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Jerry Black is looking for UFOs. A sighting has been reported somewhere over rural Blanchester and, as the cool fields grow dark, he monitors the sky expectantly. For Black, maybe tonight will be the night. Perhaps, for just an instant, he’ll see something unusual moving above the tree line, blotting out the clean, bright stars. More likely, though, like last night and the night before it, he’ll see nothing.
Balding, soft-spoken, vowels drawn out by living in the country, Black has been investigating UFOs for more than 40 years. He even met his wife in 1973 after she claimed aliens abducted her. Together, they’ve collected thousands of local eyewitness accounts of UFO sightings and other close encounters.
“I’m in the business of researching, scientifically and objectively, UFOs,” says Black matter-of-factly. “I just wish I had an answer for you people.
I wish I could tell you that UFOs are, you know, nothing to worry about. But they’ve frightened a lot of people. They’ve scared a lot of people.”
Even so, says Black, there isn’t a shred of evidence that UFOs are extraterrestrial, that they’ve ever landed on Earth or that aliens have abducted people. In 92 percent of cases, UFOs reported by rattled eyewitnesses turn out to be aircraft, mistaken celestial bodies and other natural phenomena or elaborate hoaxes, he says.
But that still leaves 8 percent; and it’s these remaining cases, the ones that cannot easily be explained, that most interest Jerry Black. For four decades, he’s tried to expose the hoaxes, the false claims and the lackluster investigating and focus on the cases that, even after thorough investigation, cannot be explained.
“The industry has kind of gone to pot,” 61-year-old Black says, wearily. “It seems like everybody out there is more interested in money than telling the truth about UFOs.”
Something’s out thereSomething’s out there
The acronym UFO stands for Unidentified Flying Object, Black says, and whatever their origin, there have been enough sightings of strange objects in the sky to take them seriously and investigate them properly.
“There’s something out there,” he says. “You can believe what you want to believe, but there’s something out there.”
And plenty of people agree. To get some idea of the number of UFO eyewitness reports logged each year, one need look no further than the recently published The UFO Evidence (Scarecrow Press) by Richard H. Hall. Included is an exhaustive and chronological collection of UFO reports from 1952 to 1995. It’s all here: luminous objects outpacing airplanes, scorched landing sites and mutilated livestock; cone-shaped objects, cigar-shaped objects, globes, balls and spheres; silver-suited beings, stocky humanoids with grayish skin; alien abductions, abrupt weight loss, burned skin and amnesia; secret desert rendezvous, government cover-ups, conspiracies and interrogations.
Although these accounts date back to 1952, the story really began five years earlier on July 3, 1947, when something strange happened in the arid scrubland near Roswell, N.M. According to the Air Force, a weather balloon crashed in the desert. But, almost immediately, rumors surfaced of disc-shaped objects, little men, deep gouges in the ground and a trail of scattered debris.
There in the thin desert air, as confused reports were confirmed and then abruptly denied, the study of UFOs, or “ufology,” was born. Whatever really happened at Roswell in 1947, the incident and the uncertainty surrounding it still serve as a backdrop to our perception of 1940s American culture. That same year, the House Un-American Activities Committee convened to blacklist suspected Communists, the CIA was formed and the Cold War began in earnest.
As a result, government secrecy, conspiracy theories and ufology also were conceived, and, more than 50 years later, all three continue to thrive.
Today there’s even a musical based on the Roswell incident — imaginatively titled Roswell: The Musical — a musical comedy/drama in two acts. It’s expected to open for a fifth season this year at Roswell Amphitheater. On TV, there’s the WB’s cult favorite Roswell, full of teen-age angst set to a Modern Rock soundtrack.
As for Jerry Black, his interest in UFOs began not too long after Roswell, in the mid-1950s, while still attending Hughes High School in Clifton.
“I was actually researching and investigating UFOs when I was 16 years old,” Black recalls. “I was tremendously interested in UFOs.”
Fellow students and teachers alike knew Black was the school’s resident expert.
“I wasn’t interested in the Buck Rogers stuff or whatever,” he says. “It really leaves me at odds to explain my interest in the subject.”
To properly investigate cases, Black has assembled what he calls “a little empire.” Its inhabitants include photographic experts, soil analysts, psychologists, other UFO investigators and staff in the air traffic control towers of both Lunken and Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky airports who can verify sightings.
Black says that, besides collecting thousands of eyewitness accounts, he has thoroughly investigated as many as 15 to 20 UFO sightings or alien abduction claims. In 1988, he had his own sighting of strange luminous objects while driving along a dark highway with his wife.
Recalling an early investigation, Black says one of his schoolteachers claimed she was seeing UFOs regularly, always from the same window of her house. On visiting the teacher, Black was surprised by what he found.
“I saw what I perceived to be the moon, a full moon,” he says. Disappointed, Black says he told the teacher that the bright object above the treetops was just the moon.
“She gets real close,” he says, “and she whispers in my ear, ‘How do you know it’s the moon?’ ”
During the late 1980s, Black researched a much-publicized spate of UFO sightings in Gulf Breeze, a sun-drenched coastal town on Florida’s Panhandle near Pensacola. Beginning in November 1987, Gulf Breeze resident Ed Walters captured images that clearly showed a brightly lit disc suspended in the night sky. Over the next few years, Walters took several other photographs and also claimed he was being abducted by aliens on a regular basis.
“Gulf Breeze cost me $2,000 to $4,000, and I didn’t even leave my house,” Black says. “I spent four-and-a-half years and almost lost my wife over it, seriously, because I spent so much time and so much money. I became obsessed with the Gulf Breeze sightings.”
Black says Walters photographed homemade UFO models and then double-exposed the film to make it appear as if the UFO was flying over the trees near his home.
“We found one (of the models) in his home after he moved,” Black says. “He took a picture himself of this model, with a light underneath it, and then left it in the camera, went outside, took a picture of the night sky, and there it was — a UFO.”
Something’s out thereBlue Light Special
The Gulf Breeze sightings, and those of Black’s schoolteacher, represent the 92 percent of cases that can be explained with careful investigation. Whether by untangling well-wrought hoaxes or trying to make sense of confused eyewitness accounts, most of Black’s other cases have been resolved, too.
But in 1976, after 20 years of researching UFOs, Black finally worked on a case that couldn’t be solved, a case that still baffles him today.
On Jan. 6, 1976, at about 11:15 p.m., driver Louise Smith and passengers Mona Stafford and Elaine Thomas were traveling along U.S. Route 27 in Stanford, Ky., about an hour south of Lexington, when they claim they were abducted by aliens.
“The women in Kentucky were driving down the highway in 1976, coming back from leaving the Redwood restaurant,” Black says quietly. “They were leaving the restaurant in a very happy mood, because they had just celebrated Mona’s birthday. All of a sudden they saw this object in the sky which they perceived to be an airplane on fire. The object appeared to be red in color and coming, dropping from the sky. They assumed this was an airplane on fire and were bracing themselves to see if it was going to crash somewhere near there.
“All of a sudden the object stopped on a dime. That’s one of the characteristics of UFOs that we don’t have.”
With the disc-shaped UFO clearly visible through the side windows of Smith’s 1967 Chevy Nova, the car began to accelerate, Black says. Although Smith took her foot off the gas pedal, the car continued to go faster, reaching speeds of 85 miles per hour. As Smith struggled to control the car, the women never lost sight of the brightly lit UFO, keeping pace with them over the treetops.
“It hung right above the trees less than, you know, less than 100 feet in the air,” he says. “The women were terrified. It went behind the car, revolving lights going round, these were yellow lights, took the car, pulled the car backwards.”
According to Black, the women later recalled that when the car was pulled backwards, “We could feel these bumps in the road, like at a Frisch’s or whatever.”
“They saw a blue light come into the car,” says Black, “and Louise, the driver, said, ‘Oh, it’s the Highway Patrol.’ But as it turned out, it wasn’t the Highway Patrol. The blue light was a UFO. The next thing they remember was back on the highway, riding in the car, they were quite hot just like they had been subjected to extreme heat or put under a sunlamp or whatever. When they got back home, they realized they had lost an hour and 25 minutes worth of time.”
The women, burned and shaken, immediately went to a neighbor’s house, says Black, and the neighbor told them to draw what they had seen and write down what they remembered about it.
“We came into the case several months later,” he recalls. “We contacted the women. They were reluctant to talk to us, and we finally convinced them with my wife coming down.”
Black says his wife believes she was abducted by aliens in 1973 and, by relating her own abduction experience to the women, gained their trust. During the investigation, Black subjected all three women to lie-detector test, or polygraphs, and they all passed.
“Under hypnosis, all three women claimed that they were taken aboard this object and given a physical examination,” he says. “Elaine was put in a glass cubicle. It was pretty dark, but she could see the figures of small beings walking around the glass outside. She had a skin scraping taken off of her chest. Mona had her eyes actually removed from her sockets, she claims, laid on her cheeks and replaced again.”
The women claimed their arms and legs were twisted in a very painful manner, he says, but when they were asked if they felt like they had been tortured, they all said no.
“We’ve got eight hours of tapes of hypnosis of these women and, believe me, they’re not pleasant to hear,” Black says. “Most of it, they’re crying. To this day, I have no reason to believe those women were perpetrating a hoax.”
According to Hall’s The UFO Evidence, which includes a report of the incident, all three women suffered eye inflammation, excessive thirst, abrupt weight loss and skin burns that took weeks to heal. Following the women’s experience, Louise Smith’s watch, alarm clocks and car malfunctioned and, in 1978, two years after the incident, Elaine Thomas died of unknown causes.
Although he investigated the case almost 25 years ago, Black still keeps in touch with the two surviving women. As each year passes, he says he believes less and less that UFOs could be extraterrestrial in origin. If it weren’t for the Stanford, Ky., abductions, Black says, he might have stopped believing altogether.
Something’s out thereTrue believers
The abduction claims of Louise Smith, Mona Stafford and Elaine Thomas are unusual, says Black, but not unique.
“There’s still thousands of people on this planet, sincere people like yourself, like me, like anyone walking out on the street today, who sincerely believe they were abducted,” he says frankly. “Thousands of women, sitting in their home, housewives looking out the window, see this strange object in the daytime approach the house. And all of a sudden the next thing they remember, the food on the stove is burning or the kids are home from school and they can’t account for the lost time.”
When investigating a case, Black likes to polygraph his subjects to determine that they’re being truthful.
“I believe in the use of a polygraph test in nationally known cases,” he says. “That doesn’t mean that if you come to me and say, ‘Jerry, I’d like to meet you at Frisch’s, I want to tell you about some lost time I had back 10 years ago.’ No, I’m not going to polygraph you.”
And scientists probably wouldn’t polygraph you either, whether your story was a national one or not. Recent research has provided them with several other credible explanations for UFO sightings and abductions, most of which involve some kind of psychological disorder or neurological problem.
According to a 1993 paper published in Journal of Abnormal Psychology, either UFO reporters are “psychologically or psychosocially disturbed” or “fantasy-prone individuals who … confuse their vivid imaginings with external happenings.”
Researchers also found that 81 percent of alleged abductions occur at night and, according to victim’s accounts, almost 60 percent are linked with sleep, occurring as they fall asleep, while they dream or when they’re waking up. In light of these results, scientists think many accounts of alien abduction are just descriptions of sleep paralysis, an episode of total body paralysis that occurs just prior to sleep or upon awakening.
Then again, some studies claim that alien abduction experiences are really fetal memories stored at the moment of birth. Other findings suggest that the temporal lobes of the brain might be responsible. Located on either side of the brain, where its surface crowds into ridges and deep grooves, the temporal lobes organize sensory information as it first enters the brain.
Acting as a gate to all kinds of incoming information, especially sound and smell, the temporal lobes tell us a lot about our surroundings. When they stop working properly, patients suffer visions, hallucinations and altered behavior and often have intense religious experiences.
Armed with these findings, researchers believe temporal lobe damage probably accounts for a lot of UFO sightings and alien abduction claims. In other words, after ruling out psychological problems, neuroses, sleep paralysis, fetal memories, mistaken natural phenomena and hoaxes, scientists think faulty temporal lobes could explain almost all remaining UFO phenomena — including the people who allege they’re carrying alien probes and the women who claim aliens have impregnated them.
“There are many women out there who claim to have been impregnated by aliens,” Black confirms. “I’m sure you’ve heard these stories, but not one story has ever been authenticated. Period. Not one story. There’s always a hitch.”
If a woman claims she’s carrying an alien fetus, Black says, it’s important to check her medical records to make sure she is pregnant, recently suffered a miscarriage or had an abortion.
“Some women won’t even let you do that,” he says. “So, if they’re not even going to let me verify that they were even pregnant, then I’m out of there.”
Black says he also knows a woman who believes she’s an alien hybrid.
“She likes to be called Sandy,” he says. “She claims to be half alien and half human, and there’s other people that claim that throughout the country. She claims she was involved in that crash at Roswell and she doesn’t want to be here. She wants to go back with her people, but they won’t let her come back. She has a mission to do.”
But remember that, according to the scientists, Sandy is psychologically or psychosocially disturbed, a fantasy-prone individual or is suffering fairly extensive temporal lobe damage. Regardless, it doesn’t look good for her.
But the psychological and neurological explanations for UFO phenomena don’t explain every single case. For one, they do nothing to address UFO sightings that involve whole crowds.
Michael Persinger thinks he has the answer. A professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada, Persinger believes UFOs, or “luminous anomalies” as he calls them, are generated by movements or stresses in the Earth’s tectonic plates.
Persinger has been studying the link between earthquakes and UFOs since the late 1960s and says there’s often an increase in the number of UFO sightings in the six-month period leading up to an earthquake.
“I didn’t even begin looking at UFO phenomena,” he says. “I’m primarily interested in luminous displays as predictors of earthquakes, which are very difficult to predict.”
Appearing as strange lights, luminous displays can move around, change color, rotate and change shape, Persinger says, but they’re not UFOs. Instead, they’re little pockets of electromagnetic energy produced when energy that has built up in the Earth’s crust is released through natural fault lines.
“Their color reflects their temperature,” he says. “If they rotate, different areas will have different temperatures and different colors which, to the naive eye, may be perceived as a craft or whatever.”
In a paper published in the journal Perceptual and Motor Skills, Persinger writes that the short pulses of energy that cause strange moving lights in the sky might also be powerful enough to affect the temporal lobes of the brain, triggering an imaginary abduction experience.
“The movement of these phenomena follow local fault lines or other strain release mechanisms,” he says. “That’s why you often find them along riverbeds, and, of course, very often riverbeds became paths, paths became trails and trails became the highway.
“Very often, you find these luminous displays moving along with cars, and the way they interact with cars simply reflects the dielectric and conductive characteristics of a car as it travels.”
Lights like these are seen often in California, where there are lots of fault lines, and also were reported in the Yakima Indian reservation before the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington state. Beginning in November 1981 and continuing for several years, residents of Hessdalen, Norway, reported sighting hundreds of luminous displays, which also were accompanied by audible underground rumblings. Most recently, after the Turkish earthquake in August 1999 that claimed more than 7,000 lives, Persinger received a glut of reports describing similar events.
“Afterwards, our lab was inundated with requests from scientists in Turkey,” he says, “pointing out that, for two weeks before the big event, fishermen were reporting their nets being burned and bizarre lights in the sky and strange vibrations and all kinds of odd things going on.”
Persinger hopes one day his research will be used to predict earthquakes, allowing those in danger to evacuate the affected areas ahead of time.
Meanwhile, as night cools the dusty fields and the yellow rows of corn, Jerry Black will continue to search the sky over Blanchester for anything unusual. He says it’s a good place for a UFO investigator to live, away from the city lights and the highway, where the sky is clear.
He’ll continue to collect reports of UFO sightings, too, adding to the thousands he’s already managed to accumulate over the last four decades. It’s possible that some of them were just luminous anomalies, caused by the slow cooling of the Earth, and maybe others were imagined by psychologically disturbed or fantasy-prone individuals or products of faulty temporal lobes misfiring as they relay information around the brain.
Then again, maybe some of them weren’t. ©
This article appears in May 2-8, 2001.