Time Distortions and the UFO Experience

For most people, spotting a UFO would be considered extremely unusual, but for two Ohio women, seeing a UFO was the least surprising part of their experience.

In June 2001, two sisters, Angie Whitmeyer and Deborah Simmons, were returning from a day of shopping in Dayton, Ohio, when a strange light in the sky caught their attention.

“We were heading home to Kingman, Ohio, on State Road 73,” Deborah recalled. “It was a beautiful evening around 8:30 p.m., the air was warm and the sky crystal clear. Angie was driving and I was watching the scenery go by when I noticed a bright light in the western sky.”

Deborah watched in amazement as the light grew in intensity and flew towards the car at an incredible speed.

“Deborah asked me what that weird light was,” said Angie. “But we were close to Caesar Creek Lake and the road was pretty dark so I wasn’t paying a lot of attention to it. But then it flew right in front of us so I couldn’t miss it.”

The bright light soared past the car and hovered over the nearby treetops, casting an eerie glow over the entire area. Whitmeyer pulled the car over onto the side of the road so they could get a better look at the unusual object.

Deborah was shocked by how large and close the UFO was to them: “The light was so bright and white that you couldn’t see any shape behind it. But we could tell it was pretty big, at least as big as a house. The funny thing was that I couldn’t hear any sort of engine like you would normally hear with an airplane or helicopter. It was completely silent.”

Suddenly, another, identical bright light swooped down from the sky and hovered a short distance away. The two sisters decided the situation was becoming too strange and tried to drive away.

“That’s when I discovered that the car had stopped and I couldn’t restart it,” Angie said. “Nothing worked, the lights, the radio, it was completely dead.”

The two women also noticed an odd silence had descended over the area, accompanied by a strange feeling of isolation. Angie remembered that it seemed as if they were the only people in the world.

“I don’t remember seeing another car come by during the entire time we were there, which is really weird because at that time of an evening there’s always traffic on that road. And it was just dead silent outside, no birds, nothing. It was as if we were in another world.”

Uncertain what to do next, Angie and her sister continued to watch the strange pair of lights, when, unexpectedly, both objects shot straight up and disappeared into the night sky. The area was plunged into darkness, and oddly enough, the normal sounds of the night came back almost as if switched on.

“As soon as the lights flew away,” Deborah said, “the car started running again all by itself. The lights and radio were on just as they were before everything happened.”

According to their watches, the strange encounter had lasted more than 20 minutes. However, when they arrived home, Deborah’s husband seemed unconcerned about what they thought was a late arrival. That’s when they discovered that instead of being after 9:00 p.m., as their wristwatches indicated, it was only 8:35 p.m.

“It was as if the entire time we spent looking at those lights had never happened,” Angie said. “But it did happen, our watches both showed we had been stuck out there for over 20 minutes, but somehow we gained that time back with a few minutes to spare. Normally we should have been home at around ten to nine, but somehow, despite what had happened, we got there early.”

How the Mainstream Press..

On November 26, 2002, North American Aerospace Defense Command began receiving reports of a contrail of unknown origin in the air over the Turks and Caicos Islands in the Caribbean. Fighter jets were scrambled from several bases to intercept the unknown that was heading northwest toward the U.S., but reportedly, nothing was spotted. Commercial airline pilots later reported the contrail over Florida and later over Indiana.

This fascinating report received scant attention in the U.S. press, which is unusual considering the zeal for "national security" that has been rampant since 9/11. The thought is disturbing that an unknown aircraft could fly with impunity over the United States and receive only a few paragraphs in local papers. What could possibly explain this odd lack of curiosity by the national media?

Actually, the failure of the press to respond to this story is no surprise considering that the mainstream press has developed the attitude that UFO reports are strictly for the tabloids. This position has become so pervasive that when some editors and journalists have attempted serious, well researched, UFO investigations, they found themselves isolated by their peers.

The popular misconception is that UFOs are seen only by the uneducated, the mentally ill, or hoaxers seeking personal gain. Because of this, many think that any reporter interested in handling such a story must also be so inclined. Heaven help a journalist who has had a personal UFO experience and attempts to report on it. He may face severe questions concerning his credibility as a journalist.

There had been some hope within the UFO community that the subject of UFOs would be given fair treatment when ABC ran the special Peter Jennings Reporting: UFOs - Seeing Is Believing on February 24 2005. However, the program had little to do with objectively reporting on the UFO phenomenon and instead dealt more with debunking the extraterrestrial hypothesis, treating the subject as if this was the only explanation for UFOs. For those who have been active over the years in UFO research, the ABC show was just more of the same when it comes to the media's mind-set towards the phenomena.

According to the current attitude with the news media, there has never been anything mysterious about UFO sightings; they can all be easily explained away with glib, uninformed blanket statements. However, this has not always been the case. In the late 1940's the mainstream press regularly covered UFO reports. At that time UFOs were a relatively unknown phenomenon and had not been tainted by the "lunatic fringe" that would surface in the 1950's and 60's. By then, most media outlets had become discouraged by the lack of progress in explaining UFOs and little, if any, verifiable evidence.

By the time the seventies had rolled around, UFO stories were permanently consigned to the back pages next to the horoscope column. Except for local, small town papers, the news media rarely reports UFO sightings. When they do, the subject is presented as a "feature story," not to be taken seriously. In large metropolitan newspapers, the occasional UFO report that does gets printed is usually restricted to the paper's entertainment section.

There has been one recent exception to this trend and that was the November 7, 2006 sighting of a UFO over O'Hare Airport in Chicago. Although it was not until January 1, 2007 that the Chicago Tribune decided to run a report about the O'Hare incident, when the story did finally hit the Tribune's pages, the story was intelligently written with none of the condescending attitude or editorializing that usually accompanies UFO reports.

Doctors and experts on Alioshenka

Igor Uskov, an urologist with a local hospital, was on duty on that day. A telephone rang in his office about midday. He burst out laughing when policeman on the other end of the line told him the reason why his services were required.

“The dead body of an alien? Stop kidding me, will you?”

“Doctor, you’d better take a look at it yourself …”

Dr. Uskov was the first medical professional to examine the body. He reckoned that it might as well be a human fetus aged some 20 weeks. Dr. Uskov asked his colleague Irina Ermolayeva, a gynecologist, for a second opinion. Dr. Ermolayeva agreed that the body looked very much like an underdeveloped fetus expelled from the womb prematurely i.e. a miscarriage.

The doctors’ verdict was music for Bendlin’s eyes. Everything was falling into place. The strange thing was not an alien any more; it was a human fetus, yet another case of illegal abortion. The investigator had dealt with several cases of illegal abortion before. He expected to close the case right after getting an autopsist’s opinion. Bendlin hoped that the autopsist would tell him that the fetus was either stillborn or too underdeveloped to live, and therefore the case would be not be a matter for further investigation.

Stanislav Samoshkin, a chief of morbid anatomy department at the Kyshtym hospital, didn’t smile and make cheesy jokes about aliens when the policemen brought the creature to his office. He performed a thorough autopsy on the body of the dwarf. And then he announced that the creature was neither a human being nor an animal. According to him, it was some new life form.

I met Dr. Samoshkin several years after the Kyshtym dwarf caused a worldwide sensation. According to him, he never doubted the conclusion he reached on that day.

“The creature was not by any means a human being. The human skull consists of six bones. The skull of that creature was made up of 4 bones. There were other differences in the skeleton structure. Those anomalies didn’t look like any congenital malformations known to date,” Dr. Samoshkin said.

The curse of Alioshenka

The dwarf from Kyshtym did not do any harm to anybody while he was in the land of the living. Some really weird things began to happen following the death of the creature. The old lady, a “godmother” of Alioshenka the Alien, died in a hit-and-run accident. The woman was knocked down by a car just a few days before a team of researchers arrived in the town from Moscow.

The body of the dwarf vanished without a trace. An investigator assigned to the case is reported to have handed the corpse to some perpetrators who walked off with it. A Japanese TV crew arrived in Kyshtym to do a documentary on Alioshenka. The Japanese posted a reward of $200,000 for information on the whereabouts of the stolen creature. However, their attempts to locate the body of the dwarf ended in failure. A minute piece of the dead body was the only hard evidence the Japanese somehow managed to recover. The Japanese displayed the object for the benefit of the cameras.

Academician Mark Milkhiker looked into the Kyshtym phenomenon on location. He carefully examined the area in which the dwarf was found. Milkhiker fell seriously ill shortly after he returned to Moscow. He died of a sudden heart attack while in hospital.

The above Vadim Chernobrov was also taken ill four years after the discovery of the dwarf. A mysterious disease paralyzed him from the waist down. Doctors were unable to explain the cause of his disease. It was Chernobrov who found a piece of fabric used by the old lady for wrapping around the dwarf on the day she found him.

Were all those misfortunes a coincidence? Did the alien really put a curse on everyone who tried to solve his mystery?

It is clear that Deguchi Masao, a producer of the Japanese documentary on Alioshenka, fell victim to his own naivety that borders on idiocy. What did he do? He promised to pay cash to locals who could share their memories of the dwarf with his crew. Needless to say, the news spread across the town like wildfire. Dozens of bums and drunkards formed a long line around the house where the Japanese were interviewing “eyewitnesses.” It took the producer a while to realize that all those incredible accounts of the event were a fake.

I have been following the Kyshtym phenomenon since it came to light in 1996. I visited Kyshtym several times to get firsthand information from those who were part of the story. Now it is about time I dusted off my old notebooks containing real eyewitness accounts so that we can separate a few grains of truth from a collection of assorted conjectures and speculations.

I am quite confident that the mummified body of the creature is not a myth. There are numerous witnesses who saw the dead body of Alioshenka. Major (Ret.) Vladimir Bendlin, a former investigator with the police department of Kyshtym, is the most important witness.

On a rainy summer morning the police detained one Vladimir Nurtdinov, a local resident suspected of stealing electrical wire. The police confiscated a bundle the man was carrying. Having removed a piece of red cloth from the object, the police were amazed to see a small mummified body of a strange creature. The police placed the corpse on the cloth and videotaped it. Bendlin noticed on the spot that the creature looked like an alien, in a way aliens are usually portrayed in sci-fi movies. The creature looked stone-cold and lifeless. It felt the same by touch.

Bendlin opened investigation into the case of an “alien.” A dead body found under the circumstances normally entails a police investigation. In line with regulation, the police were supposed to determine the cause of death of the strange being.

Russian geneticists to reveal alien’s DNA mystery

Scientists may soon unravel the mystery of the “Uralian alien,” a tiny creature found near the town of Kyshtym in the Urals. Scientists carried out five series of laboratory studies investigating the DNA samples of the creature’s biological material.

The latest study conducted by a Moscow-based Institute of Forensic Medicine produced sensational results.

“A gene discovered in the DNA samples doesn’t correspond with any genes pertaining to humans or anthropoid apes,” said Vadim Chernobrov, a coordinator with the public research center Kosmopoisk. “No gene samples available at the laboratory match the gene. The experts in DNA research haven’t come across any creatures with such an elongated DNA molecule,” Chernobrov added.

Scientists have been looking for an explanation of the Kyshtym phenomenon for more than ten years. The story began in the summer of 1996 after a miniature creature was found in the Chelyabinsk region. The find was soon dubbed the “Kyshtym alien.” A local medical examiner who performed an autopsy concluded that the dead body was neither human nor animal in nature.

Ufologists regarded the Kyshtym dwarf as a clear-cut case of the extraterrestrial. The clergy believe the dwarf was a demon. The creature was still alive when it was found by an old and barely literate woman. She was the only one who gave the dwarf a human name – Alioshenka (a diminutive of the Russian name “Alexei” – ed. note).

Alien recoveries

The two Air Force reports on the Roswell UFO incident, published in 1994/5 and 1997, form the basis for much of the skeptical explanation for the 1947 incident, the purported recovery of aliens and their craft from the vicinity of Roswell, New Mexico.

The first report, “The Roswell Report: Fact verses Fiction in the New Mexico Desert,” identified a secret military research program called Project Mogul as the source of the debris reported in 1947. The second report, "The Roswell Report: Case Closed” concluded that reports of alien recoveries were likely misidentified military programs or accidents.

Based on the evidence which could be gathered, the report concluded that the 1947 incident was not an airplane crash, a missile crash, a nuclear accident, or the recovery of an extraterrestrial craft. Obviously, the latter conclusion was the key one. “…the research indicated absolutely no evidence of any kind [italics in original] that a spaceship crashed near Roswell or that any alien occupants were recovered therefrom, in some secret military operation or otherwise.”
The overwhelming focus of the military at the time was on something more down-to-earth, the report noted: “All the records… indicated that the focus of concern was not on aliens, hostile or otherwise, but on the Soviet Union.”

While the report acknowledged that there would be some who would label the report itself as part of the “cover up,” and would probably assert that evidence corroborating alien recoveries at Roswell or nearby remained hidden or was destroyed, an assertion nearly impossible to disprove, evidence showing the increased activity which would surely be associated with a cover up operation of such a seminal event was also completely lacking, making the assertion that something was being hidden extremely unlikely. “There were no indications and warnings, notice of alerts, or a higher tempo of operational activity reported that would be logically generated if an alien craft, whose intentions were unknown, entered US territory.” The report also refuted claims that several specific high-ranking military personnel were engaged in activities surrounding a recovery of aliens and a cover-up during the time in question by tracing their actual documented activities.

In eliminating an alien recovery as the source of the incident, the report concluded: “… if some event happened that was one of the ‘watershed happenings’ in human history, the US military certainly reacted in an unconcerned and cavalier manner. In an actual case, the military would have had to order thousands of soldiers and airmen, not only at Roswell but throughout the US, to act nonchalantly, pretend to conduct and report business as usual, and generate absolutely no paperwork of a suspicious nature, while simultaneously anticipating that twenty years or more into the future people would have available a comprehensive Freedom of Information Act that would give them great leeway to review and explore government documents. The records indicate that none of this happened (or if it did, it was controlled by a security system so efficient and tight that no one, US or otherwise, has been able to duplicate it since. If such a system had been in effect at the time, it would have also been used to protect our atomic secrets from the Soviets, which history has showed obviously was not the case). The records reviewed confirmed that no such sophisticated and efficient security system existed.”

UFO Crashes

On July 8, 1995, the Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF) issued a press release stating that personnel from the field's 509th Bomb Group had recovered a crashed "flying disc" from a ranch near Roswell, sparking intense media interest. Later the same day, the Commanding General of the Eighth Air Force stated that, in fact, a weather balloon had been recovered by RAAF personnel, rather than a "flying saucer." A subsequent press conference was called, featuring debris said to be from the crashed object that seemed to confirm the weather balloon description. The case was quickly forgotten and almost completely ignored, even by UFO researchers, for more than 30 years. Then, in 1978, ufologist Stanton T. Friedman interviewed Major Jesse Marcel, who was involved with the original recovery of the debris in 1947. Marcel expressed his belief that the military had covered up the recovery of an alien spacecraft. His story circulated through UFO circles, being featured in some UFO documentaries at the time.

In response to these reports, and after congressional inquiries, the General Accounting Office launched an inquiry and directed the Office of the Secretary of the Air Force to conduct an internal investigation. The result was summarized in two reports. The first, released in 1995, concluded that the reported recovered material in 1947 was likely debris from a secret government program called Project Mogul. The second report, released in 1997, concluded that reports of recovered alien bodies were likely a combination of innocently transformed memories of military accidents involving injured or killed personnel, and the recovery of anthropomorphic dummies in military programs like Project High Dive conducted in the 1950s, and hoaxes perpetrated by various witnesses and UFO proponents. The psychological effects of time compression and confusion about when events occurred explained the discrepancy with the years in question. These reports were dismissed by UFO proponents as being either disinformation or simply implausible, though significant numbers of UFO researchers discount the probability that any alien crash was in fact involved