Encounters, p.17
Encounters, page 17
Like Simone and Tyler, Patty downloads information. Her frustration for having to show her math work in school is telling. She just knew the answers. What she didn’t know was that she was a child of an Invisible, a man whose job dictated strict limits and constraints on his family. Patty didn’t understand how different her childhood was from her friends’ because how could she know otherwise? Patty wasn’t the only child of an Invisible I knew, but she was the one I knew best and the one whose story is safe to tell. But there are others whose lives were even more constrained and whose alienation from normal society had taken a sad toll on them. As an outsider looking into this world, I wonder who or what organization was responsible for these rules and regulations? Did they question the ethical and moral justification for these programs that influenced the lives of these children so significantly?
9
FROM ATHEISM TO A MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR
When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty.
—JOHN MUIR
I met Len Filppu during the week of a much-anticipated conference at Rice University. The conference was a celebration of the university’s acquisition of an archive of “impossible” materials. An archive is a library and repository of specialized knowledge, and the items in this repository included documents, testimonies, and artifacts of and related to UFOs. This was the first conference in the United States, held on the campus of a major university, that focused on UFO materials after the release of the Pentagon’s military report about UFOs. Attendees included “experiencers,” and people who are interested in the stories of experiencers due to the potential to influence others—this group includes both Hollywood agents and agents of the CIA—each of whom is interested in the influence-angle of the topic for different reasons. Other people in attendance were those who were just fascinated by the spectacle of it all, and also sincere seekers, people who had had a UFO experience and were trying to understand what happened to them.1
Len is a sincere seeker trying to understand his own experience. We had become acquainted through email correspondence. Of the many messages I get daily about the topic, Len’s stood out because it wasn’t about a UFO encounter. Instead, he wrote to me about an encounter he had many years ago with the famous Catholic archbishop Fulton Sheen. Fulton Sheen was a charismatic television personality whose show Life Is Worth Living was watched regularly by millions of Americans, Catholic and non-Catholic. Life Is Worth Living had a very long run, from 1952 to 1965. Sheen’s emphatic message was that life had inherent value and meaning, and that every person is imbued with a dignity of which they are probably unaware. His mission was to remind people of that dignity and inherent value, if they just paused long enough to consider it.
Len is not Christian, and while he was aware of Sheen, he’d never paid close attention to him or his television show. Len’s chance meeting with the archbishop in 1975 didn’t convert him to Christianity. Yet, he was converted. Unlike Jose, who was born “plugged in” to an enchanted network, Len’s string of experiences opened him up to a life imbued with meaning, spirituality, and UFOs. Len’s story is important because he was not a seeker; he was an atheist. His story is about an encounter, but it is much more than that. One conclusion I’ve reached is that UFO encounters must be placed with contexts and not extracted from the lives of the people who encounter them. Len’s story begins with the sighting of a UFO—the first and initiatory encounter within a series of extraordinary and unlikely events that are linked by synchronicities and deep meaning.
“Over the years,” Len said, “I’ve experienced a well-documented UFO sighting, an intense inner vision of a Catholic priest on the night he died, a poltergeist with other witnesses, a full-chakra Kundalini electrical shock wave while chanting, a deep recognition of a past life, various “super vivid” dreams particularly concerning death, and exposure to a luminous, numinous white light that led to a sincere spiritual investigation and ultimate personal transformation.”2
I would add to his list the ever-present occurrence of synchronicities. As we talked in the Rice University conference cafeteria, he told me about a synchronicity related to the conference. His sighting of a UFO happened in Brockport, New York, in 1967, when he was sixteen years old. He was with a group of friends on an outdoor overnight sleep-out. Before he attended the conference, he reached out to one of the friends who had witnessed the UFO with him, Timothy “TJ” Hurley, a boy who had been one of his closest friends at the time.
“I hadn’t seen TJ for probably twenty-five years or so. We stayed in touch via occasional email, and I knew he and his wife lived in the Houston area. I contacted him to share my conference plans and offer an invitation to take them to dinner. It turned out that they lived about three blocks from my Houston hotel, directly on my walking route to the conference auditorium. We got together briefly almost every day to discuss and compare notes about our shared flying saucer incident, have some laughs, and reminisce.
“Isn’t that a wonderful coincidence?” Len asked.
“Absolutely,” I said.
THE UFO OVER BROCKPORT, NEW YORK, 1967
During Len’s youth in the 1950s, “American eyes looked skyward.” He described how his father had taken him out into the backyard one night to watch the first satellite, the USSR’s Sputnik, orbiting high above their house. Like all kids his age, he had grown up with a steady stream of science fiction movies that featured flying saucers and aliens.
“It was not unusual for kids in the fifties to point, in jest, to a distant high-flying jet and say, ‘Look, a flying saucer,’” he said.
“I never took any of this seriously until I read an article in Reader’s Digest.”
Reader’s Digest is a family magazine devoted to fiction and nonfiction of general interest.
“As I recall,” Len continued, “the feature news story was typical of the times. It discussed some reported flying saucer sightings somewhere, and while it quoted the witnesses, most of the issue was devoted to official explanations of why the witnesses were mistaken.”
Len’s childhood corresponds with the time frame of the United States Air Force program Project Blue Book. Blue Book began in 1952 and ended in 1969. One of the declassified goals of Blue Book was to study UFOs but also to run a program of propaganda that included a campaign to debunk UFO reports and the people who reported them. Within the declassified documents are references to the use of media and the press to carry out these goals. It could very well be the case that the article Len read was a product of Blue Book meant to discredit reports of UFOs.
Despite the article’s attempt to discount the UFO sightings, Len was intrigued by the reports of the witnesses.
“Something these witnesses said somehow got through to me. Perhaps I was old enough—I was about age thirteen when I read it—or maybe it was the matter-of-fact way the witnesses described and stuck to their stories that made me think and realize, that night in bed, that, of course, life elsewhere in this universe makes perfect sense and even makes more sense than the possibility that humanity is alone in this unimaginably vast space.”
Len went on to read much of the growing literature on UFOs, kept magazines and cutout articles in a notebook, wrote high school term papers about the phenomenon, and became a self-proclaimed “UFO nut.” Three years later, Len would witness the UFO that would change his life.
In the summer of 1967, Len headed out the door of his family’s house to visit his friend TJ and to sleep out in his yard.
“It was around 6:00 P.M. on a warm summer evening, still light out. I was sixteen years old. I told my father where I was heading, and I specifically said I was going to look for flying saucers,” he said. “I was half joking, of course, and had never before mentioned anything about looking for flying saucers. But searching for UFOs was indeed our teenage purpose that night. While my father didn’t respond in kind to the levity, he certainly heard me, because he waved me off with a flip of his hand.”
TJ had called the night before and told Len that some strange things had been happening in the skies around his home. Len said TJ was excited, even agitated, and had wanted Len to come and check out the situation with him.
“When I arrived, and in subsequent communications, TJ told me he’d ‘seen some orange and green flashes of light’ immediately outside his bedroom window.” He said something seemed very close, right outside his window, but it was not lightning or heat lightning. TJ told Len that “he sensed he was being observed.”
Len and TJ lived in an area of New York called the “Burned-Over district.” The Burned-Over district is named for being burned over with religious revivals during North American’s Second Great Awakening of religion during the nineteenth century. The large area of green land and lush trees rim the shores of the Lakes Erie and Ontario, and it has been a place of radical spiritual innovation. It is the location of the development of spiritualist, abolitionist, and new Christian movements, including movements led by women in groups such as the Shakers. Both Frederick Douglass, famed abolitionist, and Susan B. Anthony, national advocate for women’s rights, lived and worked in the Rochester, New York, area during the mid-1800s. The region is known for social movements that paved the way for several new religious movements, which remain part of the North American landscape. Mormonism’s founder, Joseph Smith Jr., related how he was led by an angel, Moroni, to discover the golden plates that would inform The Book of Mormon in Palmyra, New York.
Innovation appears to be an ongoing character of the people who inhabit this land. In the eighteenth century and earlier, it was the site for the peace treaty and oral constitution developed by the Haudenosaunee, or the great Six Nations of indigenous Americans who speak Iroquois. Their Great Law of Peace, also known as Gayanashagowa, the Iroquois treaty, came about through a mutual desire to avoid war and to live in peace. It was so effective that it informed North American colonists like Benjamin Franklin, who shared it with his peers, and it has been recognized by the United States as having influenced the colonists’ revolutionary work. Revolution, innovation, ferment—these are the qualities that characterize the place where Len and TJ would have their teenage worldviews rocked.
As Len and TJ surveyed the sky around the house the evening before they saw the UFO, Len saw “fleeting faint flashes of a pink-orange glow inside a nearby cumulus cloud, as if something were hiding and surreptitiously moving along within the cottony fluffs.”
Many years later, when Len watched Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, he was struck by a scene in which a UFO hides inside a cloud as it approaches a woman’s house to abduct her child.
“The quick orangish flashes inside the clouds that Spielberg portrayed were distinctly and eerily similar, almost identical, to what I saw that night on TJ’s garage roof,” Len said. “In fact, Spielberg’s depiction was so authentically accurate to me that I snuggled down deeper into my movie seat to better appreciate his informed and skillful directorial efforts.”
Len described how the prediction made in jest to his father—that he was going to look for a UFO—ironically came true.
“On the night we saw the UFO, four of us settled into our sleeping bags on the front lawn of TJ’s house,” he said.
At first, Len’s friends goofed around and even played a trick on him. One of them focused a flashlight beam onto different parts of the lawn in quick dizzying bursts. “What’s that?” they’d call out, feigning fear. “It’s a UFO beam!” someone warned. Len finally caught them, laughed about the friendly joke they’d played on him, and in time the boys fell asleep. But Len stayed awake and gazed at the starry night sky.
“My eyes widened at about 2:00 A.M., when I saw a huge orange sphere with fiery flames fly into my view, emerging over the edge of the garage roof. It slowly floated—’glided’ may be a better word—parallel to the horizon, with no downward trajectory whatsoever. It was silent, no sound at all. I’ve always described it as approximately the size of a high full moon, and it had a little white star-sized orb following frantically, seemingly abandoned, in its trail.
“Its shape was spherical in the front, with perhaps a slight tapering off toward the rear. It could’ve been acorn-shaped, with the larger end leading the way, but its true form was somewhat obscured by the brilliant flames. The flames, primarily red, orange, and yellow, started just behind the rounded orangish front and ended near the back, forming a flaring fiery tail. The completely silent object was moving so slowly, so deliberately, that I never had the sense the flames were caused by atmospheric friction of any kind. This was not a meteorite or free-falling piece of space debris. It seemed more as though the object had an internal problem, a chemical or material fire of some kind, and the little white orb had been left behind outside, following and trying to help, maybe maneuvering to get back inside.
“My recollection is, and I’ve thought and calculated long and hard about this, that it was traveling at an altitude of about two hundred feet—maybe less—and it seemed no more than thirty yards away from us horizontally. It was close, breathtakingly close. It appeared from the west-northwest and traveled in an east-southeasterly direction.
“I was astonished,” he said, “It was spectacular.”
Len kicked off his sleeping bag and shouted everyone awake.
“TJ later told me that when he first opened his eyes, the UFO looked like it was stopped in the sky right above him. As the object slowly passed by, probably fifteen seconds after my first sight, I ran without really thinking toward the front door of the house. Some good-citizen instinct seized me, and I was going to phone the police to report it. But as I approached the door, a calm, rational thought entered in my mind: Stop. What’s the point? Turn around and continue watching. Enjoy it.
“And so I did. I was mesmerized as this UFO slowly continued its blazing way until it was out of view. The entire sighting lasted approximately thirty seconds, possibly a bit longer. I savored the sight of that moon-sized orange ball of flames floating deliberately and leisurely through the sky, like a cosmic torch, a beacon illuminating the darkness.”
During the span of about six hours, the very period in which Len and his friends saw their UFO, more than thirty people in nearby towns and villages reported sightings. Their descriptions, except for one, were consistent and similar to what Len and his friends saw. The Upstate New York UFOs of the summer of 1967 constitute a “UFO flap.” A flap occurs when UFOs have been reported by different people at different times within a short time span and at different locations within the same geographical region.
These reports were made to the local sheriff’s offices and then reported in several different articles within ten days by the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle and other news outlets. Of those who witnessed the UFO that Len and his friends saw, two were Brockport policemen and two others were Monroe County sheriff’s deputies. One article specifically named seven employees of the Lucidol Division at Geneseo in Livingston County, who witnessed the same UFO that Len saw. One of the Brockport witnesses was police officer Dave Martens, who was Len’s basketball coach and physical education teacher. He worked for the police department during the summers.
The sighting that was not consistent with the other reports was that of a park security guard named Sidney Zipkin. While Zipkin was on night duty, four hours before Len’s sighting, he came upon a “mysterious craft in the parking lot” off North Main Street in the town of Churchville, which is ten miles from Brockport. Zipkin turned his truck headlights on the craft and then saw “two midget-like men, dressed in shiny, black uniforms, run past the truck and board the saucer.”3 When the Democrat and Chronicle first reported the flap, Zipkin’s was the first sighting to be reported. Although the report seemed dubious, apparently police and reporters in the 1960s took them seriously enough to write up the report and send it to Washington, DC, to the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP). The newspaper report, unsurprisingly, emphasized the ludicrous nature of his story, yet also noted that Zipkin’s supervisor said he was a good employee. Zipkin was well aware that his report was unbelievable.
“You can laugh at what I’m telling you—in fact, I used to laugh myself when people said they saw these things,” the newspaper quoted Zipkin, “but I saw this with my own eyes and I swear to God as a witness that I saw what I saw.”4
A few days later, the Democrat and Chronicle reported on NICAP’s initial review of the flap. The headline read, “UFO Reports Investigated” with a subhead reading “Zipkin Is Doubted.” The article states that “Zipkin’s celebrated flying-saucer report has been sent to Washington, for scrutiny by top officials of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP). But indications are that his story … lacks credibility.”
The article also referred to the sightings of other aerial phenomena by Len and multiple witnesses: “The NICAP placed more credibility in a recurring report that a UFO passed over the area about four hours after Zipkin reported his sighting to deputies. It [NICAP] said: ‘The sighting of an object traversing the sky in an easterly direction at 2:08 a.m., August 1, has been confirmed by over 30 witnesses who viewed the object from widely-separated vantage points. The many independent descriptions of this brilliant object concur.’ NICAP ruled out a bolide—an exploding or exploded meteor or meteorite.”5
