Lexington UFO, April 13, 2011

From the UFO Disclosure Countdown Clock blog comes this MUFON file, allegedly depicting a UFO photographed Over Lexington KY, 4-13-11.


If you look at how sharply in-focus the UFO itself is, as compared to the blurrier tree foliage, however, then we have a problem. The utility pole in the foreground is in focus, the tree branches beyond it are not, and yet the UFO that is presumably far beyond is crystal clear. I'm inclined to say "photoshop fail" here.

Either that, or what we are seeing here is a very tiny object flying around in or near the same field of focus as the utility pole, which I suppose would mean it could be some crazy new super-small spy drone about the size of a milk lid or a Stridex pad or a guitar pick. Or maybe it is a milk lid. Or a Stridex pad. Or a guitar pick.


I dunno. What do you think?

UFO Blitz in the Bluegrass Triangle

Found in the labyrinthine recesses of my archives: a newspaper clipping from a 1978 National Enquirer, exact date indeterminate. Says here that central Kentucky was reportedly experiencing a "UFO blitz" back in those long-gone days of disco and punk.


What exactly did this blitz consist of? According to the article, one of the incidents involved a pair of Madison County firemen called upon to put out a grass fire that turned out to be a "blazing red UFO" - which they then proceeded to follow across Richmond in hot pursuit for over an hour. One of the firemen, Robert Murphy, described it as a "classic" flying-saucer shaped spaceship.


Another case was a preacher and his wife who, and I quote, "encountered a gigantic, dazzling UFO on the way to church." Elmer Hardy, then 73 years old and pastor of Bybee United Methodist Church, said they were driving to Sunday night services when the UFO approached them head-on and hovered above them. "It was about 10 stories high and 20 stories wide, with a zillion lights on it," Hardy is quoted as saying.

Then there's 16-year-old Terry Kirby from Irvine, who the Enquirer says was chopping wood when suddenly a glowing oval-shaped UFO descended upon him. Kirby had the quick wits to run in the the house, grab a polaroid camera, and snap a shot. The article also quotes other Irvine citizens like police chief Marcus Cole, who says there have been many eyewitness of flying saucers in Irvine; and Guy Hatfield, publisher of Citizen Voice & Times, is quoted as defending the experiencers: "These were all solid citizens, with no reason to say it unless they saw one".

Another Irvine sighting report was from a Kentucky State Trooper, Jim Whitaker. He spotted a car-sized UFO with red/white/blue/green pulsating lights hovering over a field in Irvine on "February 19" (presumably 1978). "Whitaker, a veteran of 1,500 flying hours in Navy helicopters, said the craft definitely wasn't a helicopter or airplane." He chased the car for two hours in the Estill County night, and made a very interesting observation: "When an aircraft approached it, the intensity of its lights would die down... and once the aircraft was clear, it would light up again!"


The article, although rather well-written for a tabloid rag, fails to mention the presence of the Blue Grass Army Depot at the epicenter of this "Bluegrass Triangle" of UFO activity they posit.

More Kentucky Triangular UFOs

The first Kentucky UFO reported to NUFORC in 2011 comes from Harrodsburg. Unfortunately the entry is appallingly short, but it does fall in line with the ongoing spate of previously reported triangular UFOs statewide and nationwide. (I may have even sighted one myself.)

"Bright Triangular lights seen over Harrodsburg, KY.

We were pulling onto our road and looked up and saw a bright triangular shaped light move very fast across the sky. At first, we thought it was in the rear view mirror, but then, we realized that it was well below the rear view mirror (In reference to the windshield). Then it went out of sight."

Meanwhile, the widespread sightings of these triple-pointed enigmas continue. In November 2010, a triangular UFO "the size of a football field" allegedly was seen in California. The image above, included here to simply illustrate the phenomena, was posted to discussion about the California incident but apparently is not of that UFO either.

And over at MUFON's casefiles, we find no less than ten new UFO reports filed in January. And sure enough, there's a triangular one:

"While standing out back smoking I notice two bright lights off in the distance heading my direction. It took a few minutes to get close enough to make out what it was. After a couples more minutes I decided to run in and yell for my girlfriend to come look at it. Stupid me never told her to grab the camcorder! She was so excited and kept talking asking what it was. I asked her shush and listen. I'm hard of hearing and could not hear any sound it was making. I asked her if she could hear anything and she stated " I hear a low humming sound. " at that point we walk to our side gate to see if we could get the neighbors to come out and look. They had a house full of people and couldn't hear me yell. The triangle was right over top of us. It was so big and bright and very low. I could have threw a rock and hit it. My girlfriend tried to get her cell phone camera to work and couldn't. She ran to the other side of the house to see if she could get the other neighbor to see it but she was leaving. We watched this thing for a good 15 minutes as it floated across the sky very slow from South East to North West. It was headed right toward the love's truck stop out to interstate 75. What I would say was the front of the thing had two lights like head lights. The under side had three lights in each corner. Around those three lights were smaller lights. The smaller lights were in a circle around those three. Across what I say was the back had two flashing lights. I'm sure someone else had to see this thing because it was to big and bright. I'm positive it was bigger than the lot our house is on."

The report doesn't give a specific location, but I know Love's Truckstop well - it's at the Boonesboro exit off I-75.

Though I remain open-minded about the report, I have to assume this person is being somewhat hyperbolic when he says it was close enough to him to have hit it with a rock.

Blue Moon of Kentucky

Last night was said to be, according to those who say such things, a "blue moon". Whatever that means. There are at least four different competing memes for just what constitutes this "blue moon" they speak of, and none of them are particularly satisfying to me. Apparently much of the misconceptions about it go back to a 1946 article in Sky & Telescope that was utterly, completely wrong - which just goes to show you can't always trust the "experts".


I've already mused on this blog about the various weirdnesses involving blue moons, blue people, aliens, and Elvis, but this latest spate of media attention to the "blue moon" concept has my coffee-oiled gears turning again regarding Kentucky's peculiar obsession with blueness. Of course, what comes to mind first are those ubiquitous Kentucky Wildcats of the University of Kentucky, with their slogans like "Go Big Blue!" and "I Bleed Blue". And much of our state's blue fetish is actually about misplaced blueness - blue moons aren't really blue, and neither is bluegrass.

Blue people seem to be on the rise, culturally, what with Blue Man Group and Avatar. But for over a billion people on Earth, it's nothing new: Krishna has been predominantly portrayed as blue-skinned in the Hindu religion.


But it's the idea of blue light that interests me most, as far as our discussions about Kentucky go. Reported nocturnal sightings of eerie blue lights - sometimes called "ghost lights" - in the Kentucky mountains have been shrugged off mostly as "swamp gas" (what would skeptics do without this crutch?) but on the other hand, it is possible that in earlier times, the many burning springs and natural gas vents dotting our state's landscape burned with a blue flame.

Kentucky's curiously-named "Moonshine" also burns with a blue flame.

Many of the UFOs seen around here are blue in color, such as in this report of blue lights in the sky above Fort Campbell (although the testimony doesn't make a whole lot of sense). Coincidentally, Fort Campbell was once home to an elite corps of secret Special Forces known as Blue Light.

Then there's two different "Lady in Blue" haunting legends - one is said to haunt the Seelbach Hotel in Louisville, and a similar one dwells in the Keen Johnson Ballroom at Eastern Kentucky University (Consult your copy of Weird Kentucky for more info on both). And maybe the "Gray Lady" of Liberty Hall is actually a very pale blue. Perhaps blue just happens to be the basic color of mystical energy, or "life force", or whatever you want to call it if you believe in that sort of thing.


Interestingly, although blue has an extremely short wavelength, the receptors in the human eye are specially geared to detect blue to a greater degree.

Apocalypse Not Now

A recent announcement spells bad news for those of us who, like Kentuckian John Kehne, were turning the 2012 doomsday hysteria into a business; and for those of us who, like myself, were actually looking forward to the end of the world, or a pole shift, or a visit from the giant mutant stargoat, or the Big Electron, or whatever the heck was supposed to happen.

Geraldo Aldana of UC Santa Barbara has thrown some cold water on our fires of doom: according to his analysis of the Mayan calendar, 2012 is not the correct end-date. The accepted conversions of dates from Mayan to the modern calendar may be off by as much as 50 or 100 years, says Aldana.

Oops.

But who knows - maybe regardless of whether the interpretations of the Mayan calendar are accurate or not, some sort of intergalactic things with wings, or the Annunaki, or Nibiru, or Planet X, or some rogue comet or something, will show up ready to pummel our paradigm anyhow. Let's hope so - I have a bottle of fine wine I've been saving for the end of civilization and it would be a real bummer to end up drinking it while sitting around watching Seinfeld reruns and doing the laundry.

Louisville UFOs, 8-28-07

Not sure what to make of this YouTube video. The jet plane leaving contrails is nothing out of the ordinary (unless you see it as a chemtrail double-sprayer) but there are two different shiny objects flying around it. I say "flying around it" meaning from the camera's point of view, of course - they could actually be nowhere near the plane. We can't judge size without knowing distance, and vice versa.

Louisville Egg UFO Redux

We reported on an old Courier-Journal article about the Louisville Egg UFO of 1993 recently, and as with most things, it turns out there's more to the story. Our friend Dan Brandenburg contacted us to say:

I very much remember this story. In fact, the Weekly World News tabloid ran it as a front page cover story some months after it took place (it would be awesome to find a copy of it). The Weekly World News story distorted everything a bit and claimed a massive dog fight over the skies of Louisville. Their version of the story was awesome.

However......the real story came out a few days later when a guy stepped forward and told how we was showing his wife how to make miniature home made hot air balloons (I.e., chinese lanterns). Apparently he had made these in the Boy Scouts as a child and thought it'd be fun to make another. He launched the balloon about the time a police chopper was near. As the chopper approached the balloon, the wind from the rotors would push the balloon away. The fireballs were supposedly melting plastic.

Interesting, to say the least. I'd be curious to know what the cops themselves thought of this revelation, and if they still stuck to their story. The original report claimed the object "literally flew circles around the helicopter, even though the fliers say they were moving at speeds approaching 100 mph", and that doesn't really sound consistent with balloon behavior.

The bit about the fireballs being shot out from the main object being "melting plastic", I don't know. It all sounds a bit specious, but on the other hand, the idea of a basketball-sized UFO sounds pretty unlikely as well.

Louisville Egg UFO of 1993

From the Courier-Journal, March 4, 1993:

Two Jefferson County air unit police officers — described by their lieutenant as "solid guys" — swear they had a two-minute dogfight with a UFO during a routine helicopter patrol Friday night.

Two officers on the ground said they, too, spotted the object. The UFO — a glowing pear-shaped object about the size of a basketball — literally flew circles around the helicopter, even though the fliers say they were moving at speeds approaching 100 mph.

In one blinding moment when both craft were hurtling toward each other, the UFO shot three baseball-size fireballs out of its middle, all three officers said. The fireballs fizzled into nothing. Officers Kenny Graham and Kenny Downs haven't talked much about their Friday night flight over General Electric Appliance Park because they fear few will believe them. But they are convinced they weren't hallucinating.

Lt. David Pope, who was roused out of bed at 12:30 Saturday morning by a call from the startled officers, attested to their sanity and sincerity. "These guys are totally solid guys," Pope said. "There's no doubt in my mind there was something out there."

Officer Mike Smith, in his squad car below, said he saw the object for only about a minute. But he confirmed the UFO shot three fireballs into the air and then disappeared.

Multiple UFOs over Ft. Wright

A recent submission to MUFON - Case #23336 - tells of a multiple-UFO sighting over Ft.Wright on May 15, 2010:

I am hoping someone else saw this Saturday night. I was at a birthday party and around 10:30 We were all on the front porch of a my friends house in Ft. Wright Kentucky and someone there pointed I think it was the southwest direction and we saw hundreds of pulsating lights going across the sky. It looked like a plane would look at night but there were hundreds of them. It was a cloudy night so they were definitely traveling under the clouds pretty slowly across the horizon. We lost sight after they traveled behind the treeline across the street. After the majority of them were behind the treeline we would see a couple here and there trailing behind. I have never in my life seen anything like that before. I have been searching on the internet to see if I can find anything on it but have not had any luck. I e-mailed the Cincinnati Observatory but have not gotten a response from them either. I know I am not crazy. Everyone else at the party saw it too. If anyone has any answers, please let me know. It is driving me nuts. I tried to take a video with my phone but it did not work. Thanks for your time.

After scouring the internet for other reports of this incident, however, I found nothing - other than other bloggers talking about this same MUFON post. In such a densely populated area, surely someone else saw the phenomena and can step forward?

Solar Bag Creates UFO Scare

A number of people saw an unidentified flying object over the city of Berea a few days ago. Thanks to the spooky goings-on at the Depot, weird things in the skies aren't that big a deal, but this time one of the puzzled witnesses was none other than Scott Powell, editor of the Berea Citizen.

Powell and his neighbors watched the strange wiggling, undulating UFO for about 10 minutes. Channel 18 News quoted him as saying, "It looked like the Gateway Arch in St. Louis had come up and was flying in the air, because it had that arch shape to it and it was kind of a metallic - it had a shine to it."

As it turned out, the tubular floater wasn't an alien nor a cruise missile and it wasn't even a secret government project. It was merely a giant 50-foot-long solar bag that a local schoolteacher had released into the air as part of a class demonstration of solar energy. Solar bags act like helium balloons (some have risen to over 120,000 feet) but are filled with nothing but ordinary air, heated via convection by the sun's rays.

Fireball in the Sky

Last night I was sitting on my front porch gazing at the sky just in time to see a huge fireball blazing down into the distance and disappearing. I was pleased to have seen such an especially large and close meteor, but thought nothing more about it until this morning.

Then this came to my attention. The skies in northern Illinois lit up last night when a meteor apparently created a strange and enormous ball of fire that flashed for but a second.

See a time-lapse gif of the event here. The lines in the sky are apparently unrelated jet trails.

NBC says the fireball was reported seen from faraway points such as Milwaukee and St. Louis around 10pm last night. I saw no explosive fireball, but I did see the mother of all meteors at right about that time, so I have to wonder if there was more than one, and if what I saw wasn't the same one seen in Illinois. It has also been suggested the phenomena could be space junk re-entering the Earth's atmosphere rather than a meteor.

See video of the fireball over Wisconsin here. This is very similar to what I saw here in Louisville, but I saw no explosion-like flash.

Anyone else see this thing?

Cylindrical UFO in Florence

From the Latest UFO Sightings blog:

This video is of what I think is a UFO spotted in Florence Ky on Mt. Zion Road. This was about 11:00 PM at night and very cold 19 degrees outside. Several people saw this and you had to look straight up to see it. In the video, it is very dark, but what you are looking for is 3 square lights about the center of the screen. The object in the video stayed stationary, the movement is from me holding the camera." (Author: battlebuggy @ youtube)

Click through to see two different YouTube videos of the incident.

Metallic Sphere Outside Plane

The MUFON case files have a recent entry by someone who experienced not only a UFO aboard a commercial airliner en route to Louisville, but apparently a case of mass hypnosis as well:

I noticed a sphere about the size of a compact car approximately 200 feet off the wing of the plane.

It was dull in color. An unpolished metal nearly exact in the image of a VERY large ball bearing, it was perfect in it's spherical shape. Always looking for a logical, scientific explanation to anything paranormal first,I assumed it was a tiny bubble in the glass of the window or ice on the glass of the window. I studied it for about a minute and was astonished when i witnessed it move behind a small cloud.

I immediately looked down the aisle and noticed many other passengers were looking outside the window at the object as well. I looked at the object again and noticed it never swayed, dove or maneuvered at all. It was very static in it's position. This made me skeptical. How can any craft fly alongside another craft and never move, in any manner from it's present position? Anything in flight is always fighting the physics of the atmosphere every second i.e. barometric pressure, wind, air pockets, friction, etc...

I looked for an explanation. Maybe some strange tether to a weather balloon or refraction of light on the window? There was no physical explanation. It was what it was. My mind raced as I tried to understand how something so non-aerodynamic could possibly create lift. I looked for some sort of glow or exhaust or any type of radiation to explain it's terrestrial origin. Nothing. It sat at one position with no presence of any mechanical movement. It appeared as if it was observing us, though there were no visual ports or windows.

I didn't take my eyes off of the object as I knew I was witnessing something extraordinary and oddly beautiful. I, for the first time in my life was truly in awe. We traveled into a thick cloud formation. I witnessed the sphere pass through a patch of thick cloud and never resurface. as soon as it appeared it was gone.

Here is where things got weird. I looked down the aisle to hopefully catch eye contact with someone who was witnessing this event and could discuss this. What I witnessed next shook me to my core. All other witnesses, approximately 20 plus, just leaned back into their seats and continued reading their books, newspapers and laptops as if nothing happened. Why was I the only person who felt as if I just witnessed a magnificent moment? Whether it was a higher intelligence or something we created, it was a beautiful moment.

I reflected on this for several minutes up to the final hour of our flight. Once we reached our terminal,I had totally forgotten the entire experience. How could this happen? How could I forget an experience that shook my entire core and being? Several years later I started to slowly recall my experience. Why did the other passengers not even have any sign of expression on their face after the incident? Why did I totally forget the entire experience until many years later?

Orange UFOs in McCracken County

From MUFON, by way of Billy Booth:

01-04-10 - On our way home from Paducah to Mayfield, I noticed six orange lights gliding slowly in the sky just off the side of the highway. The lights appeared to be moving at a slow rate of speed. My wife, two children and I observed these lights for approximately 5 minutes or more.

Several other cars pulled over on the side of the highway in that area as well. The lights slowly faded out of sight one at a time, beginning with the one at the tip of the chevron and ending with the last light. I was able to take the picture with my cell phone shortly before the lights started disappearing.

The person filing the MUFON report doesn't say at what point between Paducah and Mayfield they were when the incident occurred, but most of the trip would be in McCracken County, and they most likely took Highway 131 South.

The sighting has great similarity to two others that recently happened in states bordering Kentucky. In, Youngstown, OH about a month prior, on December 5, 2009:

I noticed five or six orange lighted craft in formation traveling from the ground up. I pulled over to get a better look and realized that there was more like 9-12 of them. The lowest was at about 700 feet and the highest was about 2500 feet. At one point the craft had stopped and then they started to move again and climbed to the highest elevation (2500 feet) and disappeared one by one until they were all gone.

And in Lenoir City, TN, on January 3, 2010, the day before the Kentucky sighting:

I was getting a drink from the kitchen and looked out the window when I saw two orange/yellow lights in the eastern sky. They stayed in the same spot for 8 to 10 minutes. I got my camera and started to take pictures. Then the lights started to move left behind a line of trees, and then moved up over the trees and back down behind them again. They were out of sight for at least 5 to 7 minutes.

Covington's Futuro House

The Futuro House was a short-lived fad during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Okay, maybe it wasn't even a fad, because they only ever built 96 of these things.

With 525 square feet of living space, the Futuro House could supposedly accommodate 8 people, its press releases said. Hmmmm... maybe, but only if you're cozy and unclaustrophobic. These things seem more like children's playhouses to me. While it lacks the size and majesty of Berea's Spaceship School, it still possesses a certain space-opera charm.

The official reason given for the failure of Futuro is that the rising price of plastic during the mid-1970s oil crisis made production of the domed domiciles too expensive. Personally, I think the real reason is simply that no one wanted to live in a tiny plastic space pod.

Of the 96 Futuro houses originally sold, Wikipedia estimates only 60% still exist. We're fortunate to have one of them still intact in Kentucky, on Wright Street in Covington. See it on Google Maps Street View here.

MMX

Ten percent of the 21st century is already over. Think on that.

The arrival of a new decade, drifting out of the oughts and coming into the teens, has me thinking long and hard about - what else? - extraterrestrial contact.

Never mind that we're already swimming in a sea of invisible Lovecraftian beasties brushing up against our reality (you probably think I'm joking, don't you?) and never mind that certain microscopic critters most likely actually came here from interstellar space. I'm speaking here of more tangible, wrap-their-lunchhooks-around-you kind of aliens, which may or may not be little green men or Autogyro-piloting entities or what have you. (Some might even tell you to "Drop the Tunug" if you don't block their voices out with your Thought Screen Helmet.)

The tagline for the film version of Arthur C. Clarke's 2010 is "The Year We Make Contact". Given that all my high-weirdness detector readings are off the scale these days, I wouldn't be surprised if this isn't indeed the year that all humans finally realize (as John Titor once predicted) that we have not been living in the kind of world we've grown up thinking we're in.

With the upcoming full-throttle-firing of the Large Hadron Collider this year, some paranoid nuts - in other words, my dearest friends and associates - believe an interdimensional portal is going to be opened as a result. And something from somewhere else could end up here.

Perhaps it already has.




Our ally JLK's Ending Sentences With Ellipses blog has a great feature about the conversation between Helen Mirren and Roy Scheider about Kentucky in the 2010 film.

But when Roy says we play very good basketball, does he mean the Cats or the Cards? Most likely the Cats. But you never know. He may also have meant both, in a general, all-encompassing, Neutral Zone kinda sense.

Anyway, I'm glad to see that they still drink Kentucky bourbon in the future. Or I would be, that is, if the future were not right now.

Spiral Dreams

You just never know what the public will submit next to MUFON's UFO Case Files. The most recent example in the Kentucky reports comes from a man named Joe, who didn't actually see a UFO, but had a weird dream:

"On the night of Nov. 22, 2009, I had a most bizzare dream of being in a place and going outside and telepathically being told to lay down on the ground and look up. As I did, A large square shaped sort of opened up the sky, a sort of portal I suppose. At that time I saw inside of the openeing two discs which counter rotated and passed through each other. They came to a point where they would reverse course and repeat. I saw some stars in the background of this opening but they were of a different resolution than the others that were not in the opening in the dark sky. Immediately thereafter, a large spiral formed inside of the "portal" and another smaller spiral came from the center of this larger one and came to just above where I was laying on the ground. The reason I am reporting this is because on the early morning of December 9, 2009 there was a similar sighting over Norway that was said to be a Russian Bulava rocket launch which had failed creating the two spirals. When I saw this, I was intrigued and actually quite stunned because, it was basically, a reverse of what I had dreamed. I felt it was a strange synchronicity of sorts. In my dream there was the "opening" in the sky first followed by the large spiral and then the smaller spiral. In Norway, it was reported in reverse. It was first the small blue spiral, then the large spiral, then the black hole looking image as the spiral dissipated. Not a conventional sighting, but something strange has happened and I feel it is beyond statistical probability to be a coincidence. I was so taken by my dream, that I entered the details into my dream journal immediately upon waking. When the Norway event occurred I called my father right away to tell him about the spiral in Norway and then to read my description from my dream journal. Additionally, and unrelated, my two daughters witnessed twice int the same morning, roughly one week ago, a definite ufo which my daughter snapped a nice photo of with her iphone. I will ask her to submit it and fill out a report. I just happened to stumble onto this site from Google and felt compelled to report my incident. Although not a conventional "sighting", I felt it had a definite connection to extraworldly phenomena. Kindly, Joe."

Now usually, I'd regard "I had a crazy dream" posts on a UFO sighting board as Junk Data, but there's a lot going on with these weird spirals in the sky lately, much more than meets the eye. Enough high weirdness is in the air right now that I'm willing to give Joe some benefit of the doubt.

The official explanation is that it's just smoke from a Russian rocket that spiralled out of control, but many people aren't buying that explanation. And on the same evening as the mysterious Norway Spiral incident, there was a giant pyramid over Moscow. Some say it's related to the recent mysterious doings at CERN and HAARP. (Not to mention the Russian equivalent of HAARP, known as SURA.)

And there are still other similar phenomena going on right now, such as this and this and this.

The Legend of the Little People

Kyle Lovern's new book Appalachian Case Study: UFO Sightings, Alien Encounters & Unexplained Phenomena, Volume 2 is hot off the presses! While Volume 1 focused entirely on UFO incidents in Lovern's home state of West Virginia, Volume 2 goes outside that state's borders to examine cases related to the Appalachian region of bordering states, including Kentucky.

The Appalachian region was once the ancient homeland of the Cherokee civilization (as well as other tribes) for thousands of years before Scottish and Irish immigrants settled into its mountains in the 1700s.

The book's recounting of Kentucky UFO lore is well done, but what really piqued my curiosity was Lovern's analysis of the Yunwi Tsunsdi legends passed down in Cherokee culture since antiquity.

The Yunwi Tsunsdi are miniature beings described in ancient Cherokee lore as sometimes being spirits and sometimes being diminutive humanoids about two feet tall. According to the legends, Lovern says, these beings may have different types of appearances and may be of three or four different types. Descriptions of them range from kindly but mischievous to somewhat more malicious tricksters. They reportedly have the power to confuse humans' minds, and to turn invisible at will.


Lovern wonders aloud, "Were the "little people" known to the Cherokee related to UFOs, inter-dimensional mysteries or some other unusual phenomena?" and points out that many Indian tribes throughout North America have legends of beings from other planets or from other dimensions.

I also find it interesting that my own Irish ancestors who came to Kentucky had "little people" legends of their own - the Leprechaun, the Clurichaun, and the Faerie. Not to mention Sprites, Hobs, Korrigans, Pixies, Elves, Imps, Brownies, Goblins, Gremlins, Boggarts, and Lubber Fiends.

Kingston Advice

I often bemoan how the internet is increasingly cluttered with junk data, and here's a prime example. Check out this Topix post made last weekend, advising us of some alleged paranormal phenomena described in only the vaguest possible terms:

Lots of strange things have been happening around the area of kingston. Strange lights in the sky and weird shadow-like things seen moving on the streets and through peoples yards. It seems like it came out of nowhere. I first noticed it a couple of weeks ago. No one around here is talking about it though.

"Lots of strange things?" Okay, so what are they? "Strange lights in the sky and weird shadow-like things"? Well, there's two. Two isn't "lots". Why were the lights "strange"? They didn't say. Who, exactly, saw these "shadow-like things", and can they give us a better description? They didn't say. Did the poster see these events firsthand? They didn't say. And if not, how did they hear about it if "no one around here is talking about it"?

(Am I some sort of jerk for wanting people to actually communicate if they're going to communicate?)

Fortunately, one of the few - very few - useful things about the interactivity of the internet is that sometimes a post of useless rumors can lead to others chiming in with more detailed reports:

I'm glad I'm not the only one who has noticed. I live in the Kingston area (Bobtown) and it's been going on for quite a while now, actually.

There's been a few curious incidents (I've seen quite a few shooting stars or what appeared to be shooting stars over the course of the course of the past year and a half) but on Friday October 23rd, 2009 around 6:00 to 6:30 p.m. sometime far before the sun had started to set and dusk started to settle in, I observed a strange white light in the Eastern sky that seemed to be located somewhere in between Smith Lane and the end of Blue Lick Road. It looked just like a bright, white star in the daylight, moving quite slowly. I observed this peculiar anomaly for about a minute and a half before it finally vanished behind a distant tree line. I haven't seen it since.

Well, okay, this is better. Now we have a time, a date, and an actual location. Even if the story turns out to be nothing, at least the post seems made in good faith, and is real data, not junk data.

Unfortunately, the poster doesn't tell us what is such a "peculiar anomaly" about a point of light moving slowly thru the sky at dusk. The poster doesn't say why he doesn't believe it was a plane, which is what it sounds like.

Another poster adds:

I for one know that there are strange things happening in the Kingston Area, i live beside Kingston Elementary School, i see a lot of bright lights in the sky in the kings trace sub. There have also been people saying that their car alarms are going off at the same time almost every night. I dont know whats going on, but it's creepy. And if i'm not mistaken that area was a battlefield.

Need more info. Lots more info. It's the 21st century and the sky is, at any given time, filled with planes, biplanes, jets, military craft, drones, helicopters, autogyros, satellites, meteor showers, hot air balloons, weather balloons, and the Heene family.

I see what are essentially less-than-100%-identified lights in the sky every day. For it to be something really strange or weird or spooky or creepy, it had better contain a bat-frog-man or have a pulsing light and throbbing hum. It better look like 2001's monolith, or freak out an entire airport, or contain aliens who tell you to "Drop the Tunug!"

MADAR's UFO Data

From 1970 to 1991, the MADAR Project proposed a connection between UFO events and magnetic anomalies, and sought to document them. MADAR, which stands for "Multiple Anomaly Detection & Automated Recording"), was based in Mt. Vernon, Indiana. Because of its geographical proximity to Kentucky, a number of events in their case files took place here or near here:

October 11, 1973 - In Laurel, Indiana (about 40 miles Northwest of the Kentucky border), a report was received of "a classic flying saucer with a sound like a swarm of bees was witnessed at tree-top level by five persons for three minutes." (Writer Jeff Wells, incidentally, has written much about bee-swarm buzzing sounds being associated with Out-of-body experiences, UFOs and Marian Apparition phenomena.)

July 15, 1976 - At 10:06pm, MADAR tape-recorded an anomalous 4-pulse, 4-second disturbance, radiation 13 cpm. At 10:45pm, a mysterious green light filled a Bellevue, KY woman's bedroom through the window. According to her report in MADAR's files, "She cautiously peeked through the curtain and watched in bewilderment as the green light retreated, 'just like a liquid being drawn up through a straw'. In a matter of seconds the light was "siphoned" up into a low hovering object that was shaped like an inverted saucer a couple of hundred feet away."

A few days later, MADAR starting receiving UFO reports from Mayfield, KY (85 miles Southwest of Mt. Vernon, IN): "Someone had phoned in a report to the Kentucky State Police at Hancock County. They thought they had seen an aircraft "going down". This had happened numerous times. I immediately contacted the Control Tower at Dress-Regional Airport. No aircraft was ever reported missing or crashed."

May 30, 1989 - "A 3-pulse 3-sec disturbance was recorded. The only thing of significance reported in the region were two sightings of massive rectangular objects that year. Two weeks after the May MADAR events, there was a good sighting at Frankfort, Kentucky."

December 28, 1989 - This incident occurred in MADAR chief Francis Ridge's own home in Mt. Vernon, IN:

The table lamp we have on one end of the family room is equipped with a touch control and, for some reason, it turned on & off every time the phone rang! In other words, if the light were off and the phone would ring, it turned on the light. On the next ring the light got brighter, just as if you had touched it. On the third ring it would go off. For some reason the light control was sensitive to the magnetic fields produced by the phone ringer. Anyway, my son was told to put the toy away since there was a lot of RF radiation from all the new remote controlled appliances and toys since Christmas, but he kept on trying and kept on complaining. Then, within a minute or two, the touch light in the family room went out, then came back on. I remarked, jokingly, "I wonder if we have poltergeists?"

At that point the front door burst open and my 13-year-old daughter and her two friends came screaming in, "Dad, come out here quick?" I ran outside. There in the east, just two-to-three blocks away, was the most brilliant reddish-orange navigation light I'd ever seen, and I have seen DC-10s on the runway. This was brighter! In the binoculars the bright red- orange light was alone except for a white strobe which was in the lead as the object (shape of which I couldn't see). It made a turn toward the southeast. There was no green wing light observed (could have been obstructed), and no white navigation light at all on this craft. Most noticeable was the fact that if this was an airplane or helicopter, there WAS NO SOUND? It was very low, approximately 10- degrees, and close enough that there should have been a jet or prop engine, or helicopter blade noise. Also, this was NOT an ultra light aircraft.

The object, based on its departure path, must have passed almost directly over the house at low level, going west to east, then turning southeast. The object also must have been in close proximity about the time of the interference, affecting the remote-controlled car even before that, unless this was all a coincidence. The object faded low in the distance heading southeast.

If you're thinking what I'm thinking - that this sounds in many ways like the Middletown UFO your humble author and a friend saw last month - you win a cigar.