Our Strange Skies: UFOs Throughout History

1967 was a unique year for Canada. While the United States was embroiled in its own flap that saw the Ohio Valley play host to a myriad of strange activity, the Men in Black run amuck on UFO witnesses, and the government shunt off its UFO program to the University of Colorado, Canada’s flap was a quiet affair… but a predicted one. “In the spring of 1967 the late Dr. Olavo T. Fontes of Rio de Janei...

We're taking a bit of a break from our abduction series, and this week, Sequoyah Kennedy from The Nonsense Bazaar joins me to talk a little shit about the C.I.A. In 1952, the new Project Blue Book was riding high. With Captain Edward Ruppelt at the helm, the project was now taking UFOs seriously... but for a limited time. Before long, the project was hampered by press leaks and understaffing, but...

Welcome back to the third and final part of our series on Whitley Strieber. If you thought the last episode was wild, prepare yourself to take classes on Mars with the Sisters of Mercy. On this episode we cover the remainder of Whitley's books, including Secret School , detailing his time learning secret lessons in the Olmos Basin of San Antonio. In The Key , Whitley has a conversation with a stra...

So, what happens when you have a hit book on your hands? Well, your publisher wants another one. In this episode we cover the first two sequels to Communion , Transformation: The Breakthrough and Breakthrough: The Next Step . These sequels have it all: nine knocks, Big Cats, Whitley scared to step foot in the woods, feral chain smoking old children, the making of the Communion movie, starring Chri...

This week, we begin a three part series on one of the most important figures in alien abduction lore, Whitley Strieber. Through a singular image on a book called Communion , Strieber captured the uncanny valley of many readers and introduced the aliens that we know as the greys. On this episode we explore the contents of Communion , mainly Whitley's main experiences of October 4 and December 26, 1...

On this weeks episode, OSS teams up with the What If? Podcast to review David Paulides' new documentary, Missing 411: The UFO Connection . Together we dive into David Paulides' sketchy past as a cop, we postulate where the actual UFO connections are, and just why do aliens care about wasting disease in elk populations? References:  S.J. OFFICER ACCUSED OF FALSE SOLICITATION AUTOGRAPHS Assault Susp...

CW: Sexual abuse When it comes to the alien abduction phenomenon, no two figures have played a greater roll in its shaping than Budd Hopkins and David Jacobs. And shaping, I think, is the perfect word, because, as we’ve covered on this series, before this point, abductions were very different animals. It was through Hopkins that it became an intergenerational phenomenon, that its captors all looke...

Eight years before Whitley Strieber's Communion was published, The Andreasson Affair hit the shelves and challenged the notion of what abductions could be. Part alien abduction story and part contactee story, Betty's contact occurred during a tumultuous period in her life. It proved to be a frightening, and reassuring experience, one that proved to reinforce Betty's own religious beliefs. Stephani...

In our first installment of our History of Abductions series, I put forth the premise that abductions weren't in print before 1957... welp, that's not entirely true. On this episode I dive into the origins of the phenomenon with fae encounters from Celtic lore, and the stories of the chaneques, gnomes, from Mexico. I also dive into the classic stories of paleo-abduction, including James Everell's...

CW: Self-harm, Childhood Sexual Assault, and CSA Material We're taking a break this week from the abduction series to introduce a new series, UFO Grifters, featuring the worst of the worst in the UFO community. We're starting with a big one: Stan Romanek. Romanek came to prominence in the 00s as an experiencer who had one of the best documented cases in the history of ufology. The story quickly ev...

Abductions in the 1970s are characterized by cases that gained a level of popularity on their individual merits. The Pascagoula Abduction for instance was a media sensation that occurred during a very prominent UFO/humanoid flap. It’s also the first year that a handful of abduction cases were reported. Interestingly, they all occurred within 10 days of each other. In 1974, The Carl Higdon abductio...

Way back on episode three of this podcast, we featured our first of only two UFO Book Clubs, dedicated to The Close Encounters Man: How One Man Made The World Believe in UFOs by Mark O'Connell . O'Connell's biography of J Allen Hynek presented a man on two fronts, a scientists and a UFO investigator who had some really interesting spiritual beliefs. We released that episode way back in 2018, so it...

CW: Racism When it comes to the alien contact experience, and the cases that we've come to revere, we often forget that there are voices excluded from the conversation. The alien abduction phenomenon more often than not seems like a purely American phenomenon, dominated by white voices. I do not say this to diminish anyone's experience, but to lift up others. This episode about the question of who...

First and foremost, I can't thank you all enough for the overwhelming support for our first episode. It means the world. On this week's episode Rich Hatem is back and he brings the story of Albert Coe along. Published in 1969, at a time when contactee tales were becoming fewer and far between, The Shocking Truth! tells the story of Coe's encounter with a human looking alien while out hunting. For...

This episode marks the beginning of a L O N G series about the history of the alien abduction phenomenon. Our premise, in part, can be summarized by Thomas Bullard, “UFO abductions in the strict sense of the term usually include a visible UFO and require involuntary capture or coercion to get witnesses on board. Once they are inside the crew examines them and turns them out after about two hours,...

For Halloween this year I wanted to do something special. I reached out to Stan Gordon, and he was kind enough to join me. Stan talked about many of the cases he's collected and investigated over the years, including the infamous Fayette County case, the Bigfoot/UFO flaps of 1972 and 73, miniature UFO cases, and various other types of cryptids. Bio: Stan Gordon was trained as an electronics techni...

At the end of this week's episode I referenced a webcomic that I've been working on with past guest and all around good dude, Todd Purse , called Welcome UFO People . Well, we decided to get together and talk about it. On this bonus episode we talked about the comic that inspired us to do the series, the comics that we love, giving new life to old UFO/alien encounter cases, and the witness sketche...

Page space within UFO journals of the 50s, 60s, and 70s was dedicated to solely to the seasoned investigator, debuting important cases that we quote endlessly today, for the first time; the established theorist theorizing about the true nature of UFO entities, and other topics. Aside from listener feedback in select journals, those pages were almost never offered to the witness themselves to tell...

The 1970s produced a distinct flavor of Sasquatch, one that could be found in nationwide headlines in states like Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana and Pennsylvania. Often these sightings would be accompanied by other anomalous events, like UFOs, strange voices, and odd smells. 1972 was a year riddled with both. In a commentary for the North American Newspaper Alliance, Keel wrote “Hairy Monst...

When it comes to the big hairy guy in the woods, most people are of the mind that Bigfoot is a salt of the earth creature, feet firmly planted on the ground. Well, on this episode, we talk about the Bigfoot that may have hitched a ride on a UFO. For decades, hairy creatures have been associated with the UFO phenomenon. In 1954, Venezuela was besieged by short, stocky creatures, with glowing yellow...

CW: domestic abuse A couple of months ago, patrons of Our Strange Skies voted on a non-UFO topic that we would cover. Among the choices of "Haunted Objects, "Gef, the Talking Mongoose" and "The Beast of Boggy Creek," the topic that won, with 38% of the vote was The San Pedro Haunting. The San Pedro Haunting, otherwise know as the Jackie Hernandez Poltergeist case, is a uniquely violent case. Jacki...

On episode 96 , we briefly touched upon the story of the Sunderland family, who'd had a series of encounters with UFOs and aliens in a field near their home. The accounts of Gaynor and Darren Sunderland were very similar; they included strange flying saucers, wobbly walking aliens, and sci-fi ray guns. Their story first made headlines in 1978 and soon after, investigators began to document continu...

On September 13, 2022, Vice Motherboard rand published an articled called "Ukraine’s Astronomers Say There Are Tons of UFOs Over Kyiv." Astronomers at the main observatory in Kiev described black, extremely fast moving objects, that absorbed radiation. These objects were so fast, that they had to design a system involving two observatories, 60 miles a part, just to detect them. The paper cited by...

CW: misogyny, fat phobia Back in April I did an impromptu live stream. The theme of this live stream was music . One thing I love doing is live reacting to things I've never read before and this episode captures it well. In the first story, I recount a UFO encounter that the Moody Blues had while returning home from a show in 1967. The second story involves a Canadian man named Jack and his lifelo...

Journalist Bob Pratt made several trips to Brazil, collecting stories from villagers of UFO encounters. Many of them proved to be random, violent encounters which he published in UFO Danger Zone . Often these attacks would come after the witnesses had lit up a cigarette. The area known as "The Valley of the Old Women" produced many accounts over the decades. To quote Pratt, “The valley encompasses...