We Are Not Alone

GREETINGS, EARTHLING READERS

It seems only fitting to start a book about unidentified flying objects and aliens with an otherworldly story from Roswell, New Mexico. Not the Roswell crash in 1947 (we’ll discuss that tale later), but the one I heard over lunch during my pilgrimage to the flying saucer mecca on a clear November day.
     I had spent the previous two days working on this book just outside Albuquerque, New Mexico, at the home of UFO researcher and historian David Marler. His curated collection is a massive archive of UFO documents, photographs, books, original newspapers, and every form of audiovisual media imaginable. During our conversations he told me the story of a man he’d tracked down in Roswell who was attacked by a UFO in 1964. His name is Charles Davis, and he was just eight years old when the incident occurred on a Tuesday afternoon on June 2 in the small town of Hobbs, New Mexico. Knowing I was headed to Roswell to continue my research, Marler texted Davis and asked if he’d be willing to meet with me. He said yes.
     The next morning, with the rising sun nearly blinding me at the outset of the three-hour trip, I drove from Albuquerque to Roswell. There was little to be seen over the last hundred miles leading into town, except for some clich. tumbleweed that occasionally rolled across the road in front of me. But once I got to Roswell, aliens greeted me everywhere I looked. The lampposts dotting the main drag were topped with alien heads. The Dunkin’ Donuts sign was held up high by a twenty-foot extraterrestrial. The McDonald’s was shaped like a flying saucer and surrounded by metallic alien statues and, naturally, there were plenty of shops selling whatever they could put an alien face on—including a store selling Abduction Beef Jerky.
     My plan was to spend the day at the International UFO Museum and Research Center. It has an enormous collection, including more than 8,000 books and 30,000 files. I didn’t quite get through them all, but after a few hours of gathering as much information as possible, I took a break and met Davis and his wife for lunch at a nearby Mexican restaurant. It was crowded and loud and, for Davis, not the ideal place to discuss the traumatic event of his youth. But he had moments when he felt comfortable enough to share a few of his memories.
     “If you were to ask me today if I’m a believer or a nonbeliever, I’d tell you I don’t know,” he said as I cut into my enchiladas. “I just know something weird happened. It was unexplainable.”
     The weird thing that happened involved a black, metallic object shaped like a spinning top hovering about two stories high. Davis was playing in the back lot of DeLuxe Laundry when he spotted it across the street. It seemed fixated on the young boy, and he knew it. So he moved to the left, and it moved to the left. Then he moved to the right, and it followed.
     “I remember knowing I was seeing something I shouldn’t be seeing,” he said. “I remember hearing a loud noise and within seconds—boom—it was on me.”
     The strange craft whooshed directly over Davis’s head and belched out fire, giving him second-degree burns across his face and ears. His grandmother heard the commotion and rushed out of the laundromat in time to witness the strange event. She told reporters her grandson was “covered with black, his hair standing on end and burning. . . . I grabbed him and tried to smother out his hair, which was on fire.”
     Once she’d extinguished the flames, she rushed him to a hospital. Fortunately for Davis, a burn specialist happened to be working there that day and treated him immediately. Davis told police and doctors that he was burned by “a fire that came out of the sky” and added, “I guess I should have ducked.”
     According to a local newspaper report about the story, police investigated dozens of theories to understand what had happened, but found no answers. A Roman candle had not been thrown at him; no burning lint blew out of the laundry; no fire belched from the boiler; and no release of steam had caused the burns. There weren’t even any scorch marks on the ground. It was just something . . . unidentified. The FBI questioned Davis’s family but came up empty as well. As for the object itself, Davis said it had whooshed back from whence it came and disappeared.
     Aside from a little hearing difficulty in one ear, he made a full recovery. I looked as closely as possible, but no scars were evident on his face, though he told me “from a certain point up my ears were inside out. They wouldn’t give me a mirror in my room, because my face was so disfigured.”
     Whatever had happened, Davis had put it on “a back shelf” of his mind. In fact, he had not spoken of the incident in some forty years until Marler learned of the case and tracked Davis down in 2019. I was the second person Davis had discussed it with since the late 1960s. This was clearly not something he’d ever tried to publicize, exploit, or cash in on, though early on that’s what people suspected.
     “You get accused of insurance fraud, or that you made it up—there were a lot of skeptics at the time,” Davis said. “I will tell you this, I know something happened and I don’t care what anyone says.”
     I thought Davis seemed genuine in his recounting of the tale, and Marler had come to the same conclusion based on his interviews with Davis. “These are the last people that you would think would concoct a UFO story,” he told me of Davis and his family. “They lived in conservative Hobbs, New Mexico, in the sixties and were devout Pentacostal. He doesn’t care about UFOs. . . . I can’t find any legitimate reason to disbelieve the story, as crazy as it is. But there it is, nonetheless.”
     That last person Davis had spoken with about the case before Marler was Dr. James McDonald, in 1968. The physicist worked with the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the University of Arizona and had been investigating the UFO phenomenon. After questioning Davis and his mother on the phone for twenty minutes, McDonald acknowledged this event was particularly unique. “It’s very weird, and unlike any other case I’ve run into,” he told Davis’s mother. (I obtained a recording of the conversation from Marler’s archive.) “Almost all UFO cases are fairly weird, but this one is different from anything that I have ever heard of myself.”
     And the story just gets weirder. Marler’s research found that black top-shaped objects were spinning around the country in the weeks before and after the 1964 Hobbs incident. And almost always on Tuesdays. One week before Davis was burned, newspapers reported that residents of Morgantown, West Virginia, saw a “burst of fire” in the sky coming from an unidentified object described as “top-shaped and glowing like an overheated stove.”
     On June 30, a couple of weeks after Davis’s encounter, a man driving through northwestern Georgia spotted a strange circular object flying by his car. “I was traveling about 65 or 70 miles per hour, but when the object approached, the car’s engine began to slow down,” he told a reporter. The object was about six feet high and as long as his car. The man described it as resembling “a giant top.” As his car decelerated, he pulled off the road, at which point, according to a newspaper article, the object “gave off heat and burned his arm,” then left a foul odor and residue on his car.
     The following Tuesday a group of neighbors in Tallulah Falls, Georgia, witnessed a similar object that also smelled “terrible.” Exactly a week later an article reported that a young girl in the same area claimed to have seen a “weird contraption” with a “bad smell” as she and a friend rode bicycles. That night, in anticipation of more Tuesday top sightings, residents grabbed their cameras and telescopes and set up watch parties.
     What the heck was happening on Tuesdays in the middle of 1964? There is simply no good answer.
     “If you and I were living in 1964 and we got a bunch of UFO researchers we want to pull the wool over on and concoct a story, you’re not going to come up with a small, black, top-shaped object belching flames, you’re going to fit a story that falls along the known narrative,” Marler explained to me. “You’re going to come up with, ‘I saw this sleek thirtyfoot-diameter silver disk and it moved silently and it caused vehicle interference with my car.’ You’re going to tell a story they’re going to believe because this is the narrative that’s out there. But people were describing a black top-shaped object belching smoke and flames that basically behaved not like some advanced aircraft from another world, but almost like a bad lawnmower. It makes no sense.”
     As you’ll read in these pages, there’s a lot about UFOs that doesn’t make sense. Sure, UFO sightings often have perfectly natural explanations, but all too often they don’t. And they’re continuing to happen today. In recent years, multiple U.S. Navy pilots have reported anomalous objects flying over the oceans in ways that defy physics—and the government has even declassified and released three navy videos showing UFOs (see page 269 for more). At a public congressional hearing on May 17, 2022—the first focused on UFOs in more than fifty years—the government’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) Task Force admitted that it had insufficient data to identify a number of physical objects witnessed in U.S. airspace.
     That means that the U.S. government itself has finally admitted what many people have long believed: that UFOs are real. Whether or not these UFOs are flying saucers containing little green men is up for debate, of course, but there are—without a doubt—unidentified flying objects in our skies. The UAP Task Force is now tasked with providing annual unclassified reports to Congress, which will hopefully start to include more data. Contemporary scientists are also openly exploring the phenomenon and gathering data to understand it through organizations such as the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute and the Galileo Project.
     Many of these witnesses and investigators—who include government officials, navy pilots, police officers, and thousands of everyday people who have seen flying objects in the shapes of saucers, triangles, and even eggs since the 1940s—are respected members of the community, not kooks telling tall tales. Their compelling testimonies have helped destigmatize the UFO conversation and led to an uptick in the number of believers. Gallup reported in August 2021 that 41 percent of Americans believe UFOs involve alien spaceships from other planets. That’s nearly half the country. And even more believe that aliens exist somewhere out there in the universe: two-thirds of Americans, according to a 2021 Pew Research Center survey. Wherever flying saucers may be coming from, it’s clearly not the fringe.
     So, what exactly is this strange phenomenon that’s captured our imaginations for decades—and throughout that time led to conspiracy theories, cultlike beliefs, science fiction brilliance (and schlock), scientific study, and suffocating taboos? Now that we finally have proof that UFOs are out there, the question remains: what are they? And beyond that, are UFOs proof of what we both hope and fear: that we’re not alone in the universe?
     This book is a collection of possibilities, filled with beliefs, stories, facts, and conjecture spanning the entirety of the human experience. Though I can’t say I’ve personally seen a UFO, my journey in gathering all of the above has included interviews with former members of the military, journalists, researchers, and everyday people who have—and have no doubt that what they’ve seen was not of this earth. My research has also involved conversations with scientists, a trip to the National Press Club in Washington, DC, to hear about saucers appearing over nuclear facilities, visits to the homes of UFO investigators and collectors, and several days of attending presentations and hobnobbing at the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) International Symposium—not to mention virtual conferences, deep dives into online newspaper archives and centuries’ worth of books, and occasional forays into cavernous rabbit holes. Many of the stories and photographs I uncovered are being published here for the first time.
     So consider this volume your voyage through the chapters of humanity and our encounters with whatever or whoever else might be zooming through our skies. As you read the evidence, the lack of evidence, the passionate testimonies, and the skeptical responses, you won’t find a smoking gun explaining the UFO phenomenon. But when pondering if we’re alone in the universe, you just might find yourself armed with more informed and endlessly fascinating questions.