object. It seemed the collision was imminent. Nothing like this ever came. In the meantime, the crew of the helicopter could see the UFO. It was a metallic, cigar-shaped object with a red light at its nose and a white light at its end. Under the end, the green beam swept in a 90-degree arc and shined upon the entire inside of the helicopter. The object had no wings, no tail structure, and no recognizable markings on its body. Captain Coyne pushed the collective pitch down to the altitude of 1,700 feet above the ground and it was now descending at 2,000 feet per minute. At 650 feet above the treetops below, the crew suddenly saw the object was covering the entire front wind shield. Then it covered the entire aircraft. We looked up and saw it stopped right over us, Coyne said. It had a big, gray, metallic-looking hull about 60 feet long. It was shaped like an airfoil or a streamlined fat cigar. There was a red light on the front. The leading edge glowed red a short distance back from the nose. There was a central dome, a green light at the rear reflected on the hull. All four were just staring at the UFO while their helicopter began to climb, without the pilot's guidance. I made no attempt to pull up, he said. All controls were set for a 20-degree dive, yet we had climbed from 1,700 to 3,500 feet with no power in a couple of seconds with no G-forces or other noticeable strains, Coyne said. Now the UFO briefly hesitated over the helicopter hovering for approximately 10-12 seconds above it and then in front of it. It seemed like it was there for so damn long it was just stopped for maybe 10-12 seconds and I mean stopped. It was coming at us and then it was there, just like that, Yannisak later said. The UFO hovered silently there in front of and above the helicopter and its crew before accelerating and heading off to the northwest. Now only the object's white rear light was still visible. Suddenly executing a sharp 45-degree turn to the right, the light vanished. The helicopter returned to 2500 feet and flew back to Cleveland, Ohio. The flight plan was closed and the FAA flight service station informed about the incident. The radio communication was completely gone on both VHF and UHD frequencies just after Mansfield Control Tower acknowledged the helicopter. Then it returned to normal 10 minutes after the incident. There were also witnesses on the ground who observed an object looking like a blimp and as big as a school bus and hovering above the helicopter. The green light at the rear of the unknown craft was like rays coming down according to one of the witnesses. Philip Klass, a famous UFO debunker, made some attempts to explain the UFO sighting as a meteor or fireball from the Orionids meteor shower. Meteors do not last more than a few seconds at most and bear no resemblance to the structured object all the observers reported. Klass also argued that the crew had been descending at 4,000, not 2,000 feet per minute. Feeling a collision with the ground, Coyne or Jazzy had instinctively pulled back on the cyclic pitch control to avoid crashing into the ground. Thus, there was nothing mysterious about the ascent, Klass said. However, many researchers, along with Dr. J. Allen Heineck, an American astronomer, professor and ufologist disagreed. Captain Coyne's response was, if we had been diving at 4,000 FPM, I would never have been able to recover in time to stop a crash. At no time, he and the other crew members insisted had they worried about such a crash. East of San Francisco, California is a narrow valley opening to the Bay of San Pablo. In spite of its pleasant situation and fruitful possibilities, it had no inhabitants until 1820, when Miguel Zamacona and his wife Amelia strayed into it, while on a journey and being delighted with its scenery determined to make it their home. In playful mockery of its abundance, they gave it the name of El Humbre, Hunger Valley. After some weeks of such hardship as comes to a Mexican from work, Miguel had built an adobe cabin and got a garden started, while he caught a fish or shot a deer now and then, and they got on pretty well. At last, it became necessary that he should go to Yerba Buena, as San Francisco was then called for goods. His burrows were fat and strong, and there should be no danger. Amelia cried at being left behind, but the garden had to be tended, and he was to be back in exactly three weeks. She waited for 22 days. Then, her anxiety becoming unendurable, she packed an outfit on a burrow and started on the trail. From time to time, she called his name, and Miguel echoed sweetly from hills and groves, but there was no other answer, save when an owl would hoot. Wrapped in a blanket, she slept on lupin bowels, but was off at peep of day again, calling, calling, high and clear among the solitudes. During the second day, her burrow gave a rasping bray and a hee-haw answer from the bush. It was Miguel's burrow. He had come at last, leaping to her feet in her impatience. She ran to meet him and found him lying on the earth, staring silently at the sky. All that day, she sat beside him, caressing his hand, talking, crying, bathing his face with water from the marsh, the poison marsh, and it was not until sunset that she could bring herself to admit that he was dead and had been dead for at least two days. She put the blanket over him, weighed it with stones, and heaped reeds upon it. Then she started for home. A wandering trader heard her story, but years elapsed before any other settler entered Hunger Valley. They found her skeleton then in the Weedy Garden. The adobe stands tentless in the new village of Martinez, and the people have so often heard the ghost of the Azama Connors haunt the place that they have begun to disbelieve it. On August 25, 1974, the unknown flying object registered on radar was traveling at 2,500 miles per hour. It was on a collision course with a small civilian aircraft that lifted off from El Paso, Texas, heading toward Mexico City. The small aircraft was in apparent danger, and the catastrophe was inevitable, and this deadly collision was about to happen just outside of Cuyame Chihuahua, Mexico. It was a calm summer evening, and people were slowly turning in for the night. Then something unexpected happened. In the meantime, at 10.07 pm, 500 miles away, the United States Air Defense System suddenly registered an unknown object flying over the Gulf of Mexico towards Corpus Christi, Texas. The object was traveling at 2,200 knots, 2,530 miles per hour on a bearing of 325 degrees at an altitude of 75,000 feet. In the beginning it was assumed that the object, tracked by two different military radar installations, was a meteor. However, radar operators quickly realized that the object they observed on the screen could not be a meteor. It was traveling and descending through steps, unlike that of a meteor that travels at higher speeds and descends in a smooth arc, not in level steps. American air defense systems were alerted, but there was no time for the military to scramble fighter jets to intercept the UFO. Suddenly, the unknown flying object turned left, decelerated to about 1,700 knots or 1,955 miles per hour, and turned to a heading of 290 degrees. It began a slow descent while entering Mexican airspace approximately 40 miles south of Brownsville, Texas. Radar tracked the UFO approximately 500 miles to a point near a small desert town of Koyama in the state of Chihuahua, not far from the U.S. border, but then the object suddenly disappeared from the radar screens. It was believed that both the civilian plane and the spacecraft had collided, which was confirmed about an hour later when a civilian radio station announced that an aircraft had crashed in the vicinity of Koyama. Early next morning, a Mexican recovery team started a rescue mission, searching for the craft that disappeared over the desert. At approximately 10.35 am, Mexican recovery teams spotted the wreckage from the air. At the same time, Mexican authorities announced another crash site just a few miles away. Radio silence on the search was officially issued. All activity and radio contact between the Mexican recovery team and its headquarters had ceased. U.S. authorities offered assistance to help clean up and recover. The offer was declined. According to researchers Ruben Oriarte and Noah Torres, who authored the book Mexico's Roswell, despite the refusal, Fort Bliss on the American side of the border near El Paso was forming a recovery team and continued to monitor Mexican recovery efforts via air surveillance. On the other side of the border, U.S. intelligence followed the events. The Americans managed to intercept a Mexican military report and learned that the wreckage from the missing plane had been spotted from the air, just outside Koyama. Shortly thereafter, the U.S. received another report of a second plane on the ground a few miles from the first, but it was not a conventional aircraft of any known type. It was a silver disc-shaped object about 16 feet 5 inches in diameter. The thickness was slightly less than 5 feet. Its surface had the appearance of polished steel. The craft had no windows, doors, markings, and there were no bodies inside the craft. The spacecraft was damaged in two spots. The damage was most likely caused by the collision with the civilian aircraft. However, as Ruben Oriarte, co-author of the Mexico's Roswell said, what I found fascinating was that the crash may have been caused by both craft colliding at a lower altitude due to their vision being blocked by a high peak, hills or mountain. In other words, both craft met at an intersection of the mountain. If the plane was flying south and the craft was flying west, the pilot couldn't have seen anything on his left until he cleared the mountain, colliding with the craft in front of him. In addition to this, the darkness of night was another key factor. The American recovery team included four helicopters, three small UHI Hueys, and a large sea stallion. When the Mexicans placed the UFO on a truck, U.S. surveillance monitored the entire event. The Mexican convoy with the damaged saucer was now slowly moving away from the crash site. What really happened at this point is unknown. The Americans studied satellite photographs which revealed something must have gone wrong during the recovery. The photographs taken during high altitude overflights showed that the Mexican convoy had stopped and the U.S. military could see a number of dead bodies. All convoy personnel was dead, most within the trucks. Dressed in protection suits, American soldiers approached the silent convoy. The UFO was still on the truck. The recovery team reconfigured the straps holding the object on the truck and attached them to a cargo cable from the sea stallion that transported the spacecraft over the borders to U.S. territory. What happened next is unsettling. The American elite force gathered the debris, the bodies from the Mexican recovery team, the civilian craft, and then destroyed everything with high explosives. There was no longer any visible evidence of what had taken place at this site on August 25, 1974. We're confronted with many open questions. What killed the Mexican recovery team? Where was the crew of the UFO? Where was the crashed UFO transported? Many ufologists who have studied this case, which became known as the Chihuahua UFO crash, tend to believe that the Mexicans were killed by an extraterrestrial biological agent of some sort. If the Mexican personnel was not wearing proper protection suits, they were in danger of being exposed to a lethal, unknown agent of some kind. There were no bodies discovered inside the crashed saucer. This indicates that the spacecraft was most likely an unmanned probe. Perhaps it was an alien probe on a reconnaissance mission, examining and collecting data of our planet. What happened to the crashed saucer is unknown. Some suggest that the debris was taken either to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base or Fort Bliss. These are only two possible locations. The true whereabouts of the disk that crashed on August 25, 1974 outside of Cuyama, Chihuahua, Mexico, are unknown. People who live near Cuyama claim the UFO crash is a real event. The case remains unsolved, but there is a small newspaper story from the El Heraldo de Chihuahua dated October 27, 1974 that mentions a group of Mexican soldiers who died during transport. Our next weirdo watch party is Saturday, April 13th. Are all the men gathered? All the fools. We'll be treated to a Roger Corman crap fest from 1958. Teenage caveman starring Robert Vaughn. There are shadows there, deep and cold and dirt that eats men. Did he just say dirt that eats men? There are shadows there, deep and cold and dirt that eats men. Yep, I guess so. Mistress Malicious and her Mistress Peace Theater will keep us entertained throughout the film as we watch this caveman teenager with great hair go into the jungle to fight prehistoric monsters like dogs and an armadillo. Whatever. They're prehistoric creatures. An animal's far more terrible than any you've seen. Our weirdo watch party is always free to watch online, so grab your popcorn, candy and soda and jump into the fun and even get involved in the live chat as we watch the movie. Plus, during this weirdo watch party, I'll be giving away a creepy crate to one lucky winner, full of scary surprises like horror collectibles, true crime-themed accessories, books, terrifying trinkets and more, with some weird darkness swag added in. You won't know what's in the creepy crate until you open it. And I'll be giving instructions on how to win the creepy crate inside the chat during the movie, so you have to tune in to win. It's Teenage Caveman, Saturday, April 13th, hosted by Mistress Peace Theater. The show begins at 10pm Eastern, 9pm Central, 8pm Mountain and 7pm Pacific. You can watch a trailer for the film and watch horror hosts and schlocky B movies anytime, day or night on the Monster Channel page at WeirdDarkness.com. Hope to see you on Saturday, April 13th. Hey weirdos, be sure to click the like button and subscribe to this channel and click the notification bell so you don't miss future videos. I post videos seven days a week and while you're at it, spread the darkness by sharing this video with someone you know who loves all things strange and macabre. If you want to listen to the podcast, you can find it at WeirdDarkness.com.