Radically Different and Richer Alternatives

years before the Rundelsham Forest incident. The Condon Committee, formed in the aftermath of the nineteen sixty six Michigan UFO sightings, released a report that included summaries of several difficult to explain cases. This nineteen fifty six encounter, labeled case number two in the report and known informally as laken Heath bent Waters, featured a letter written in the late nineties sixties and sent to the committee by a watch supervisor at an air traffic control radar site on the night

in question. The Condon report says that quote one of the interesting aspects of this case is the remarkable accuracy of the account of the witness as given in the letter reproduced above. Which was apparently written from memory twelve years after the incident with that recommendation. This is what happened that clear night, as excerpted from that letter, read by Martin Sweeney. It begins with a call from another radar site. Radar operator asked me if we had any

targets on our scopes. Traveling four thousand miles per hour, they said they had watched a target on their scopes. Proceed from a point thirty or forty miles east to a point forty miles west. Target passed directly over the RF station, he said. Tower reported seeing it go by and it just appeared to be a blurry light. S flying over the base at five thousand feet altitude also reported seeing it. That's blurred light passed under his aircraft. There was very little or no traffic or targets on

the scopes. As I recall over, one controller noticed a stationary target on the scopes about southwest. The target should not have been picked up on the scopes unless it was moving, but there it was. They called to another air traffic control unit, which confirmed that they too had the target on their scopes. As we watched, stationary target started moving at a speed of four six hundred miles per hour in the north northeast direction until it to

reach a point twenty miles north northwest. Now there's no slow starter build up to the speed. It was constant from the second it started move until it stopped. The target made several changes in location, always in a straight line, always at about six hundred miles per hour, and always from a standing or stationary point to his next stop at constant speed, no build up and speed at all. These changes in location varied from eight miles to twenty miles in length, no set pattern at any time. This

continued for a while. After thirty minutes or so, the U. S. Air Force called the r A F and they sent up an aircraft to investigate. Shortly after, we told the intercept aircraft he was one half mile from the UFO and it was twelve o'clock from his position, said Roger, I got my guns locked on him. Then he paused and said, where do you go? Do you still have him? We replied, Roger, it appears he's got right behind you, but he's still there. There are now two targets, one

behind the other, same speed, very close. The two separate, distinct targets. The first movement by the UFO was so swift I missed it entirely, but it was seen by the other controllers. However, the fact that it had occurred was confirmed by the pilot of the interceptor follow The interceptor told us he would try to shake the UFO and would try again. Tried everything. He climbed, dived, circled. The UFO acted like it was glued right behind him,

always the same distance, very close. The pilot, aware that the plane was running low on fuel, returned to base. A second plane was sent to intercept the object, but turned back with a mechanical failure. Target made a couple more short moves, then left our radar coverage in a northerly direction, speed still at about six hundred miles. We're out. We lost target out bound to the north at fifty sixty miles, which is normal off aircraft or target is

at an outdo blue five ft. The Condon Report's final word on this encounter reads in conclusion, although conventional or natural explanations certainly cannot be ruled out, the probability of such seems low in this case, and the probability that at least one genuine UFO was involved appears to be fairly high. I'm Toby Ball and this is Strange Arrivals Episode eight radically different and richer alternatives. The Condon Report released in seems to be the turning point for Alan Heinek.

Heineke had worked as a consultant for the Air Force's investigations into UFO sightings for twenty years, and this report said that continuing this work would be of no scientific or defense value. The subsequent closing of Project Blue Book meant that he was no longer beholden to the Air Force in any way. He was critical of the Air Force's investigation by the time you left now, he was there for about twenty years. In the first part of his contract, he was convinced there was nothing to it,

UFO historian jan Aldretch. But as things went along he changed his mind. So when your primary advisor changes their mind and you don't pay attention to that, that's rather unusual. Besides that, he was like the institutional memory for Project Blue because people came and it. This is Heinik from ninety seven while the Connon Committee was doing its work,

but before it released its report. He gives us analysis of the leading theories about the explanation for UFO sightings, there are say, four large categories in which explanations For a one, of course, the one used for so long as it's all about it, it's still slight probability that that might turn out to be the case, but I

don't think so. Second is it's all there's secret weapons being tested by that government, but that seems unlikely to me, simply because it's hard to keep a secret for twenty years, and one don't test secret devices in seventy countries. There is of course extra trust, feel intelligence e p i UM.

This is a popular one because it's it's amazing how the human race wants devoutly to believe and here as we're doing to his proper sense, wants to believe even possible help from outside what they desperately want to There's everything for a scientific father image of this time. Uh. And of course the stronomers will go wrong with the high idea that there is life very likely right else where.

It to be consumately preventially to think today that there isn't the problems getting here communicating that's a totally different situation. And then the fourth possibility is that if we're dealing with handed for unknown but perfectly natural, normal physical growth phenomenal, and you say, well, how can it be bec never hand Just put yourself back a hundred years. Suppose somebody when some when we were crossing the plane in the covered wagon, somebody has googly begun begun to talk about

nuclear energy. But in those days we didn't even know if they didn't even know that Adam Hanndal's let alone that you could get energy out of it. People are gonna totally incomprehensible thing. People at that time, well, how do we know? It's because seven and by the year twenty five sixty seven we won't know things that will

make nois today. L This fourth possibility that there are frontiers of knowledge which the current state of established science wasn't ready to deal with, had intrigued Heinick since his youth. Depending on your viewpoint, it either provides an explanation for why he was willing to theorize outside the strict boundaries of more narrow thinkers, or why he wasn't quite as rigorous in his scientific thought as he should have been.

You see, Heineck had a keen interest in modes of thinking well outside the scientific norm, and it began when he was young. He said that while other boys were saving up their money to buy motorcycles, he saved up a hundred dollars, which in those days was a huge amount of money, and spent it on a book, a book of occult knowledge called The Secret Teachings of All Ages, which was one of the biggest occult tons of the

nineteen twenties. My name is Jason Colavito. I am an author and researcher who has studied UFOs, the unexplained and all manner of weird things for almost twenty years. He wanted to know all of the hidden secrets of the world, all of the mystical things that the occult groups, the secret society's the forbidden knowledge, and he used that to create an intellectual world in which there were more things

than merely the material. This was the beginning of an interest in the esoteric and paranormal by the man who had become the most influential voice on UFO matters, author Mark O'Connell. When he got into college, he really started reading a lot of the works of Rudolf Steiner, who is an esoteric thinker who boy, I don't even know

where to start with Steiner, but he became fascinated with mystics. Today, Rudolf Steiner is probably best known for founding steiner Waldorf Schools, which provide progressive education, stressing quote universal human values, educational pluralism, and meaningful teaching and learning opportunities. But Steiner was a wide ranging thinker and his works were not confined to the realm of education. Well, Rudolf Steiner was an Austrian sort of polymath. He was born in the sort of

late nineteenth century and he died nineteen. For the first sort of half of his career he was more or less the typical German intellectual, German speaking, you know, a language intellectual, and he became well known as a scholar of the German poet Gerta. Well, my name is Gary lachman Um, a writer about we can say, the history

of the Western esoteric tradition. And that's a bit of a mouthful, but esoteric means inner and sort of about the inner teaching of kind of the mainstream religious teachings, and also about the inner world or inner being, and that includes different histories of different movements and biographies people of Rudolf Steiner and Carl Jung and Alistair Crowley and ages ago In a previous life, I I used to be a rock musician back in the late seventies by

rock musician Gary Means. He was the basis for Blondie. In his childhood, Steiner experienced visions and instances of seeing ghosts or spirits or things like that. And in his forties he sort of came out of the closet about that, and um, this is when he began this kind of second career as a spiritual teacher, leader of a kind of spiritual movement that he called anthroposophy. But anthrow means

man in Greek and Sophia. Sophia is wisdom, so sort of the wisdom of man, and it is basically a kind of spiritual teaching about this spiritual existence that we have alongside the physical one that we had of. Steiner's conception of anthroposophy was connected to the work he did on the poet Geta's Scientific Writings, in which he described a method he devised to use his imagination to study nature,

for instance, the way that plants grow. He was able to train his imagination to be able to in his way when he was observing a plant to be able to see it through all the processes of its growth, so from when it went from a seed to just you know, sprout and then actually growing and bearing fruit and all that. And Gerta was convinced that he had somehow was able to see this kind of eternal plant that was behind the actual physical one that was moving

through time. And Steiner picked up on this when he was doing this work on Gerta's scientific writings, and he combined this kind of methodology that's Gerta had developed, this kind of way of disciplining his imagination to see to see this with this kind of inherent, innate kind of

psychic ability. Had Steiner became a very popular teacher of this type of in quotes science feartual science was this way that he had a whole methodology of following these these practices that he got from going to and he barely ran with it. So it went from into seeing him to pass lives and into the history of the cosmos,

and I mean it's quite grandiose um. And he had a grandiose vision of human evolution and the evolution of the cosmos and all that, but fundamentally it was a way of training your imagination to be able to see this kind of what do you want to say it some phenomena, and not only in the time and place that you see it now, but in its full kind of being, in connection to the rest of things around

it and all that. While in college, Heinick became interested in Steiner and other spiritual and esoteric writers again Mark O'Connell.

During his college days he was spending a lot of long, lonely nights at the Yerkes Observatory in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, looking at stars, looking basically into the depths of eternity through this telescope at Yurkey's Observatory, And in the meantime he's reading the writings of these esoteric thinkers who are talking about well, Sninder like to talk about something he

called the super sensible realm. Some of us can perceive it now and then, and we can actually train ourselves to be able to experience these these other dimensions of reality. This was definitely something that was always part of Heineck's thinking, and I think it had a lot to do with why he was willing to consider the reality of the

UFO phenomena. As the Condon Committees worked out under way, Heineck met another UFO researcher who had a similar interest in the occult and paranormal, a man named Jacques Valet. Valet is the model for the French scientist in the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He is a longtime UFO researcher who, in addition to UFOs, also researched other paranormal subjects, including visions of the Virgin Mary and

the practice of remote viewing. He eventually asserted that UFOs weren't extraterrestrial, but in fact represent a quote previously unrecognized phenomena, and that their ability quote to manipulate space and time suggests radically different and richer alternatives, but that came later. Jason Cola Vito in six Jallen Heineck and shock Bill At we're traveling to Colorado in order to participate in the Condon Committee investigation into UFOs sponsored by the University

of Colorado in the Air Force. The two of them were there to provide their testimony and their evidence to the committee as they were looking for the scientific explanation for UFOs, and it was increasingly obvious that the committee was going to determine that there was nothing much to the UFO phenomenon in terms of anything extraterrestrial or ultraterrestrial.

But that conclusion didn't sit very well with either Heineck or Valet, and on the way back from Colorado, Heineck confessed to Valet for the first time that he was not entirely the materialist scientist that he pretended to be

in public. But he told Valet that he actually had these mystical occult ideas, that he was deeply interested in things like her meticism, and while as a scientist he followed the scientific method and proposed scientific ways exploring UFOs, he had always that sort of mystical idea in the background that they could be something more than material science

could explain. Depending on your viewpoint, this is either an unorthodox tool that makes him a more insightful thinker about strange phenomena, or an indication that Heinech wasn't as strict with his scientific reasoning as he needed to be given the subject matter. Regardless, as the Defense Department officially shut down their investigation into the UFO question, Heinich was a public face of Flying Saucer investigation, and he had a

new message. After the break, we've been looking at Heineck's career through the framework of the archetypal story of the hero's journey. The end of Project Blue Book marks his emergence back into the normal world with a new message about UFOs. His first book was The UFO Experience, and that came out I believe in two somewhere right around there. And yeah, over all these years of studying UFOs, Heinek had always been thinking in terms of how do we

classify these events? Because for all their similarities, there are also some major differences in these different events that keep on being reported. So how can we categorize those? How can we organize those to try to make some sense of them? And his first attempt at that was pretty simple. He broke UFO sightings down into three simple categories. One was daylight discs, and that was when people reported seeing what they believed to be a solid object in in

broad daylight during the day in the sky. The second was nocturnal meandering lights. That's pretty obvious, and then the third category was visual slash radar sightings. This type of sighting was the most intriguing to Henick because the radar reading would corrob rate the eyewitness account. But this wasn't

the final form for Heine's classification scheme. As time went on, he further refined them and came up with his close encounter system, not least because of the Steven Spielberg movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Heine's close encounter system is the best known method for classifying UFO sightings. Close encounters, by definition, had to be something that occurred within about five yards of the witness. Okay, so that's what separates

these new categories from the original three. In heineck system, there were three kinds of close encounters, so close encounter. The first kind involves a visual contact, just a sighting of an unusual object in the sky within about five yards. Heineck felt that at that distance a witness could make out the size, the shape, the contours, the outline of

whatever it was they were looking at. A close encounter of the second kind added the element that the UFO had to have some type of physical effect on its surroundings or on the observer. The classic example is of the car stalling or the radio going out, or possibly vegetation is burned, as in the Lonnies of Moor case. But of course the most famous is the close encounter

of the third kind. Close encounter of the third kind really up to the anti because now it includes occupants or beings or creatures that are associated with the UFO as part of the event. It doesn't necessarily mean that the witness interacts with those creatures, but the creatures are present, the creatures are reported in proximity to the UFO, if not inside the UFO. So those were the three categories. A couple other categories have been added by other people

since then. I usually disregard those because those are just basically like escalating levels of human alien contact, and that just takes the whole thing in a completely different direction than Heineke ever intended. The term close encounters of the fourth kind has been used as a designation for alien abduction.

After that, it gets even more bizarre. A former physician and transcendental meditation teacher and current u apologist named Stephen Greer promotes the concept of close encounters of the fifth kind.

Author of They Are Already Here, UFO Culture and Why We See Saucers, Sarah Skulls He has made a name for himself with the specific kind of contact with aliens called close encounters of the fifth kind, which is essentially a kind of contact with aliens and UFOs that you, as a human being on earth, try to initiate, like you kind of send your intention and receptive nous to that experience out into the universe somehow, and then a phenomenon is supposed to sense that and and appear to you.

So this is getting well beyond witnessing lights in the sky or physical craft or what have you. But back to Heinich scale, Heinech was. Heinick was always very uncomfortable with close encounters of the third kind, because anytime you start talking about occupants of the UFO, you start talking about creatures. It just raises all sorts of questions that are much harder to deal with than anything in a close encounter the first or second kind. But they're the

most dramatic and of course the most famous. Heinich famously appeared in Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind as well, basically himself, but in the real world it was the less dramatic cases that had his attention. He really, really enjoyed the close encounters of the second kind cases because he felt they had the most scientific value because they left behind physical evidence. There was some sort of

physical effect left on our environment from this object. And like I said, those could be health issues with the witness, It could be all sorts of different things. But while accounts of sightings involving UFO occupants troubled Henich, this was not an indication that his mind was closing two ideas out of the scientific mainstream, to put it mildly. In fact, he continued to be intrigued by new paranormal claims, including those of Robert Monroe, who was an advocate for the

reality of out of body experiences. Well. UH, an out of body experience is a state of being, a state of awareness, a state of action, UH, separate and apart from the physical body. UH. About twenty of the population throughout the world, I guess has this spontaneously take place, that they're aware of UM at least once in their lifetime.

And it wasn't just Monroe. Heinek became interested in the work of a guy named Ted Sirios who claimed to be able to take psychic photos with his camera so he could like, concentrate on prehistoric times, and somehow, click click, his camera would take a picture of a dinosaur. Sirios used a small paper tube that he called a gizmo, which he said concentrated his thoughts to create the images.

Later he was exposed as a fraud. He would slip something, probably a picture, into the tube before the photo was snapped. This was what created the image, not his psychic powers. Iik was interested in a lot of these things, which drove his friends nuts because they felt like it detracted from his credibility, and I'm sure it did, But to me, I took it as a sign that Heinich was simply interested in exploring different states of consciousness that he then might be able to use to make sense of the

UFO experience. And now we're getting into the seventies and the eighties, he's you know, he's been dealing with and thinking about the UFO phenomenon for decades. At this point. He always thought that the extraterrestrial hypothesis was possible, but he was never fully committed to that. The extraterrestrial hypothesis is as it sounds, the theory that UFOs are vehicles from outer space. It is the most popular theory, but not the only one. He saw it as only one

possible explanation for the UFO phenomenon. He was willing to look into psychic things. He was willing to consider that UFOs maybe in part a psychic phenomenon, not that they were creations of our minds, but that whatever was manifesting its self in the UFO was doing it directly into our minds, not necessarily through our eyes or our ears, but directly into our minds. In that sense, Heineck thought

they might be psychic occurrences. This is heinik in. It could very well be that the whole UFO phenomenon is a signal, an index, another kind of property of the natural universe that we as yet had not recognized. Then I'd be on that if by go any farther, it will be a pure science fiction. Jason Cola, Vito and he and Jacques l A over the succeeding decade came to a sort of rough consensus that flying saucers may not be physical vehicles at all, that they might in

fact the psychic phenomenon a phenomenon. He was particularly interested in the idea that UFOs were related to pull to Geist's, and he said several times in the nineties seventies that UFOs had a very close connection to the poulter Geist phenomenon, and if we could understand what made for poulter Geist's made these ghosts, we would also understand what made flying saucers.

And between the two of them, the idea sort of came together that flying saucers were coming from another dimension, that they were a semi supernatural phenomenon, and that we couldn't entirely understand them through science itself, but through a mystical means of knowledge, And the idea emerged from that that if you could fully understand the UFOs, that by exploring flying saucers, you would see a new, better, grander science behind the facade of the material world, towards something

that's more psychic, more spiritual, even something that's approached almost the divine. In Heineken Valet co authored a book titled The Edge of Reality, a Progress Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, which begins quote the UFO phenomenon calls upon us to extend our imaginations as we have never done before. It continues quote in short, to approach boldly the edge of our accepted reality and by mentally battering at these forbidding boundaries,

perhaps open up entirely new vistas. He also entertained the possibility that these things were interdimensional in nature, that they were visiting us from another dimension, and he called these metaterrestrials, which I always liked that term metaterrestrial instead of extraterrestrial. So yeah, Heineck really became enamored with a lot of

these kind of different approaches to reality. But as I said, I think my read on that was that he was simply trying to consider different states of consciousness and how they might play into the UFO phenomena, maybe even create the UFO phenomena in the edge of reality. Heineck and Valet right quote the solution may lie in the parapsychological realm, the means of getting information. I mean, this is a startling statement from the man who was considered the leading

scientists studying UFOs. If science is inadequate to address the question of flying saucers, what are we left with spiritualism metaphysics? Is it surprising that the Condon Committee didn't see further study as being scientifically useful And this is what makes Heinick such an interesting character in the UFO story. He seems to embody the tension between people who want to use science to get to the bottom of uf sightings and people who feel that science is too insular are

too limited to properly address the issue. The fact that he really was a hardcore scientist. He only went where the facts led him. He would never go one step beyond what the facts and what the data would tell him. And yet at the same time, he's fascinated by people like Robert Monroe who have out of FADI experiences. He's fascinated people like Ted Sirios who claimed to be able

to make psychic photos. So there's this dichotomy between Heinech the scientists and Heinech the sort of want to be mystic or at least a guy who is at least interested in at least dipping his toe into those waters. And all of this, I think is in the hopes that it can just lead him to greater understanding of reality of the universe, I suppose. So where does this

leave us as we look at the folklore developing around UFOs. Well, the one sustained effort undertaken during the middle of the twentieth century to try to determine the truth behind UFO sightings. Project Blue Book ended with the Condon Committee's conclusion, which was seconded by the National Academies of Science, that there was no indication that these things that people saw in the sky were of extraterrestrial origin, and that further study

would have no scientific value. At the same time, who have Project Blue Books consulting scientists undergoing a change in perspective during his two decades investigating encounters from dismissive skeptic

to believer that something is going on. This perspective is complicated by Heineck's keen interests in the paranormal and belief that stepping outside the bounds of established science is likely necessary to find answers, and it is this lack of resolution that creates the space in which the folklore could

flourish and expand. With the end of the official government inquiry into UFOs, the narrative switches to other actors in the story, to civilian researchers, popular culture, and government disinformation agents. Next time on Strange Arrivals. Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heart, three D Audio and Grimm and Mild

from Aaron Manky. This episode was written and hosted by Toby Ball and produced by Miranda Hawkins and Josh Thame, with executive producers Alex Williams, Matt Frederick, and Aaron Manky, and special thanks to Wendy Connors, creator of the Faded Discs archive of UFO related audio on archive dot org.

Learn more about Strange Arrivals over at grimm and mild dot com, and find more podcasts from my heart Radio by visiting the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows