A major historical event. A time travel story.

Seems straightforward enough. Only for me, it wasn’t.

There was I, scouring the interwebs a few years back when I saw a news story from the writing world that delighted me. Stephen King’s new book coming out was the news. I’m a huge fan of King, his book On Writing about the craft of writing remains one of the best around, whether or not you’re a fan of the man himself, so I was suitably delighted. “Yes!” I shouted. I read on, overjoyed at this news. It’s about the assassination of JFK. Oh my. My favourite author has written a book about the grand daddy of conspiracy theories (something else I’m fascinated by - obvious to anyone who’s read The Unexplained Files/this blog/my Twitter feed (another aside here - retweets do not equal endorsement. Don’t @ me. Or if you do, prepare to be ignored. I have zero time nor tolerance for cancel culture. But I digress)). “YES!” I scream. It feels like my fave author has written a book just for me! I can’t get enough of this news. Hungry for more I read on. It’s about time travel…

“YE— … … bollocks.”

OK, now I feel sick. Sick and excited. Excited because I have got to read this book. Sick because I know anyone who knows me, knows I love Stephen King. So when I tell them about my time travel book based around a major historical event, they’ll think I’ve “borrowed” it. And who would blame them? That’s what I’d think.

“The first draft of anything is shit.” - Ernest Hemingway.

The fact was, the first draft of my time slip novel based around the events of 9/11 was already tucked away in a dark corner on my laptop. Complete. Back then, I was more into screenwriting (something I still love, and have recently returned to, but that’s another story entirely), and the first draft of that book was rougher than even Hemingway could imagine. Truth was, while the story was there, my writing needed a lot of development before I was ready to share that book with the world. A full four years passed between first draft and publication.

Another question I get asked about that book is “Was it difficult writing about such a sensitive subject?” If I tell you King had reservations about his JFK book more than fifty years after the event, then that should tell you everything. I had doubts. Serious ones. They were with me every single time I sat down to write Ghosts of September. Maybe that is something I’ll go into in more detail another day. For now all I’ll say is I hope my respect for the strength, will and resilience of the people of New York shines through in that book.

95% of UFO sightings can be written off as nothing: weather phenomena; misidentified aircraft; mistakenly identified stars or planets. 5% cannot be explained. In this series we’ll be looking at the mass sightings. The abductions. The unexplained deaths. Real cases, with real people.

These are the 5%. These, are the UFO files.

16th September 1994

It’s the morning break at Ariel School, Ruwa, Zimbabwe. The teachers are all in a staff meeting, leaving the children outside in the school yard with just one adult for supervision. The adult is working at the tuck shop, selling sweets and drinks to the children.

The meeting is nothing out of the ordinary until suddenly, the children run screaming into the school towards the teachers, surprising them in how coordinated they were, one teacher recalling “They came running up here [to the meeting] in such a panic, even if we had staged it they could not have run all together like that. Even if we practised it I don’t know how many times. They came up here like a living snake.”

The screaming children are telling the most outrageous of stories, another teacher recalled her initial scepticism at the wild claims. When all is said and done, 62 children will report the sighting. After hearing the children’s stories and the consistency within them, she too starts to believe that something out of this world had taken place.

So what had happened?

The children were playing outside, when suddenly, some of their eyes are averted skyward, drawn there by a flute like noise. Looking up, they see a silver object, surrounded by smaller objects. Beside the school grounds is an area of brush. More children watch now as the object lands in the field next to the school.

Wild enough, but what happens next is straight from the realm of nightmares. The craft sits in the scrub beside the school and a ‘man’ materialises on top of the craft. No taller than the children themselves, the being has large, black, threatening eyes.

In the blink of an eye, he is in front of the craft, walking towards the children. Panicked, they scream. The man notices the children and vanishes, materialising behind the craft.

The stories are unbelievable, and yet, with so many of the children reporting such a similar tale, the teachers think that the kids have seen something. The children are asked to draw exactly what they have seen. The drawings contain such an eerie similarity that now the teachers are starting to believe.

Children are famous for their over-active imaginations, and it would be easy to dismiss, if not for the fact that some of the children are also displaying symptoms of PTSD.

John Mack is an American psychiatrist and parapsychologist and a professor at Harvard Medical School. In the early 1990s Mack embarks on a study into alien abduction, suspecting that those reporting the events are suffering from some form of undiagnosed mental illness. Upon interviewing ‘abductees’, however, his interest is piqued when no obvious pathologies present themselves. They’re not crazies, so what’s really going on?

It is during the following decade-long study that he was called to interview the children at the Zimbabwe school.

The children are interviewed one by one. They recall seeing two UFOs and two alien beings. It is clear from the interviews that the children are scared. They report the noise of the craft. The landing of the silver object. The strange being that came from the craft. One child recalls the man looking at her:

“I felt scared… I’ve never seen such a person like that before.”

Fear was a common theme. The black, staring eyes of the being seemingly the source of the fear. The children sensing the man wanted to take the children away.

Some of the older children got the impression that they were being communicated with, but the message was bleak:

“They were telling us the world’s going to end. Maybe because we don’t look after the planet.”

This idea came after the sighting.

“I felt horrible inside. All the trees would go down and there would be no air and people would be dying.”

John Mack said after the interviews that he felt the children were not distorting reality, telling something crazy, and doubting themselves. The quality of the testimonies was that of someone talking about something that happened to them. He said of the alien abduction phenomenon more generally, “I take [the accounts of abduction] seriously. I don't have a way to account for them. I would never say, yes, there are aliens taking people. [But] I would say there is a compelling powerful phenomenon here that I can't account for in any other way, that's mysterious.”

So, you're interested in UFOs? Want to read more? Sure you do! Click here for an excerpt from my UFO thriller The Event.

Thanks for reading! Hope you liked it! Remember, if you don't already follow me on social media, click one of the icons right at the bottom of the page so you don't miss out. Any shares/retweets/likes are greatly appreciated!

95% of UFO sightings can be written off as nothing: weather phenomena; misidentified aircraft; mistakenly identified stars or planets. 5% cannot be explained. In this series we’ll be looking at the mass sightings. The abductions. The unexplained deaths. Real cases, with real people.

These are the 5%. These, are the UFO files.

It’s the evening of 9th December 1965, and the switchboard of a local radio station - WHJB - is alight. Reports are flooding in to the station. They report seeing something in the skies over a nearby town. Some say it’s a fireball - others, a plane crash. Others still say it’s a UFO.

Office manager Mabel Mezza hands one such call to WHJB news director John Murphy. Murphy ends the call and stands up. He’s going to Kecksburg.

Kecksburg is a village in the state of Pennsylvania, around 45 miles from Pittsburgh. It’s a small place that in 1965 is famous for very little, but all of that is about to change.

Over in Kecksburg, local man Bill Bulebush was working on his car when he heard chatter on the CB radio that there was a strange object in the sky. His interest is piqued, but he carries on working on the car, until he hears a hissing sound. Looking up, he sees the object. A bright fireball cuts through the sky. It makes a u-turn in midair before heading into the woods near Kecksburg.

Rather than calling the radio station, he jumps in his car and heads to the site of the crash. A plume of smoke rising from the woods marking the spot where whatever he saw came down.

He gets to the site and the air is thick with the smell of sulphur. His interest draws him into the woods and towards the object. As he nears, he hears sizzling. Then, he sees it. The size of a small car, the colour of burnt orange. He notes strange hieroglyphics around the bottom of the object. After standing beside the object for some 15 minutes, he leaves, worried that whatever this thing is, it may explode.

He goes home and comes back with his son, surprised to see the army everywhere. He’s baffled how they got there so quickly.

John Murphy has arrived in town and entered the woods through an alternate route. He locates the object and snaps photos. Soon the military arrive on scene and his photos are promptly confiscated. Escorted from the woods, he decides to interview locals. Convinced there is something going on in town, he calls into the station, who put him on air to make a report.

Meanwhile, in town, more military arrive. They continue with their task of moving onlookers away.

Local youth Robert Blystone has also seen the object. He too entered the woods before the military arrived. Now standing outside the woods he sees an empty flatbed truck, accompanied by jeeps. The convoy enters the woods. Being close to his parents house, Robert decides that this is too good an opportunity to miss, so he waits. It is two hours before the convoy reemerges, but the flatbed is no longer empty. There’s a tarpaulin stretched over the back, and underneath, and acorn-shaped object.

Radio chief John Murphy listens to the interviews he recorded. Something fell into the woods. One witness states “… I seen two big bright flashes and a long streak of orange light. I figured it was a plane.”

Fascinated by the story, and convinced that he’s onto something huge, Murphy decides to make a documentary for the radio. He calls it “Object in the Woods”

Days before the documentary is due to air, two men in suits arrive. They are military men and they take Murphy into a room. The meeting lasts approximately 30 minutes. When he emerges, Murphy refuses to talk about the incident. In fact, he’s reluctant to discuss the Kecksburg UFO at all. But he still decides to air the documentary.

Mabel Mazza, the station’s office manager who worked on the documentary with Murphy is shocked when she hears what airs. It is completely watered down, and nothing like the project she and Murphy had originally  worked on.

Murphy advises the audience at the start of the documentary, “We regret that part of the program had to be censored and other parts of the program had to be cut out entirely.”

He then goes out of his way to make the following assertion: “This station has not been contacted by any official agency of the state, federal, or local government in connection with this program.”

He insisted that the edits to the original documentary were made as a result of worried witnesses calling the station on the night of the show saying they didn’t want their stories aired. But to make such heavy edits on the night of the broadcast would require too much work.

Murphy’s wife would later go on record regarding Murphy’s change of heart towards the Kecksburg UFO. According to the her, this went from the biggest story of is life before the visit of the military men, to nothing. She noted how out of character such a U-turn was.

Project Blue Book was a government report on UFOs and UFO activity. The project ran from 1952-1969. A project Blue book report on the Kecksburg Incident states:- A three-man search was carried out until 2am, and nothing was found. It was a meteor.

In 1990, as an anniversary nears, a new thirst for answers arises in the media, drawing the attention of ‘Space Consultant’ James Oberg. He thinks he has found the answer to the Kecksburg question.

Oberg’s party piece is taking famous UFO events and comparing them to satellite and rocket launches and re-entries. And he’s got something.

Soviet Venus probe Cosmos-96 re-entered the earth’s atmosphere on the same day as the Kecksburg sighting. A failed rocket left Cosmos-96 stuck in earth orbit. He tracks down the relevant data. Air force tracking keep detailed records and these records could unlock the mystery.

Upon study however, the flight path is nowhere near. Between Cosmos-96 and the Kecksburg UFO he finds a 13-hour discrepancy. Oberg isn’t convinced that’s the end of the matter. It could be a cover-up: deliberately misleading data to hide the fact that the US has found what would have been at that time a Soviet satellite. The coincidence of the satellite re-entry and Kecksburg UFO event happening on the same day was too difficult to dismiss.

Fast forward to 1996, and better tracking data is made available, Oberg conclusively ruled out Cosmos-96 being the object found in the Kecksburg woods. He is not ready to rule out another satellite, though he says it is unlikely.

Sceptics are keen to ascribe the Kecksburg event to a meteor. A meteor, however, would not account for the witness reports of the object changing course in mid-air, nor the heavy military presence. Why would the army go to such lengths to cover up a meteor? An interesting entry in the Blue Book file on the Kecksburg event instructs anyone dealing with the media to “call it a meteor”, later going to on to state “investigation is still underway”.

So what was it? Where can we find anything matching such a bizarre description?

Enter the Nazis.

Die Glocke was a ‘wonder-weapon’ supposed to quickly end the war - a war they were on the verge of losing. The German word glocke translates as bell. The Nazi Bell could easily be described as acorn-shaped, and also featured strange hieroglyphics around the bottom.

So was it a long-lost Nazi weapon?

After WWII, the top Nazi scientists of the day were not jailed or hanged for war crimes, but smuggled into the US to continue their work as part of the now infamous Operation Paperclip. The Nazi Bell theory is perhaps not a outlandish as it first sounds.

The one man who was most likely to crack the case, sadly cannot. In February of 1969, WHJB radio news director John Murphy was walking alongside a highway in Ventura, California and was hit by a car. He died instantly.

So, you're interested in UFOs? Want to read more? Sure you do! Click here for an excerpt from my UFO thriller The Event.

Thanks for reading! Hope you liked it! Remember, if you don't already follow me on social media, click one of the icons right at the bottom of the page so you don't miss out. Any shares/retweets/likes are greatly appreciated!

95% of UFO sightings can be written off as nothing: weather phenomena; misidentified aircraft; mistakenly identified stars or planets. 5% cannot be explained. In this series we’ll be looking at the mass sightings. The abductions. The unexplained deaths. Real cases, with real people.

These are the 5%. These, are the UFO files.

This week, it's part two of the Travis Walton Abduction case. In case you missed it, here's part one.

Part Two

It’s been five days since Travis Walton disappeared in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest near Snowflake, Arizona. The November nights have been cold, some of them sub-zero, and the police are becoming more certain by the day that one of Walton’s co-workers who reported him missing is more than likely his killer. Far from convinced of the strange story of UFOs told by the six men who did return from the forest, they subjected the forest workers to polygraph tests. Police are dumbfounded when five of the men pass, one result is inconclusive. Over 50 searchers, helicopters, and sniffer dogs have been searching the area where Travis disappeared, to no avail. Wary of being hoodwinked, the police have released a picture of Travis Walton, asking anyone with any information to come forward.

Nobody has responded.

If the five days since the disappearance have been difficult for the police, they have been hell for the family. The press have been interested from the off, but since the men passed the lie-detector tests, scrutiny has reached fever-pitch. Worse than that, the family have been receiving prank phone calls. Every time the phone rings, it’s either a reporter looking for a scoop, or a member of the public making fun of them and their story. So when the phone rings on the fifth evening of Travis’s absence, his brother-in-law Grant is reluctant to pick up. The only feeling stronger than that reluctance is the desire to know where Travis is, so he answers.

On the other end of the line is a garbled, excited voice. Another prank. Grant is about to hang up, when the voice becomes clear. “It’s me! It’s Travis!”

He jumps in his truck and heads for the location ‘Travis’ gave. After five days, it’s natural to believe that this is probably just another cruel hoax. But to not check it out would be unforgivable. He picks up Travis’s brother Duane on the way and they head for the gas station from where Travis made the call.

They arrives at the phone booth to see Travis, naked, slumped inside. They grab him and load him into the truck. Travis isn’t making much sense. They tell him they’ve been looking for him and that they were worried sick. Looking at the clock, Travis sees that it is after midnight and apologises. Duane tells Travis to touch his face. Travis feels his chin and the growth of beard there, baffled as he’d only shaved ‘that morning’. “Travis, you’ve been gone for five days.”

While friends and family (and not least Allen Dalis) are relieved to see Travis return, some are none too impressed. By now the police are convinced they’ve been taken for the proverbial ride. And for every UFO nut who has arrived in town, there are as many journalists and sceptics who think this whole thing has been an elaborate charade. They are in for quite the surprise.

The police want answers. Travis is questioned, and his story is out of this world.

He claims that he woke up at the side of the road because of the feeling of cool air against his skin. When he looked up, he saw another disc. This one not illuminated, just hovering by the side of the road. In an instant it shot upward into the night sky and was gone. From there, Travis made his way to the phone and made the reverse charge call to his sister, where Grant answered. The police want to know where he has been for the past five days. Still badly shaken from his experience, Travis tries to put his experience into words.

After approaching the UFO in the forest, he was hit by a beam of light and thrown backwards. At this point he must have lost consciousness, because when he awakes, he’s no longer in the forest. Now he’s in a small, damp room, lying fully dressed on a table he thinks is at the hospital. He wonders why they haven’t taken his clothes off. He turns to one of the ‘doctors’ to ask what is going on. That’s when he turns to the people surrounding him to see that they are not people at all.

Looking back at him are four creatures less than five feet tall, with over-sized heads, and eyes with irises so large that the whites of their eyes can barely be seen. Travis screams and grabs the nearest object, a kind of lightweight pipe, to use as a weapon. He swings it at the creatures, telling them to get back. They turn and leave the room. Travis scrambles to his feet, desperately trying to get his bearings. He moves quickly to the door, checks the curved hallway, and turns left. There he reaches another door. Heart pounding, he enters the room and sees a chair, facing away. He creeps behind the chair, unable to see if anyone is sitting in it, desperately wanting to avoid any further interaction with the small beings he has just encountered. As he gets closer to the chair in the centre of the room, the strangest thing happens: the walls become translucent, and Travis can see beyond them, into a sea of stars. Relieved to see that the chair is empty, he sits and inspects the control panel before him. Worried that touching anything will alert his captors to his presence, he quickly leaves and re-enters the hallway, moving on to another room, where he’s relieved to see another human. Over six-feet tall. Travis tries to engage in conversation, but this tall figure remains silent, leading Travis to another room.

In this room are three more people - two men and a woman. He asks them where they are and what is going on and is again met with silence. They led him to a table and made him lie down. Wondering what was going to happen to him, he lost consciousness, the next thing he knows, he’s naked at the roadside.

The police make the shaken Travis Walton take a lie-detector test. Given Walton’s confused mental state, rather unsurprisingly, the test comes back all over the place, indicating deception. But that is not the end of the story.

Since then, Travis Walton has passed 12 separate lie-detector tests.

One of the crewmen was offered $10,000 to ‘come clean’ and denounce the whole story. While he must surely have been tempted by such a large sum, he declined.

Many have claimed that the whole story was a hoax, yet none have been able to provide proof to substantiate their claims. In the five days that Travis was missing, no evidence of Travis was found in the woods, and not one person came forward saying they had seen him. In the face of ridicule and scrutiny, none of the men have changed their story, despite being offered financial temptation to do so. While Travis Walton has made money from the event, he had to wait years before that was possible. In those years he faced mockery and surely must have been tempted to say that it was not true. During that time, nobody came forward to say it was a hoax, and it was by no means certain that sticking to his guns would have led to financial benefit. Travis did not change one word of his story.

So, you're interested in UFOs? Want to read more? Sure you do! Click here for an excerpt from my UFO thriller The Event.

Thanks for reading! Hope you liked it! Remember, if you don't already follow me on social media, click one of the icons right at the bottom of the page so you don't miss out. Any shares/retweets/likes are greatly appreciated!

95% of UFO sightings can be written off as nothing: weather phenomena; misidentified aircraft; mistakenly identified stars or planets. 5% cannot be explained. In this series we’ll be looking at the mass sightings. The abductions. The unexplained deaths. Real cases, with real people.

These are the 5%. These, are the UFO files.

5th November 1975, Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest near Snowflake, Arizona.

Six men are tearing at dangerous speeds through the forest near Snowflake, Arizona. They are piled into a pick-up truck and returning from a hard day’s work in the forest, making clearings in the trees to slow the inevitable forest fires next summer. However, their breakneck driving is not from recklessness, but from sheer terror. “Is it still behind us?!” shouts the driver. Whatever the response, he will not slow down. He has no intention of slowing down until he’s out of that forest and safely back home.

One of the crew pleads with his friends. “We have to go back.” But his pleas fall upon deaf ears. At first. “We can’t just leave him.”

The driver (and crew foreman), Mike Rogers, finally hears the cries from the back and draws the truck to a screeching halt. The men sit silently, breathless, until another man speaks. “He’s right. We have to go back.” It’s agreed. Decision made, the driver turns his truck around, and they make the same journey that the seven of them had taken that morning, but now their thoughts aren’t on the day’s work ahead of them. They’re on the empty seat beside them, and the ominous disappearance of their colleague.

The day leading up to this moment had been pretty average. A bunch of guys working their way through the forest, clearing gaps in the forest to slow any fire that might break out in the coming dryer weather. But all was not well. Two of the crew members, Allen Dalis and Travis Walton, were in the midst of a dispute. Because of this, Dalis had been toying with Walton, felling trees dangerously close to him. Walton knew that there was work to be done and spent the day getting further and further from the belligerent workmate, to avoid conflict and inevitably slowing the whole operation down. Eventually, darkness fell and it was time to go home. They loaded their tools into the back of the pickup and climbed in, ready for rest at the end of a long day. But it was on that drive homeward that things took a dark turn.

As the truck weaved through the forest, a light appeared ahead of them through the trees. The men were all baffled as to what it could be, later struggling to describe the light. Struggling to say if the light was coming from a craft, or if the light was the actual craft itself. But there was a craft. A saucer shaped- object 20 feet in diameter. After a few minutes, they decide to investigate further. The truck comes to a stop and the men sit staring. “What is that?”

That’s when Travis Walton opened his door.

The others were shocked as Travis started towards the craft. They too left the truck and pleaded with him to come back, but he didn’t come back. He carried on towards the strange light. The air felt thick with static as Travis neared the light. There was a blinding flash and a scream, and when the light subsided, Travis was gone. The men had seen enough. They turned and sprinted back to the truck and fled until some semblance of calm was regained.

Now they were driving back to the scene. The men in the truck were terrified, shaking uncontrollably and rattled by what they had seen. Upon returning to the scene of the disappearance they sat in the truck, trying to build up the courage to step back out into the night, into the cold darkness that had taken their friend. The light was nowhere to be seen and they hadn’t actually seen it since that bright flash. They debated what exactly they had seen. A beam of light came from the craft and drew Travis in. They had all seen the same thing. Sure that whatever had taken Travis was gone, the men left the truck. Still shaking, they linked arms and stepped in the forest.

“That’s your story?”

The police were naturally sceptical. Seven men enter a forest with chainsaws, and after a long day of hard work where tempers are flaring, only six come out. The theory put itself together. Foul play was afoot and the most likely answer was that Travis Walton had been murdered, and his body hidden.

And yet their tall tale had about it a ring of truth. The men were genuinely distressed, and were insistent that the police search the area where Travis had gone missing. The police agreed and took the crewmen back to the forest, but their search was without success. A more thorough search was planned for the next day. This, too, was fruitless. The temperatures would drop below zero and the odds of finding Travis Walton alive were diminishing by the day.

The police continue the search but by now are seriously considering the alternate, and much more likely theory that Walton has been murdered. The men are questioned, separately, and the police are amazed that six people have their story so straight. They all report the same thing and none of their stories change. The men even state their willingness to take a polygraph test to prove not only their innocence, but their truthfulness.

The men get their wish. Cy Gilson, a polygraph examiner from the Dept of Public Safety is called in. The men are tested, and not only questioned as to whether they had anything to do with the disappearance of Travis Walton, but also regarding their bizarre cover story of flying discs and lights in the sky. And the strangest thing happens: they pass. Five of the six men come through the test without detection of deception. One test, that of Allen Dalis, is inconclusive.

It has been five cold nights since Travis disappeared, and if he had been alive at the time of his disappearance as his fellow crewmen stated, he was now almost certainly dead. The police begin questioning friends and family members of the crew, including those of Walton, determined to get to the bottom of what is going on.

In the five days since Walton’s disappearance, the spotlight and scrutiny has been building on Allen Dalis. He was the one with a motive. The dispute between him and Travis at the forefront of police minds. His was the lie detector test which had returned inconclusive. So it was that on November the 11th, days after he’d gone missing, that nobody was more relieved than Allen Dalis to hear that Travis Walton had returned.

And if investigators thought the claims of his crewmen were unbelievable, they ain’t heard nothing nothing yet...

Thanks for reading! Here's Part Two of the Travis Walton Abduction.