Edward Crabtree: The Martians had a chat with Gary Wilcox on 25th of April 54 years ago. At around 10 A.M in the morning in Newark Valley in New York State, the farmer noticed a cigar shaped craft suspended over one of his fields. Out from this exited two diminutive hooded occupants. These humanoids were carrying trays of soil specimens. They explained that they had come from Mars and were here to learn more about Earth people’s agricultural techniques (Brookesmith, p78 –79).
We could dismiss this claim with ease as being an egregious fantasy, but there is an awkward postscript to the whole thing. On that very same day in a southwestern direction in New Mexico the Socorro UFO case took place. In this incident, long considered to have been one of the best documented Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a police officer along with several independent witnesses observed an egg shaped craft with a blue flame come in low over the area which left some physical traces after the event. The officer, Lonnie Zamora also saw two beings emerge from the landed craft except that these did not address him, and there was no suggestion that they hailed from the red planet.
Why should we shrug off the first story and give weight to the other? After all, all too many UFO encounters feature silly or improbable details – a star map is shown in scroll form, a piece of pancake is offered, sexual relations are offered (or enforced) –such as to invalidate the truth of the whole episode. Knowing this has lead many to conclude that such encounters start and end in the human brain. One such is the eminent science populariser Carl Sagan who in Our Demon Haunted World poses a powerful case for this paradigm: ‘Is it possible [he asks] that people in all times and places occasionally experience vivid realistic hallucinations… with the details filled in by the prevailing cultural idioms sucked out of the zeitgeist? ‘ (Sagan, p-130).
This psychosocial approach however needs must refuse to acknowledge any suggestion of the corporeal nature of the UFO whether these be from radar returns, from multiple sightings, from scorched vegetation and irradiated ground or dehydrated soil and so on. A different option is at hand, however.
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