Story Views
Now:
Last Hour:
Last 24 Hours:
Total:

% of readers think this story is Fact. Add your two cents.

In the magazine pictured, True Flying Saucer & UFOs Quarterly [Spring 1976], is a featured article (without byline) about an alleged UFO encounter in Wellington, Texas, April 1^st (yes), no year given.

It seems a farmer Carroll Watts saw a light about 10:30 p.m. while driving home from his father’s house.

He turned on a dirt road to drive “toward the strange glow” when he saw an “object which ‘appeared to be about 100 feet long and eight to ten feet high.” [Page 49]

He walked around it and “about 20 feet down the side [he] found a port, or door” and “knocked on it three or four times and it opened mechanically. Then a voice began speaking to [him] – it was an unemotional voice neither masculine nor feminine. It asked [him] if he would be willing to submit to a rigorous physical examination.” [ibid, italics mine]

He asked them why would he want to take a physical and they told him they’d he’d be able to make a flight with them.

After a short colloquy with the voice, he still declined to have a physical, and left, getting back into his car.

As he pulled away, the ship “rose slightly and turned to the south. There was a light, about 20 inches across, on the tip of the nose. As the ship was sitting, it gave off a clear fluorescent light. When it began to move, the light took on a reddish cast.” [ibid]

Farmer Watts proclaimed he saw other ships on March 31^stand April 11^th and took a photo of a cylindrical object floating 18 inches off the ground.

Inside he found machinery and heard a voice asking him to submit to a physical.

He “fled from the craft that night. But “in April [he] came in contact with it again and allowed the creatures inside to probe him with wires. He described the space creatures as about five feet tall, muscular, and clad in white coverall suits… they had wrap-around eyes, superficial ears and noses, and slit-like smiling mouths which did not move when they talked.” [ibid, Page 50]

The Air Force and Associated Press got involved and farmer Watts took a polygraph, at the suggestion of J. Allen Hynek, which he [Watts] flunked.

The whole thing was a hoax, fostered, supposedly, by an unidentified artist who was visiting the town, hooked up with farmer Watts, hypnotizing him, and thus encouraging him to make up the story. (To what end, the piece doesn’t tell us.)

The article ends with this…

“After examining Watt’s photograph [pictured above], Hynek concluded:

‘If this is a hoax, it’s a very, very clever one. In fact, it would be almost as interesting as what this farmer claimed actually happened to him.’” [ibid]

Okay, what do we have here? Another instance of UFO madness, but one steeped in some interesting details.

Watts got the wrap around eyes and probe scenario from the Betty Hill tale and the white coveralls from the Zamora/Socorro incident probably, but what about the five foot tall beings?

They didn’t become a popular item until after the 1978 influx of Roswellian stories that burst forth from the Stanton Friedman/Jesse Martel conversations, and the many books from which the little grays exploded as an ET meme.

At any rate, I hope that some of you can see that there is an inherent madness at the base of the UFO “reality” or mythos, as skeptics have it.

RR