Ufology Research

To Celebrate World UFO Day, here’s a list of the Top 5 Strangest UFO Cases

Kelly-Hopkinsville Close Encounter

The leading UFO researcher of the early days of ufology called the Kelly-Hopkinsville case “preposterous” and offensive to “common sense.” Despite this, the case as a whole is difficult to refute, and many investigators consider it a solid example of a close encounter of the third kind.

At around 7:00 pm on Sunday, August 21, 1955, nearly a dozen members of an extended family began experiencing encounters with strange monkey-like creatures surrounding their farmhouse near Kelly, Kentucky. The creatures were about three-and-a-half feet tall, with large heads, bulbous glowing eyes, pointy ears, with clawed hands on the end of long arms. The family even shot at the creatures, who instead of being taken down, did backwards flips and righted themselves again and floated gently down to the ground and scampered off. Throughout the next hour, creatures seemed to scurry in the shadows around the house, dashing around trees and outbuildings. The family heard scraping noises on their roof, as if clawed feet were moving around up there. The creatures poked their heads in windows and darted around the house.

The seven adult witnesses and later their children were interviewed by reporters several times over the next few days. Skeptics assumed that the witnesses had been drunk or hallucinating, leading the family to simply stop granting interviews after a short while. Another theory offered was that the family had seen monkeys escaped from a zoo, but the witnesses insisted they had been close enough to see if the creatures were ordinary animals.

Joe Simonton’s Pancakes

On April 18, 1961, just before lunch, farmer Joe Simonton heard an odd noise outside his home and ran outside just in time to see a silver, egg-shaped object land in his yard, hovering over the ground. A hatch opened and inside he could see three “men,” with dark complexions, “like Italians,” and dark hair. They wore a uniform consisting of a kind of turtleneck sweater and close-fitting headgear.

One of the “men” saw Simonton and held up a silvery jug with a handle and Simonton figured that he wanted it filled with water, so he went to a tap and filled it up. Simonton saw that one of the “men” was sitting at a flat counter, apparently “cooking” something on a “stovetop.” He pointed at the “grill” and one of the “men” passed Simonton three “pancakes” — small, flat cookielike things with numerous holes. They closed the hatch and the craft took off.

One of the “pancakes” was eventually given to the US Air Force for studying, another went to a civilian UFO group, and Simonton attempted to eat the other. He noted that it tasted like cardboard.

The USAF directed the Food and Drug Laboratory of the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare to test it, and later reported the cake was “composed of hydrogenated fat, starch, buckwheat hulls, soy bean hulls and wheat bran... [and] the material was an ordinary pancake of terrestrial origin.”

The Tully Saucer Nests

Probably the best-known historical UFO case in Australia is that of the Tully saucer “nests.” A possible precursor to the famed “crop circles” of England in the 1980s and 1990s, the Tully incident occurred in a remote area in north Queensland on January 19, 1966.

Around 9:00 am on a clear and warm summer morning near Horseshoe Lagoon, banana farmer George Pedley was driving his tractor along an access road on the property of a neighbor when he was surprised to see a gray, football-shaped object, like two saucers glued rim to rim, rising from the ground about 75 to 100 feet up the road. It seemed to be about 25 feet in diameter and slightly less than 10 feet in thickness, and it appeared to be spinning.

When it had flown away, Pedley found a circular area that had been swept clean of reeds and the water there was rotating slowly, approximately of the same estimated dimensions as the object. The grass initially appeared green when newly fallen but turned brown quickly.

He went to tell the marsh’s owner, who noted that his dog had been in a frenzy and barking in the direction of the marsh that morning. Furthermore, he told Pedley that he had been having odd dreams about a UFO landing on his property. He went with Pedley to visit the area, taking photographs and even wading into the swamp and diving underneath the floating mat of reeds to discover their roots had all been cut away. RAAF records confirmed that there were no aircraft in the area at the time of the sighting.

Antonio Villas-Boas

There are Close Encounters — and then there is what happened to Antonio Villas-Boas in 1957. He had what could be described as the Closest Encounter. You see, he didn’t just see a UFO, he went in one. And he didn’t just get abducted, he was violated.

On October 15, 1957, Antonio was ploughing a field and noticed an odd, red-colored star in the sky. It was moving towards him and getting perceptibly bigger as it approached. The object eventually took up a position about 150 feet over his head, and seemed to be an egg-shaped object that cast a very bright pinkish light around his tractor. It dived from its position and landed only about 35 feet in front of his tractor.

Completely “freaked out,” he started the tractor and attempted to drive off, but its engine died. He then opened the door away tried to run away but was grabbed by three small creatures who lifted him in the air and carried him into the craft.

Inside, Antonio was forcibly undressed and then was given a sponge bath with a thick, clear odorless liquid. He was then put into a room with metal walls with thin tubes from which was being emitted puffs of smoke or colored gas. His discomfort increased and he became very nauseous, eventually vomiting in a corner of the room. A door opened suddenly, and a female creature looking “not quite human” entered the room and immediately made it clear what she wanted. Before long, the alien seduction was over. The male creatures came back into the room, gave him his clothes, he dressed quickly and then was led outside into the field. The craft took off and Antonio was left to reflect on his cosmic quickie.

Dr. Olavo Fontes of Rio de Janeiro had examined Villas-Boas and was puzzled by his story and physiological effects. He was convinced that Antonio had not simply made up the story because he had been reluctant to even come forward with the details. Furthermore, if it had been simply a sexual fantasy, surely he could have done better, as Antonio said that the female alien didn’t even have lips for kissing!

Villas-Boas kept to himself for many years, refusing all interviews. However, in 1978, he agreed to be interviewed on Brazilian TV, primarily to set the record straight about the many different versions and embellishments of his story over the intervening years. He was a learned man, having become a practising lawyer in Brasilia, and was married with several children. He had not discussed his experience in any detail, even with them. Until his death, he maintained that his experience had been real and that he had not been making any of it up. He did not profit from his story and he did not seek any fame or celebrity status, which he certainly could have received had he tried.

The Manhattan Abductions

In contrast to Antonio Villas-Boas, who refused interviews and went to great lengths to remain out of the limelight, the case of Linda Napolitano is one of notoriety and public attention. And rightly so, for many of the claims surrounding the case are fantastic and allegedly involve prominent individuals.

In May 1989, she began corresponding with abduction researcher Budd Hopkins about some odd experiences she had that seemed to be related to aliens. But six months later, on November 30, she called Hopkins in great distress because of a very traumatic dreamlike memory she had of a bizarre encounter with “them” during the previous night. She said she remembered waking up at about 3:15 am and finding small alien creatures around her bed. Before she knew it, she was somehow floating outside her downtown Manhattan apartment in her nightgown, many stories above the ground, beneath a bright bluish-white light.

In February 1991, Budd Hopkins received a letter from someone describing himself as a police officer, who wrote of an amazing experience he and his partner had in November 1989. He wrote that very early one morning, they had been a patrol car underneath FDR Bridge when they suddenly noticed a bluish light near a tall apartment building in front of them. They were even more surprised to see the figure of a woman floating in the air underneath the light, accompanied by three odd-looking creatures who were also suspended in midair. They entered the light, which had now been resolved to that of an oval object, and it then flew off behind the Brooklyn Bridge where the astonished officers watched it descend and enter the water, disappearing from sight.

This observation greatly unnerved the men. In fact, after their experience, they had been very troubled with guilt because they had been unable to do anything to prevent the woman from being abducted. A few weeks later, Napolitano contacted Hopkins with the news that the two men had shown up at her door. They had said they were not actually policemen but “detectives” named “Richard” and “Dan.” The story changed even more: Richard and Dan were not police or security guards, but bodyguards whose job it was to protect and escort “an important political figure.” This third man also saw the object and Linda’s aerial abduction, even though Richard and Dan had made him lay down in the back seat of the vehicle, out of harm’s way. Speculation was that this third person was Javier Perez de Cuellar, former Secretary General of the United Nations.

Linda and members of her family had several meetings with Richard or Dan throughout the next several months, with more letters and some audiotapes coming to light. At no time did Hopkins himself ever meet Richard or Dan, leading some researchers to suggest that the entire thing was an elaborate hoax perpetrated by Napolitano herself.

Complicating the issue were events such as Linda’s claim of an abduction in broad daylight on a street corner by none other than Richard and Dan themselves. Dan accused her of being “one of them” — an alien hybrid half-human, having “alien blood” coursing through her veins. Her captors even examined her feet to see if she had toes (as they knew aliens do not).

On another occasion, Linda was abducted and taken by Dan to a remote oceanfront location on Long Island where he forced her to put on a nightgown similar to the one she had worn on the night of the alien abduction. He also attempted to have sexual relations with her, twisting her arm and overpowering her, then forcing her head under water when she resisted.