Our Strange Skies: UFOs Throughout History

In UFO circles, Puerto Rico's reputation has largely been built upon that red eyed goat sucker known as El Chupacabras. In reality, their UFO and humanoid history is much more varied than that. Magdalena del Amo-Freixedo, the wife of investigator Salvador Freixedo, put it best: “Long ago, long before the arrival of Christopher Columbus, the god Yuquiyú was wont to appear to the natives of the Isla...

Am I phoning it in again? Yes, but I really like this episode and for those who haven't subscribed to the Patreon, this is what you can expect. While I was perusing Patrick Hughye's Field Guide to Extraterrestrials I found an entry concerning a mantis being. To me, this mantis looks like it's getting down to "Cotton Eye Joe." I tracked the story featured in it to an article written by Gary Smith f...

In UFO research we have lots of strange terms for things. For instance, a flap is defined as a large cluster of sightings over a period of time. A great example of a flap is our series on the 1973 Year of the Humanoids, or the 1954 flap in France where witnesses saw UFOs and occupants that wore “diving suits.” Beyond the scope of flaps, there are certain areas of the world that have distinct paran...

CW: Animal death and mutilation This week Spencer Wirth Davis of Finding Quantum Quest and The What If? Podcast steps in to tell ME a story. Sometimes, a sentence is so unhinged and delivered in a normal fashion that it's unforgettable. In 2018 Spencer and his co-host on The What If? Podcast , Ryan Kopperud, went to the Mile High Mystery Conference . While there, Ryan was yelled at by David Paulid...

After nearly 8 hours of content over the span of three episodes, I feel like we could use a bit of a breather. Okay, maybe I need the breather, but I'm not gonna leave you hanging. I'm flying solo this week, and I've culled a few articles from The A.P.R.O. Bulletin to read for you. If you feel like I'm phoning it in, don't worry, I do too, but I needed a bit of a break. We'll conclude our series o...

As silent wings hovered over the TNT area north of Point Pleasant, the big gray birdman would soon be replaced with bright luminous lights, and mysterious men driving brand new Cadillacs, asking strange questions to Mothman witnesses. 1967 would be the weirdest year of the flap. With humanoid and UFO reports on the rise, intense men in black type activity would accompany the witnesses all througho...

On August 29, 1965 headlines across the country all read “UFO Prober Says There’s Nothing to Indicate Any UFOs Extraterrestrial.” Air Force Major Hector Quintanilla, a physicist and head of the Project Blue Book, made a statement following the huge spate of UFO sightings across the country that month. There were calls that summer for a new probe into the government’s handling of the UFO mystery, i...

1965 is often viewed as a turning point in ufology. Up until that time, the press had largely dismissed UFO reports at the behest of Project Blue Book and their downplay of UFO reports. 1957 was the last time that the press had really looked upon the subject in a favorable light, but things would change 8 years later. In August of 1965, an explosion of UFO activity would be reported in Texas, Arka...

In February of 1978 a man known only as Julio F packed up his car, his dog and his .22 rifle and headed out into the woods to hunt for hare. Almost immediately, everything got weird. From the start, he took a direction he never intended to. He stopped at a "wayside bar" that wasn't normally opened this early for breakfast and was directed to a hunting site by the strange man that ran Hostal 113 ....

The Men in Black, MIBs, the UFO silencers; since the 1950s, UFO witnesses have reported encounters with shadowy figures who've threatened them into silence. Or as Nick Redfern puts it in his book, The Real Men in Black : “For years—or perhaps even for centuries — the Men in Black have been elusive, predatory, fear-inducing figures, hovering with disturbing regularity upon the enigmatic fringes of...

On September 7, 1956, Thomas Hutchinson, a resident of Moneymore, Ireland, put a head lock on a miniature UFO that had landed on his property. Thomas attempted to escort the object to the police department, but after placing it on a bush, the object spun quickly and took off into the sky. Stories of miniature UFOs, like Thomas Hutchinson's are often brief, no matter the means employed to capture i...

They go by many different names and are found in cultures all throughout the world. Trolls, Leprechauns, the fae, various legends of “The Little People” in Native lore, The “Hidden People” of Iceland. But Today, we’re calling them gnomes. Specifically UFOGnomes. Legends of little people have littered fairy-tales and literature for centuries. and sometimes they step out of UFOs. On this episode I'm...

As a life long resident of the Adirondack region of Northern New York, books covering topics like ghosts and cryptids were slim. And aside from Night Siege , the Center for UFO Studies' examination of the Hudson Valley UFO flap of the 1980s, it was rare to find books about anomalous objects in the sky. And yet to the residents of the Hudson Valley the area had a paranormal reputation. It was the l...

CW: Domestic Violence, Childhood Sexual Assault In 1994 Jean Bilodeaux, a field investigator for MUFON in California, received a phone call form a woman. The voice on the other end of the phone said, “May I talk to you? I saw a UFO.” The woman, given the pseudonym Callie initially called to talk about her own UFO sighting, but soon she began to discuss a young woman named Raechel, her daughter's r...

When Close Encounters of the Third Kind was released to wide audiences, it was believed by some in the UFO community that it would have an impact on UFO reports. And yet it didn’t. CEIII reports continued to vary during a time when UFO contact wasn’t homogenous with reports of the grays, tall nordics and reptilian shape changers that has dominated much of UFO literature since the late 80s. That’s...

CW: ANIMAL DEATH, ANIMAL KIDNAPPING  On September 21, 1967 Harry King went to the fence to give Nelly Lewis' prized Appaloosa Horse, Lady, her usual treat for the day. He grew concerned when she failed to show up. A short time later, her body was found, mutilated. Lady's death was quick to make newspaper headlines because of the unusual condition her remains were in, and investigators were quick t...

UFO witnesses who describe contact with otherworldly beings are often told "do not be afraid", that the beings "mean them no harm." On this episode of the Our Strange Skies podcast, the opposite is the case. For this episode I'm joined by Derek Hayes, the host of the Monsters Among Us podcast, a paranormal expert for the Travel Channel's Paranormal Caught on Camera and one of the creators behind t...

When I ask a guest to be on the podcast, I often given them a list of topics to chose from, but with Stephanie Quick it started with a DM that began "Are you familiar with the Trancas Incident?" I don't know why Stephanie was the right person for this episode, but she was. The deeper we looked into this incident, the more synchronicities we found.  Seven years after the Trancas Incident took place...

It's safe to say that the new logo for the podcast is a fair representation of what would happen if I were to meet an alien in an open field. For our guest this week, Katie Webb , the opposite is the case. She talks candidly about her experiences and her takeaways from them. On this installment of our Witness series, Katie talks about her first UFO encounter, incidents in which mysterious iodine w...

The Yukon has this reputation where the sky is a theater itself. It’s a place known for its lights in the sky, where from August to April the Northern Light can be seen against a backdrop of stars. It’s the kind of isolated place that you’d think most UFOs would avoid, but in the mid 1990s, Yukon became a place where enormous UFOs would be reported. The first sightings would come in late 1995 from...

In 1968 Gordon Creighton of Flying Saucer Review received a rather angry letter from a man named F.D. Marrow of Flemington, New Jersey. Marrow, a Klass apologist, was concerned that he was doing a disservice to UFO research by comparing UFOs and ghostly phenomenon. “On this basis UFOs will never communicate with the authorities or the average man, and we will have to depend on mediums, and others...

1973 was an unprecedented year for abduction cases. 10 abduction cases were reported that year, 8 of which occurred during a 17 day period from October 11-28. Many of them would become infamous in the UFO community. The abduction of Patty Roach and her children was featured in an episode of In Search Of... alongside the story of Carl Higdon. The model for Brian Scott's repeated abduction experienc...

"The fall of 1973 saw one of the largest and most concentrated waves of UFO reports in history... But the strangest reports from 1973 were of humanoid entities often seen in association with UFOs. I recorded 70 reports of this type during the 5 months from August through December, 1973. Of these, 55 took place in the continental United States, 36 in October and seven on a single day, October 17, w...

The Year of the Humanoids was a unique time in UFO history. Over the course of four months, the eastern United States saw a high concentration of UFO sightings characterized by unique humanoids in association with them. Bigfoot type creatures, BAEliens, catfish-like creatures, and a myriad of other odd beings doing odd things. During that time in 1973 a pair of cases stood out. For months, in and...

The Place Bonaventure Hotel Incident is the quintessential UFO event involving a big UFO hovering above the outdoor pool of a Hilton hotel in downtown Montreal. For nearly three hours, 40+ eyewitnesses looked upon a UFO, including journalists, police officers, members of the RCMP, and military personnel. On this episode, Brian Hastie from Double Density and The Order of Podcasters joins me to disc...