Showing posts with label UFO's. Show all posts
Showing posts with label UFO's. Show all posts

Wednesday, November 20, 2019

A conversation with Chris Aubeck about UFO's, belief, and everything in between





Back in July, Danish organization UFO Denmark (formerly known as Exopolitics Denmark) hosted one of their regularly occurring UFO conferences in Copenhagen. As usual the program included a diverse and interesting selection of guests from the international field of ufology that you wouldn't otherwise be able to experience in Denmark. This time around the speakers included Tracy Garbutt, who talked primarily about remote viewing and personal experiences, while Richard Dolan did a very matter-of-fact presentation about possible future disclosure, in light of recent developments involving declassified navy UFO footage.

The main attraction for me, however, was the addition of top notch UFO historian Chris Aubeck to the bill - a choice which both surprised and delighted me when I first learned about it. I've known Chris for many years and met and corresponded with him on several occasions, as a member of the Magonia Exchange group. Chris founded Magonia Exchange back in 2003, with the purpose of being an online forum for sharing and studying UFO-related items (newspaper articles, images, books and much more) predating Kenneth Arnold's infamous sighting of June, 1947.

What Chris Aubeck and the many other top ufologists connected to Magonia Exchange have discovered through their collective efforts, is that UFO's have a history that precedes and goes beyond anything we could have imagined 20 years ago. Accounts of things like crashed spaceships and abductions by aliens, which everyone thought were largely a recent phenomenon, have shown instead to extend quite far back in time. And not only that; they have had a much larger impact on our culture and society than we think and collectively remember. This realization has only happened due to the recent advances in digitization and increase in online resources, and Chris Aubeck has been on the forefront of this evolution, setting new standards not only for historical UFO study, but for research in general.



Chris Aubeck presenting at the UFO Denmark summer conference, 2019

After the 2019 conference in Copenhagen I sat down with Chris and tried to dig a bit deeper into his personal beliefs and the main achievements that he feels has come from his many years of studying UFO's in history. As you will learn from the resulting interview, Chris Aubeck is a real powerhouse of knowledge relating to UFO genealogy, but his work and findings are still almost criminally overlooked. Therefore I hope that this interview will help make more people aware of what he and the rest of Magonia Exchange have uncovered, so we can all become at least a little bit wiser about what it all means.

UPDATE: UFO Denmark has now posted the full video of Chris' presentation 

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Thomas: Hello Chris, and thank you for agreeing to this interview. You made a great presentation yesterday at the conference, elegantly presenting your meticulous research and findings, the majority of which people, including most ufologists, are completely unaware of. I really think it was received well, although it was of course a lot to swallow at once, even for me.


Chris: Thanks Thomas, it’s good to be here. I hope you’re right about that, that people received it well. I know many were listening, because they were laughing at my jokes, even towards the end. Ha!


Thomas: (laughing) Yeah, I noticed that too. So, can you give an outline of who Chris Aubeck is and what motivates you to do what you do? Why are you strictly focused on older UFO cases, when most ufologists seem to be more interested in the here and now, or in the future?


Chris: Well, you know, when I was young, about 14 years old, I discovered a book on etymology. I found that I liked to learn the origins of all the words I knew. I’d look around my house at windows, carpets, tables, my cat and so on, and I wanted to know how those words came about. I didn't know what I would use the information for, but I wanted to find out how this vocabulary had been created. And I've applied the same philosophy to many things in my life since then. I've recently moved back to a town where I last lived 20 years ago and I’m fascinated by the differences, how the shops, the buildings and the people I used to know have changed. I like to find out where people are now, the evolution of things. I just instinctively try to trace the origins of whatever I see. That means when if I'm faced with a UFO story, I want to know where it’s from, who created it, for what reason, and so on. A lot of the seeds of modern cases are buried in historical ones, so I work to peel back the layers to get to core truths. Every year the digitization of the world's archives makes that work easier and easier.


Thomas: So, if someone called you a historical detective it wouldn't be completely off the mark?


Chris: I would be happy with that label, yeah.


Thomas: From our correspondence over the years I know that you have researched and accumulated so much groundbreaking data that it would blow most people’s minds. But I've often wondered how on earth you keep track of it all? Do you have Excel sheets where you categorize it, an advanced note system, or how do you do it?


Chris: Well, I'm the kind of person who's always writing a book. I've been writing a book since I was 13 years old, so I probably think very much in chapters. I suppose that is somewhat the equivalent of having a database or notation system, so although I don't work with Excel sheets, I do have a system to help keep track of these cases. I think of them mainly in chronological order.


Thomas: So you're saying that besides writing about them, you can actually manage most of these things inside your head?


Chris: Thats right. If someone says a year, I can usually tell them what happened in that year in pre-UFO history.


Thomas: Okay, that is pretty remarkable.


Chris: I don’t know, what I really have is just chapters that I write in, which occasionally become books. But I'm not really motivated to write books. I'm motivated to write a particular book, which will be the presentation of my thesis. which is to explain the origin of...well, Ufology, in a sense. I mean, I’ve come to see the evolution of the UFO phenomenon from its roots. I can see how it overlapped with stories of meteorites, for example. I can see how literature, culture and the advance of science turned many meteorites sightings into UFO stories, including the ones about passengers, or those with strange writing on them. What I want to do is to finish this one book before I'm hit by a bus or something. Then of course I have minor projects going on as well, so I'm not obsessed with this one thesis and I'm very happy to adapt or change or get rid of things, if need be. Which in fact I have done over the years. The reason I haven't published this one yet is because I've totally rewritten it along the way. And I'm open to that.  And because at the same time, I don't care how much of this turns out to be real or not. I’m happy to be proved wrong. That's OK, I'm just letting the evidence guide me.


Thomas: You are known for your tendency to really stick with a case until It is solved, exploring all avenues of research known – or unknown – to man. But is there ever a point where you give up, where you're like….okay, this is simply taking up too much time and resources, and while it may have seemed important at a certain point, it doesn’t anymore. A point where you are content and you don’t feel you need to really pursue it further?


Chris: Well, the reason that I have been working on the same main book for over 15 years, is that I'm really hesitant to publish a case without reaching a conclusion for it. But I do eventually reach one. Take for example the 1865 case of a trapper in the Rockies called James Lumley. You can even find this story on the internet these days. People think that it's like an old Roswell type incident. I had this case on file for a very long time, researched and wrote notes about it frequently, but I was never happy with it, because I didn't know how or why it happened. But now I know the origin of that story, I've traced its roots. I know the reason why it was published, and so on. Another example is a case I mentioned yesterday that happened in Arkansas in 1847, involving a bust which fell from the sky. I finally know all about that case after many years of research. Now I know the why and how and when. I also mentioned a case from 1862 about a meteorite reported to be covered in paintings and pictures and diagrams, believed to be from another planet. That’s another example of one I’ve research to pieces, as it were. I am actually reaching a point now where I don't need to look for any more cases to support my thesis, because if I did my book would end up being seven hundred pages long!


Newspaper article about the above mentioned Lumley case


Thomas: Ok, so besides your drive for researching cases, I also know that you are actively trying to spread more awareness about the fact that the UFO phenomenon didn't just start in 1947, and that Kenneth Arnold’s sighting was just a more recent point in a very long continuum of similar events. What can you do to create more attention about these, let's say, historical gaps?


Chris: I don't know, because I'd like to put out books, but at the same time I realize that we're living in an age where many people don't read books. So, I am toying with the idea of making videos for YouTube, turning my thesis into…a rap video, maybe? Perhaps that will get people's attention.


Thomas: (laughing) I would love to see that


Chris: I have absolutely no idea to be honest. It's very difficult to make big changes these days because there's so much noise. Whatever I say there will be someone a lot noisier than me telling everybody that the government has a UFO locked away in Area 51 or something. It's extremely difficult.


Thomas: Where do you see yourself fit in the world of ufology? I don't believe many are motivated in the same way as you are, on either side of the spectrum, but besides that, where do you sort of come down on the major issues?


Chris: I would say that I don't, for example, believe that the government has any UFOs in their capacity. And I don't believe the government has all the truth about everything. Which doesn't mean that there is or isn't anything going on related to UFOs. What I mean is, the government might know what's been going on up to a certain extent, but then someone, my mother for example says "oh, I saw a flashing banana-shaped light in the sky yesterday". They can’t automatically know what that was. Therefore, I think it's impossible to say that the government knows the “whole truth” about anything. They might try to give the impression they know things, as a kind of political strategy or to look more powerful. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if they like the idea of conspiracy theories floating around and people getting together, like during this weekend, talking about what they think the government is hiding. Because whether “they” are hiding something or not, the fact is people believe it and this fact adds to their power. And the UFO myth is also a convenient cover for the development of secret weapons, as we’ve seen examples of.


Thomas: So, in your research, even if you are only looking into old cases prior to 1947, and especially before the 20th century, you don’t feel that there are any examples where governments could have covered up certain incidents?


Chris: Honestly, I don't. I don't see any real cover-up. What I see is a tangled web of information. We have to remember that a government isn't one person, it's a lot of people. And among them there are going to be individuals who are going to suspect that others working beside them, above them, or below them will have access to information that they don't. So, I wouldn't be surprised if people in the government can also become paranoid about what's really going on. But I don't personally think that behind all of that there's a filing cabinet with the truth in it. I think that it's just a horrible mess and that the same applies for any subject. I mean, there are of course real conspiracies. Like when the military is accused of covering up rape by male soldiers of female soldiers. The word cover-up exists outside ufology, obviously. But no, I don't believe that “they” are covering up anything significant related to UFOs.


Thomas: OK, but then to maybe take a step back further from the subject: So, you don’t see any indications of a historical cover-up of UFO's. But when does this element of conspiracy first start appearing? I mean, this is now an inescapable part of let's say the UFO mythology, but at what point do you see it entering reports and stories?


Chris: Well, I don't know, I suppose that the government sort of suddenly started it by accidentally saying they had captured a flying saucer in Roswell, in July of 1947. And that gave rise to suspicion, because, of course, when at first they say one thing and then suddenly change their mind, it does create doubt. So I wouldn't be surprised if that's really where it started. I mean, before that I haven’t detected any real conspiracy theories. Yesterday I mentioned a case from 1926 concerning a farmer who believed that he'd found an alien skull, who then spent the next couple of weeks with his neighbors looking for the rest of the alien body. He thought a spaceship had exploded near his house. He stated to journalists that he was very sorry, but he wasn't going to give this to the government, or any kind of scientists, because he felt he had a mission to find the rest of the alien first. If he had lived in a social context in which government conspiracies were a possibility, he would have mentioned it. But the fact is that he didn't. So, I don't believe that people distrusted the government in the sense that we see after 1947, at least not concerning these types of events.


Thomas: How do you reconcile that fact that UFO sightings, historical as well as newer ones, for a large part has been "one step ahead" of the current technology? For example, before there were airships, people reported mystery airships, then after the airship was invented, people began reporting even more advanced airships, and then mysterious airplanes...


Chris: Well, we humans are always imagining slightly beyond our means, in the same sense that science fiction is always about technology that hasn't arrived yet. And considering that in the 19th century people were also inventing stories, like they do today, it’s not surprising that they were describing airships or other types of alien technology or whatever that hadn't been invented yet. I mean, that's just the way it's always been…in stories people come up with things that haven't been invented yet.


Thomas: Do you see any kind of “supernatural” element or unknown factor in this evolution at all? Something that falls outside of what science can explain today? I am thinking of something akin to Jacques Vallée’s “conditioning hypothesis”, the idea that someone or something is using the UFO phenomenon to nudge us into new beliefs and perhaps technologies.


Chris: I don't think that people are being guided towards new technologies or beliefs via alterations to the visual imagery presented to them. I think that that's a wonderful excuse that people have, so they can put everything into the same sack. I mean, when I was writing Wonders in The Sky with Jacques, we argued a lot about this. He would say “look, here's a classic close encounter case” and I would say, “but this sounds more like a ghost to me” and then he would present another case, and it would sound to me like a vision of the Virgin Mary. Why try to argue that a virgin is a ufonaut or whatever? I just can’t understand that approach. And in the end we actually agreed to take out a lot of these more ambiguous close encounter stories.



Chris Aubeck with legendendary ufologist and co-founder of the book 'Wonders In The Sky", Jacques Vallée, in 2015.


Thomas: I want to get back to this hypothesis about some overall guiding principle, or however you want to call it. Jeffrey Kripal for example has this idea about a “Superstory” which we are all the time writing collectively as humans, mostly without even realizing it, and which at the same time influences us to continue writing it. Kind of similar to some of Jung’s ideas about archetypes and narratives. Do you subscribe to something like this at all?


Chris: I do think that humans tend to create stories according to a certain template, and if you study folklore, if you study mythology, or simply literature, you will find that people make stories with more or less the same plot all the way through – like The Hero’s Journey narrative. You have the hero, then you have the problem that the hero has to face. You might be able to insert a love interest, and then there's a point in which he almost loses his bride-to-be, or whatever. I mean it's just like a structure that people always rely on. You can compare a lot of Hollywood films that followed very similar structures. It’s all about tropes and motifs. I think that descriptions of UFO encounters also grow this way. If you take stories like the one I presented yesterday from 1863, where this meteorite crash-landed in Jamaica, the witnesses include a scientist who identifies it as a meteorite, then takes it back to his laboratory inspects it, only to discover that it's made of a strange substance, something totally artificial. It also has writing on it and from there he reaches the conclusion that this is alien technology. It’s a basic story you find throughout modern ufology, and in the end, what do you think happens as a result of these alleged breathtaking events? Absolutely nothing. The meteorite from 1863 was going to revolutionize science, but of course it didn't. It disappeared. Did Kecksburg revolutionize science? Of course not. Did Roswell revolutionize anything? Has anything ever revolutionized anything in the world of ufology? Only if you subscribe to the belief that some of our current technology came from aliens. I certainly don’t subscribe to that theory.


Thomas: Okay, but where, in your opinion, does personal belief fit into the UFO phenomenon? I mean what's the value of it to you?


Chris: Well, I've had a lot of hobbies in my life. I became interested in magic and magic tricks; I've been interested in painting. My levels of interest fluctuate. But one thing that continually motivates me about the world of UFOs is that there's still so much left to discover that it gives me a reason to reopen my files every day. Although I wouldn't say that it's belief-oriented, I’m definitely motivated by knowing that I can add something of value to this field, just as I am in my day job, teaching English.


Thomas: Okay, but actually what I meant with the question was, what is the evidence value of personal belief in ufology and in UFO experiences. Maybe I should ask, to what extent do you feel we can we use individual personal experiences, which in most cases is all we got?


Chris: Okay. Well, there are some cases that don't conform to the general pattern that I find. These are what we can call outliers, and when I find one, then of course it makes me wonder if the people involved really saw something unusual or not. So, my mind is open to the possibility that I will find anomalies in the data. Here in the modern world, I am surrounded by people who “see things.” I am constantly thinking about whether their experiences have a rational explanation. And I will look for one and offer my opinion, even if people don't want to hear it. 

People don’t always like to know the truth. I mean, I’ve been out for a drink with other ufologists when one will suddenly stand up and get very excited about something in the sky. They point to a plane, and say something like “Oh my God, they know we're talking about them!”. Seeing that kind of behavior, and realizing that they're going to write this up as an as another anecdote for their UFO files, worries me a bit. I think that in reality less than 1% of the phenomena that I read about or hear about might have a complex explanation. I think anomalies are much rarer than people think.


Thomas: But they do exist, that’s what you’re saying?


Chris: I'm willing to accept that. But I'm also willing to accept that there's nothing at all mysterious about them in the end.


Thomas: So when you're looking at cases, you are not looking at them to add to a collection of anomalies, you are looking to solve them.


Chris: Yes, I am looking for problems that I can actively solve.


Thomas: Alright. Well in that connection, what would you say is your toughest case. Did you ever encounter one where you found yourself thinking oh s**t, I will do my best to solve this one, but even then, it is just so mind-boggling that I still can’t reconcile the weirdness of it.


Chris: Well, apart from a UFO sighting of my own, which I’ve thought about a lot and never found and explanation for, yeah. There are some historical sightings that make me wonder. There’s one case in a book from 1857 which is so strange, because it doesn't fit into the timeline at all. This is the one where a ship sails over an American village. And I've been there, I've been to this location, which didn't help. I've also been to be the archives located in the nearest town, that didn't help either. What bothers me about this case is that it appears in a book about health. It's a book that does mention things like potions and little bit of magic, but nothing even remotely to do with unidentified flying objects. It's so out of place in this book that it makes you wonder why the author would have inserted it. He doesn't use it in any of his publicity for the book either. It gives you the impression that he came across something that he really wanted to share with his readers, but maybe just didn’t know what to do it, so he just threw it in there. 

I've spent now more than 10 years working on solving it one way or another, together with Kay Massingill (a very active, to say the least, American member of Magonia Exchange), tracing the origin of everything else in the book. So, for example, we now know that pages 25 to 61 were stolen from another publication. We also know that a whole chapter was taken or copied from someone else’s health book, and so on. But the part about the UFO, we haven't found anything similar anywhere at all. And this this bothers me a lot and it'll bother me forever until I’ve solved it. I don't believe that this man invented the story, because he could have invented something a lot better than that! Another thing that bothers me is that the author says that there are thousands of such cases on record. That's something you just don’t hear anywhere until more modern times, long after 1947. So why would he say that? Why would you say there are thousands of cases of record? It sounds so out of place. So that one bothers me.


Chris Aubeck and Kay Massingill in Ohio, 2014

And then there is the story from 1874 that Martin Shough and I included in Return To Magonia, about two farmers from Ohio crossing a field, when they see a black object descending from the sky. When it lands it doesn't crash. Instead the lights go out, the door opens and a man comes out dressed in black holding a lantern. He then jumps into a “buggy” without any horses and drives away. Now, I can trace possible origins for each part of this, I think, but it still bothers me, because it's so odd. Now, it’s important to mention that it was published just after April Fool's Day. But at the same time, the witnesses really existed, I tracked them down through genealogical records. The place existed as well; I’ve been there myself. And visiting the place, it makes you realize that the man who reported the story knew the area quite well.


Chris Aubeck examining a supposed landing site in Ohio, 2014


And then finally this story from 1831 which I mentioned in my presentation. I wasn't that interested in it when we published it in Return To Magonia, but now I've looked at it again and again, I realize just how strange it is. It describes a clock shaped object, sometimes with legs, that scorches the grass, but doesn't burn people. It goes up in the sky, comes down again and so on. That's pretty strange. And there is very little there to indicate a hoax - even the discrepancies between witness testimony is what you would expect if it had really happened. So that one bothers me too. I would put those three into the “unknown” category for now.


Chris Aubeck searching for information in a library in Ohio, 2014


Thomas: Very interesting, particularly the second one to me personally. As you may remember, I have been particularly interested in cases involving strange boxes, and the thing with the lantern sounds very much like you would hear about in more modern encounters with UFO entities. It’s a recurring element in so many of the more documented cases out there, but do you see it appear often in your research?


Chris: Well, there is one science fiction novel published in 1848 that made me think more about it, published a Christmas book. It's an amazing tale really, every part of it reads like a modern UFO case: An object is seen through a telescope coming from space, which gets larger and larger and eventually divides into at least two lights, red and blue. Then it lands in a garden, and when it lands, people rush outside from their Christmas dinners to see it. After the object lands, the light goes out, just as it did in the other case from Ohio. Then a figure emerges from this dark object. I believe it's carrying a light, I’d have to go back and read it. But it's a very similar story. And it was published 26 years earlier. And I know that it was based on a case about a meteorite that landed in Bavaria. So, it shows that this element already existed in the culture, or, let’s say, within people's imaginative grasp, even back then.


Thomas: Ok. So, with these cases, there is something that I thought about during your presentation yesterday. When you start going deeper into them, then you naturally have to question a lot of things. But on the surface, if you just mentioned the details and the narrative, it can sound to people like you are coming with a lot of evidence about historic alien visitation. How do you reconcile this?


Chris: Whenever you strip a story of the details, it becomes more convincing. Particularly if you put it in with a bunch of similar cases. It's like, oh, another case and another story, another crashed object. But the moment you start to drill down to the details, you realize they contain contradictions and that they were usually inspired by something else. Or maybe the witnesses didn't even exist. You should never base beliefs on fragmented information or case summaries.  So, I was very aware, when I made this presentation, that the people who invited me are part of the exopolitics movement. Some of them might look at the historical cases I’ve presented and think that it’s all nonsense, but some might also think, “wow, this really strengthens my belief”. That's why I did mention a couple of times that if you want to know more about each case, you know, you’ve got to wait for my book. You need to give people the opportunity to get deeper into the data.


Thomas: Ok, so you’ve talked a lot about some cases that are hard to crack, but what is your favorite case, or cases? Are they the one and the same?


Chris: No, my favorite cases are more like my favorite witnesses in a sense. I'm fascinated by the stories of the Mystic Jane Leade, who died in 1701. She was from London and had a massive following. She kept some Diaries called The Fountain of Gardens and she's constantly making references to her own personal UFO sightings. And these are diaries, so you have the date and the place and so on, and her descriptions are very interesting, just like modern UFO encounters. For example, in one entry she's looking at a star through her window, when she loses consciousness. Then she wakes up inside the star, where she says she meets strange beings and so on. And then occasionally she makes references to little children, pregnancies and such…It's just like a whole alien abduction story, except it's from a Mystic who died centuries ago. So if I had a favorite case, I'd say that would be it.



Chris Aubeck illustrating ectoplasm for an article about spiritism. The spiritist movement of the late 1800's and early 1900's played a large role in popularizing experiences that most people today associate with UFO's. 


Thomas: What is the future for the Magonia Exchange project that you started more than 15 years ago now? You haven’t actively posted anything there for years now. Have you given up on it?


Chris: Well, my whole aim when we started the project, was to be the main contributor for as long as necessary. But I was always hoping that it would gain momentum and just carry on without me with no problem. And that's exactly what has happened over the years. I mean, if you if you look at other online historical archives to do with medieval history or science, you find that it isn't normally the guy who founded it that contributes the most. The founder of an organization is the guy who thought it all out, maybe he gets the ball rolling, but then he hopes that it will have a life of its own after a while. And that's exactly what happened, and it worked out very well.


Thomas: So, who's effectively most in control of it right now?


Chris: Nobody's really in control of it, except for me. I still have the last word about what happens with the group, who can join who leaves and so on. Yeah, I mean, I'm just happy that it's still going strong. I always told people at the beginning, that if they suddenly stopped posting, if they stopped contributing, that was fine. I would just use it myself as my personal database. But that didn't happen, it just carried on and got a life of its own. And these days it's a vital tool, I think people really need this kind of thing. The way that I created it was not to have a central database. That was done for various reasons, firstly because I wanted to encourage people to keep their own archives instead of being dependent on an online platform, because web pages are never permanent. The only disadvantage is that new members don't have access to the earliest cases, but to be honest, I don't think that's a problem. Older members will be sure to mention if something has been posted before and anyway, if there's one thing that people have to realize, it is that part of historical research is comparing multiple sources. Even if someone posts the same story as someone else years before, it might have a different date, different wording. It might be from an earlier or a later newspaper. If one was posted in a California paper and the other one in a New York paper, it gives us some valuable info that the story was carried across many thousands of kilometers, for example. And that can be analyzed. Sometimes what seems like different cases turn out to be the same, but they went viral and became altered along the way. And you need different sources in order to detect where this happened, how stories spread.


Thomas: I have not been that active in the group for the last couple of years, but every time I drop in to take a look, I see the level of activity is unchanged, or maybe even has increased. It seems that there is no end to the discoveries that can be made collectively.


Chris: That’s right. And at the same time, more and more digital archives and resources are becoming available to us. So, I don't see any limits to this group and its possibilities. And even if at some point everybody stops writing, then maybe I'll become active for a while again. But we've already collected more than 40,000 items. That's enough for anybody in a lifetime. So now let’s start to analyze it and make more output from it. And this is actually happening also more and more, with books coming out by several different members of the group, largely based on the information gathered there.


Thomas: Indeed, I am looking at some point to do the same, but with more local Danish material. Well, that's pretty much what I had for now. Thanks again for taking the time Chris, sharing your great insights and results from the many years in the field. I wish you all the best with all your future projects, and I am looking very much forward to reading about them in book form.

Chris: Thank you Thomas, it has been a pleasure. Let’s keep in touch.



Together with Chris Aubeck in front of the Copenhagen Mormon Temple, just around the corner from where the conference took place. Mormonism is yet another, little known piece of the historical UFO puzzle.

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For more of Chris' research and methodology relating to historical UFO cases, I recommend reading Return to Magonia, created together with the equally amazing Martin Shough.






Saturday, May 9, 2015

UFO's Over Copenhagen - A Case Of Hidden Contact?


This post is based on an article I wrote for a 2012 issue of UFO-Mail, the official organ for SUFOI (Scandinavian UFO Information), about a very unique Danish UFO case that I investigated a few years earlier. Besides just translating the article to English I have added some further details and comments to the main body of text, as well as to the conclusion. All names of those involved have been changed, for the sake of anonymity.


I came across the following story about 5 years ago, in the spring of 2010, while I was still at university. At the time I had been working on a larger research project for over a month, together with a fellow student who we can call Christian. On one occasion during a break, the talk turned to UFO’s and what they could be. Looking back, it was probably Christian who brought it up, since I very rarely start conversations about the topic myself. It's not that I’m embarrassed about my interest in UFO's, but simply because there are exhaustingly many layers you have to cut through every time you present your views, to people who mainly have their knowledge of the subject from documentaries etc. Still, I must take part of the responsibility, as he could hardly have failed to notice the many books about UFO’s I had lying around.
 

Anyway, after having talked about it back and forth for a few minutes Christian suddenly remarks: “Hey! I just remembered that my wife once saw a UFO!”. I was of course surprised and a bit intrigued, but didn’t really expect anything major. For all I knew, and from the little Christian could remember of her story, she might just have seen a strange light in the sky one night. But, as I was soon to learn, it was something a lot more dramatic than that. Furthermore, this came along right when I was most engulfed in reading about such cases. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. At this point, not knowing very much, I asked Christian if he could tell his wife, Marianne, that I had a serious interest in UFO’s, and ask her if she was willing to share her experience with me some day. A few days later he had made arrangements for me to speak with her.



Marianne’s Close Encounter


Marianne’s UFO encounter took place sometime during the mid-1990’s – possibly in 1996. That’s about the closest we have come to putting a date on it. At the time she was living in an apartment on Carit Etlars Vej, in the western part of Copenhagen (actually in the city-within-the-city known as Frederiksberg). Her apartment was special, in that it had one of the only two French balconies on the rear end of the building - Marianne’s being on the fourth floor and the other just below it, on the third floor. In fact those balconies are the only two openings in the building facing in that direction, period.

The building housing Marianne’s former apartment. Her balcony was the top one, on the white facade of the building to the left.

The immediate view straight from the balcony is a medium-sized, red-colored apartment complex which partially blocks the view of a heavily trafficked road, Vesterbrogade. I couldn’t get both buildings to fit properly into one shot, so I took two separate pictures. There is some distance to the complex from the balcony, and in between is a small, cooped-up, ball court which is visible on the photo above and the one just below.

The back of the red apartment complex. You can see the ball court that separates it and the building housing Marianne’s apartment, to the left in the picture.
Although we haven’t been able to determine the exact year of the encounter, there can be no doubt that it took place in the summertime - possibly in June or July – during the the late night/early morning hours. She remembers that it was getting bright outside and the birds were singing. Due to the really humid climate around that time, she had pulled her bed all the way up to the balcony only a few days before, in order to get as much fresh air as possible. 

Suddenly, for some reason she can’t recall – or maybe there was no particular reason - Marianne looked out the balcony window. There, immediately outside, hovering above the ball court, was an object of bright aluminum complexion, without any visible windows or doors or other distinguishable features. Anne says that the “body” of the object was about 5-6 meters long, and the “wings” maybe 1.5 meters each. The things that attached the “wings” to the body seemed to her like some kind of pipe system. She made a sketch of it which you can see just below.




Marianne describes the rest of the experience as if time itself started to fall apart, or as if two different timelines were moving along at the same time. The object was moving, but very slowly. She noticed that all sounds and smells now disappeared, almost as if her surroundings faded away from her, and she felt that her sense of space and time was the only “real” thing present - all tell-tale signs of what British veteran ufologist Jenny Randles has dubbed the Oz Factor

Eventually the object began moving to the right, around the corner of the building. According to Marianne it should have been visible from the kitchen window immediately afterwards, but when she ran out to look it wasn’t there. Marianne isn’t sure how long the encounter lasted altogether, due to the strange state she was in, but she knows that it couldn’t have been that long because the sun hadn’t yet come up when it ended. She remembers that she was a bit scared, but most of all she felt that the object had been curious about her and that it was somehow “just passing by”.

An important part of the story is that Marianne's boyfriend at the time, Marco, was there with her during the encounter. He had been out partying pretty hard all night, but had arrived a short time earlier to crash at her place. Talking with Marianne, and later also with Marco, it became clear to me that the UFO encounter happened shortly after they had had sex that night/morning. Anne says that she remembers being awake for a little while afterwards, in a state of complete relaxation – very different from anything she had ever experienced before or since. Marco had fallen asleep almost immediately and was already snoring. She remembers that she tried her best to wake him up, but he was as far gone as the object now was. Marianne never saw the UFO again. 



Further Experiences


When I asked her about other unusual experiences, prior to or after her encounter, Marianne recalled a few very interesting things. One was an extremely vivid ”alien dream” she had a few nights later, in which she interacted with some very tall, golden ”super women” that looked like normal people, except for their height and large heads. In the dream she was supposed to help these beings with something, maybe a pregnancy. She also found some peculiar markings on her body, but doesn’t remember whether this only happened after the incident, or if it had also happened prior to it. She describes these markings as if they were indentations made by a hair brush. Curiously enough, while we were talking about all this, Christian suddenly broke in and stated that he himself had had those kinds of markings, more than once. He thinks that he may even have had them before he met Marianne. He describes his markings as 5 small dots, in a dice-like pattern. Christian also remembered calling Marianne his “intergalactic star goddess” one of the first times he met her, after falling in love with her. This was before she ever told him about her UFO encounter and he has no deeper explanation for this choice of nickname. 

Later I also found out that Marianne has a thing about owls and has made more than one very detailed piece of artwork involving them. I asked into this and she couldn’t explain why, other than they just had some sort of meaning to her. Although I am hesitant to make a direct connection between this and Marianne’s encounter it bears mentioning, because owls have been appearing under odd circumstance to a lot of UFO experiencers (just ask Mike Clelland, who has been documenting his own and other peoples stories involving owls for years)   

The conversation had turned into something of a surprise for all three of us. Marianne and Christian had very rarely talked about these things before - and certainly never all of them, within a UFO context. For me it was incredible that I seemed to have stumbled upon one of those very cases of “hidden contact” that I had been reading so much about. At least, all of the details I was getting just seemed to fit so well with incidents of that type. At the same time I was cautious and did not try to paint a picture of alien abductions and hybrid programs, although it would have been very easy to jump in head first like that. In fact I tried my very best to not even mention the abduction mythos in that or any of our later talks, except when asked - and then only very hesitantly. Nevertheless the details just kept coming forward.

Next, I felt had to find out if there could be something about Marianne that made her particularly susceptible to unusual experiences. This was very much inspired by reading books by Jenny Randles and Kenneth Ring, which document that certain personality traits make some people more prone to UFO experiences. This also brought forward some extremely interesting details. Just for the record it should be stated at this point, that Marianne has never touched any hard drugs and only occasionally smoked a joint.



About Marianne


Marianne is now in her mid-to-late 30’s and is the mother of 3 children. Christian is the father of the 2 youngest, a son and a daughter, and Marco is the father of the oldest, a daughter named Natalie who is now in her teens. Marianne is a designer, and at the time I spoke with her she worked specifically with furniture design. She describes herself as having had strong creative urges ever since childhood. As a child she was extremely good at visualizing shapes in front of her and when she closed her eyes, she could instantly imagine complex figures retract and expand, almost like fractals, which she felt she had to shape and balance in order to keep them separated. She still gets these images once in a while, but she says that with time it went from being an ability to being more of a “feeling“ which she often gets just before falling asleep. She feels that if she could only train this ability properly she would be able to use it for so many things. She has thought about practicing transcendental meditation to help further this goal.

Marianne has also had several odd things happen to her throughout her life, but nothing that she ever thought of connecting with the UFO encounter. In kindergarten for example, she suffered from an unknown and perplexing condition, where she would periodically experience static in front of her eyes, as if tuning into a dead TV channel. The doctors ran a long series of tests on her, for epilepsy and other disorders, but never figured out what was wrong. After a while it disappeared by itself.

Next I asked Marianne, inspired directly by Jenny Randles' experiencer-checklist, if she often had vivid dreams of flying. She confirmed. In fact, for a long time during her late childhood and early adolescence she believed that she could actually fly, if only she concentrated hard enough on it. She told me that even today this can be a source of conflict to her because, in a way, she still thinks that it can be done, but at the same time she knows it isn’t supposed to be possible. She has to keep her thoughts in check once in a while, so she won’t get too carried away.

Another trait in encounter-prone personalities is the clear recollection of events stretching back to very early childhood, sometimes even late infancy. Marianne confirmed this part as well. For example, she vividly remembers her younger sister’s birth, even though she was barely 2 years old at the time. Natalie, the daughter of her and Marco, also has detailed memories from when she was only 1½-2 years old. 

The story, as it now stood, would have been interesting in and of itself. But as it turned out, it didn’t end there. There proved to be a very definite link between Marianne's encounter and her former boyfriend, which we shall now explore further.



Marco’s UFO Encounter


As you will recall, Marco never woke up in time to see the UFO outside Marianne's balcony. But when she drew a sketch of it one of the following days he completely freaked out, for a very good reason: he had had a sighting of what appeared to be the exact same object, many years earlier. I haven’t been able to find out precisely which date this happened either, but Marco thinks it was probably in the early summer of 1987 or 1988, although it could be as late as 1989 or 1990. What we do know is that on this day he was out rollerskating with a few friends on Eskildsgade, a street not that far away from Marianne’s old apartment (and incidentally, I found out later, also the street where Mike Tramp, who I interviewed not long ago for a completely different purpose, grew up). Marco and his friends had a thing back then where they would grab onto cars and roll with them up and down the street, and they had been at this for several hours when it was beginning to get dark. Marco remembers that around 21.00 he was standing in one end of Eskildsgade, next to the medium-sized public square called Vesterbro Torv, while his two friends were much further down the the street, closer to Istedgade

 
The street where Marco & friends where rollerskating. Marco was standing approximately where I took this picture, facing the same direction as the camera, when the object appeared.


Around this time all three boys began noticing a loud, roaring sound coming from the air. Marco had trouble describing it to me, but according to him it was different than the sound of thunder. It was more like when a plane breaks the sound barrier, although even more powerful. Then suddenly, a 5-6 meter long grayish object, shaped sort of like a dumbbell or rolling pin, passes over his head, in the sky above the buildings. While the object flew over the street the sky was completely gray, but Marco distinctly remembers a pink, triangular patch of light in the distant sky, somewhere to the right (which could indicate an exotic weather phenomenon, but more about that later). As the object flew by, the streetlights and all other lights in the surrounding apartments went out one by one, and turned on again immediately after it had passed them. The object eventually disappeared into the horizon, but just before doing so it seemed to transform into a light.

 
A rough illustration (not correctly scaled) showing the object Marco saw, and the manner in which it flew forward. Marco estimated it to be about 40 meters above the buildings, but it kept itself in between them throughout its whole “route” of flight.

As can be seen on the above picture, the object was very similar to what Marianne observed years later, if not nearly identical to it. But the shape of the object is not the only element that recurs in Marianne’s encounter. As it turns out, Marco also tried everything he possibly could to get his friends to see the thing, but without success. They did not notice anything flying above them, although they do remember seeing a light disappearing in the distance. They also observed the electrical lights going off and back on again. In fact, one of them even heard a local radio show a few days later, where the host described an “unexplained blackout” that had taken place the night of the encounter. Even more interesting, like Marianne, Marco also felt as if time was distorted during the whole incident, and that the object somehow “sucked out” all the energy of its surroundings. He believes that, objectively, the whole experience only took about 20-30 seconds, but it felt a lot longer. Marco doesn’t think that there were any other people on the street who actually witnessed the object.

Marco describes the above experience as a turning point in his life. In retrospect he realizes that this was the one event that made him seek out a more spiritual lifestyle at a young age. He became a vegetarian instantly afterwards and has not eaten meat since. He also changed his personality from being a “smartass street kid” into a more sensitive and open minded person. When he saw Anne’s drawing and heard her recount her experience many years later, it felt kind of like redemption to him. Finally, someone had seen the same thing as him and he could know come to terms with the fact that it hadn’t just been a hallucination. One thing that he has wondered about many times since though, is why he never saw the object the second time around and why there was this strange temporal aspect to both his and Marianne's sightings. They discussed this many times afterwards and Marco distinctively remembers thinking that “time was against him” and that “something” prevented him from waking up in time to see the object. He also remembers Anne’s dreams about the aliens and speculated that there was a connection, even then.


Further Investigation


There were several things at this point that merited further investigation, but without any exact years to place the sightings, it was very difficult to approach them. In the case of Marianne I had hoped that at some point, a diary entry or similar would remind her of a more precise date. So far this hasn’t happened. Marco, likewise, who I have spoken to on several later occasions, can’t remember anything precisely about either of the two sightings, except the general time of year. Even after getting in touch with the friends he was skating with on the day of his encounter, we weren’t able to narrow it down much. Concerning his sighting, however, I have been able to work somewhat “backwards”. First I tried approaching local bars in the immediate area of the sighting, but in all of the places that existed back then (which weren’t many) the owners couldn’t pinpoint any power failures which had stood out particularly throughout the years. I did get the impression that it was something they had experienced quite often, though. I also began asking around in local shops, but quickly realized that it didn’t make much sense. Even if some of them did exist back then, they would surely have been closed at the time of the incident.

Next, I set out to look through local newspapers from the late 1980’s/early 1990’s, in order to find articles about power failures in Copenhagen – unexplained or otherwise. I figured that since it was apparently worth mentioning on the radio, there could have been a mention of it somewhere. However, searching both printed newspapers and Infomedia, a database covering a large section of Danish newspapers back to the 1980’s, has not yielded any useful clues.

Parallel to this, I tried locating a recording of the said radio program itself. I suppose I could have put up flyers all over the area of Vesterbro, in hope of finding someone who had an old cassette tape with the broadcast, but I wasn’t quite prepared for that. Instead I tried to find out what local radio station could have been the source of the announcement of the “unexplained blackout”. Marco helped me in the right direction on that one, and we discovered that it was probably one called Radio Ratatosk (now defunkt). After a short email exchange with the former administrator of the radio, a forwarded reply came back to me revealing that a former Radio Ratatosk host named Michael remembered a strange power failure in the late 80's, most likely after 1987 (but not whether he had talked about it on air). In any case, Michael told me that one day around that time, the power suddenly went out. For some reason he thought to himself “this is it. Chernobyl happening all over again”. Even stranger, when he picked up the phone to call a friend, the line was busy and full of voices. Then suddenly, the friend he was supposed to dial up was speaking from the other end. His friend had not tried to dial him either, and this was in the days before automatic callback was a standard feature on telephones. Michael then found out some time later, that the blackout was actually connected to the nuclear power plant, Barsebäck, which is located just across the water from Copenhagen, in southern Sweden. And if that isn’t enough, I also found out that Michael had an interest in UFO’s himself and was in contact with a lot of old characters from the heyday of Danish ufology. He could even tell me, that the last surviving member of a notable 70’s UFO cult lived just around the corner from me.

Eventually, although an interesting coincidence, I came to have my doubts about whether this was really the same blackout as the one during Marco’s encounter. They didn't sound like the same, since all the lights came on again almost immediately after the object had flown past them. But the sense that there was something about this area of Copenhagen that made it particularly susceptible to power failures, was further reinforced after my article was “printed” in UFO-mail. One of the reasons for putting the story out there in the first place, was to see if it would generate any useful clues to understanding the case better. I received a few replies in that regard, one of them an email from a reader who prefers to keep his name a secret. He wrote the following (translated from Danish):

In the 1980’s I became chief administrator for an organization with headquarters close to Vesterbro Torv (the square from which Eskildsgade is connected). From the late 1980’s until the middle of the 1990’s we experienced many short, unexplained interruptions of data transfer, typically during the night. We spent a small fortune trying to solve this problem, which was very damaging to us, but without any luck. The only explanation we were offered was that the interruptions were due to short power failures, despite the fact that we had the best UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) available on the market at the time. What the cause really was, we never found out. One day in the mid 1990’s, the problems suddenly stopped.

In light of Marco and his friends description of the power going shortly off and on during his encounter, the above account is highly interesting. It does indicate very strongly that there were some general problems with the electricity supply in the area around Vesterbro Torv during the 1980’s and 1990’s. I did try to follow this trail as well, but the main electricity provider at the time has long since been absorbed by the much larger company DONG, and contacting them was not very helpful at all. But I doubt that it would bring me any closer to a date for the Marco encounter anyways.  


Map showing some of the different places mentioned. The center of Copenhagen begins less than 1 kilometer to the right of  Vesterbro Torv.



Case Analysis


As readers can probably sense, this is a case that I have spent a lot of time on throughout the years. The reason is, as indicated earlier, that it presented itself to me at a time when I was really opening up to the complexity of the UFO phenomenon. In fact, I can think of no better example than this case to demonstrate just that complexity. I will (and can) not completely exclude that the object seen was some reconnaissance ship from another planet, keeping tabs on certain individuals while at the same time granting them exclusive experiences to further “their” own cryptic goals. I just think that when looking at the full picture - whether or not one accepts that both encounters are connected, which isn’t necessarily a given – the evidence points to several different answers. I also think it makes more sense to look at the individual elements on different levels.

On one level we have the undeniable physical aspects – the light in the distance, the power outage and the loud noise that both Marco and his friends saw and heard. I will go out on a limb and say that I think the odd pink, triangular patch in the distance, could also have been observed by others (in fact I plan on looking into this possibility in the near future). Along with the circumstantial evidence I received later on, this all indicates that something physical did in fact happen - it wasn’t all in the mind of one person. Furthermore it points to the area around Vesterbro Torv as being somehow electricity-sensitive.

On another level there is what seems like a purely individual and subjective part of the experience which, if we boil it down, only occurred to two people (that we know of, at least): Marco and Marianne. This is also where we find the most exotic descriptions – the shape and color of the craft, its movement, the time-warping, the sense of being watched, as well as the aftereffects that manifested (In Marco’s case, a complete change of lifestyle). In a way it seems like these experiences were meant only for these two people, and only one at a time.

But even though most of it seems very individual, how do we explain that so many of the core details can be found in both encounters?  Focusing on the personality traits of UFO experiencers that I mentioned earlier, which Marianne fulfills almost to a tee, some degree of deviation becomes apparent. Marco doesn’t seem to me as nearly the same kind of person. In fact I could only really pinpoint a few elements of experience-proneness that he somewhat conformed to. So if the whole case wasn’t already complicated enough, we also have to explain how Marco could have this experience to begin with, years before meeting Marianne, if he is not even the experience-prone type. Here again I think we should take note of the unusual weather conditions at the time. There are lots of other cases on record involving strange - in fact, often pink-colored - clouds, which include the same temporal distortions as Marco (and Marianne) experienced. Jenny Randles explored many of these in her excellent book Time Storms.

We also need to explain why Marianne suddenly saw what she saw, so many years later. She did not notice anything unusual about the weather, but did mention that it was extremely humid. This humidity could perhaps be linked in some way to a weather phenomenon similar to the one involved in Marco's encounter. Besides this, there is the aspect of Marianne’s experience occurring immediately after having sex with Marco. I left this part out in my original article for UFO-mail, but in fact I think it is highly relevant, whether or not one thinks of the case in “mystical” terms. Of course you might say that there is a good case for explaining Marianne’s sighting as an advanced after-effect of unintended sex magick, but even if this is uncomfortable for the more materialistically-oriented people out there to hear, I will suggest that it is not too far out to simply look at it in terms of an altered state of consciousness.

In addition to the above, we of course can not ignore the fact that Marco could have influenced her with the story of his own experience. In fact it is very likely that he did on some level, although neither of the two remember it. There were also many popular UFO movies, books etc. (X-Files was huge here around that time), which Marianne could have sought out for information. It was not my impression that she had even the slightest interest in those things, though, and the same goes for Marco, for that matter.



Conclusion(s)?


If asked to speculate freely, I would connect the dots in the following way:

  • Marco has a UFO experience at a young age that may or may not have been triggered, in part, by an exotic weather phenomenon
  • This phenomenon somehow interferes with both the electricity in the area and somehow also with his mind, creating an altered state of consciousness that makes him hallucinate a metallic object flying over him. It changes him, in fact so much that he becomes an almost different person afterwards, similar to people undergoing a mystical experience.
  • Years later, he manages to affect Marianne – an encounter-prone person who has a unique ability to easily and vividly imagine geometrical shapes , just by closing her eyes –with ideas of this oddly shaped UFO. He might even have told her in detail about it on several occasions, without remembering it.
  • One night, one or more stimulations put Marianne into an altered state of consciousness. During this state she recalls the details Marco’s UFO so strongly that she actually believes she sees it in front of her.
  • This state of consciousness- the Oz Factor or whatever we choose to call it - may be so similar in “feeling” from person to person, no matter what initially triggers it, that both Marianne and Marco were able to have an experience in the same basic way.
  • Marianne, however, being the more encounter-prone type of person, has an even closer encounter with the “object” and experiences even more dramatic effects that Marco did.

There are of course still many aspects that are harder to explain, such as.

  • Why the distinct shape of this object and why did there even “have” to be one in the first place, that moved synchronously with the power outage?
  • Why does it appear to be “shielding” itself from more than one person at the time? One gets the feeling that these episodes happened exactly because no one else could see them, which was noted by both Marco and Marianne. Especially ‘Marianne said that she thought it was noteworthy, how the object could just about avoid detection from other people in the area, by appearing in front of her particular window.
  • Why did Marianne experience so many of both the physical and mental aftereffects that we see in abduction cases from the same period – and indeed still do – such as strange markings, dreams centering on aliens reproductive aspects and a fascination with owls? And more puzzlingly, why should Christian have indications of these too, perhaps even before meeting Marianne?

Whatever the final answer may be, this was the case where I finally realized, that putting only one or two tags on UFO's doesn’t always work. There are a variety of external and personal factors involved that can trigger unusual experiences, made up of imagery that people are not even aware that they have. The case also made me realize that this is actually what makes the investigation of close encounter UFO cases such an interesting – as well as creative – endeavor. As to what the true source of that creativity really is – that, in my opinion, is still not fully explained.