Mansfield - "“Just after 11pm on October 18, a US Army reserve crew was flying a helicopter from Columbus to Cleveland, Ohio.  They included Capt. Lawrence Coyne (nineteen years flying experience), Lt. Arrigo Jezzi, Sgt. John Healey, and Sgt. Robert Yanacsek.  At 2,500 feet and good visibility, the crew noticed a red light to the west, slowly moving south.  They assumed it was probably an F-100 out of Mansfield.  Very abruptly, however, the light changed course and began to head right at them."” (Dolan (2002) p. 383) They tried to evade it by descending at a rate of 2,000 feet per minute.  They couldn'’t get any confirmation as their radio had died.  "At 1,700 feet above the ground, the crew saw the object streak in front of, then above, the helicopter.  It stopped dead for about ten seconds, filling the entire windscreen.  All four members saw it clearly: it looked like a gray cigar with a small dome on top."” (ibid p. 384)  There was a red and a white light, but it was the green light that sought them out and flooded the cockpit with an eerie glow.  The saucer then flew west, made a sharp trun and disappeared, in the region of Lake Erie.  There was even a witness on the ground, who described the green searchlight as reaching to where she was.

Mantell -– Captain Thomas.  One of the few people to die chasing "“Venus"”!  On January 7th 1948 at 1.20pm a large UFO was seen by Godman AFB, Kentucky.  It was described "“alternatively as a bright disc-shaped object, round, and cone-shaped"” (Dolan (2002) p. 56).  When it was still there at 2.30pm and a flight of P-15s went past, their Flight Commander Mantell was asked to intercept.  He climbed to 15,000 feet in pursuit of it, while his men turned back for fear of running out of fuel or oxygen.  At 2.45pm he is recorded as having said "“I have the object in sight above and ahead of me, and it appears to be moving at about half my speed or approximately 180 miles an hour"….  "It appears to be a metallic object, and it is of tremendous size."” At about 3.15pm he said "“I am trying to close for a better look."” However his plane spiralled down and he died.  Captain James F. Duesler claims he was a crash investigator at Godman Field in 1948 and saw the "strange gray-looking object"” that Mantell had pursued (Marrs (1997) p 155).  Of Mantell's crashed plane he said "“The wings and the tail section had broken off on impact with the ground and were a short distance from the plane"  …It appeared to have "belly flopped"’ into the clearing "There was no scratching on the body of the fuselage to indicate any forward movement and the propeller blade bore no tell-tale scratch marks to show it had been rotating at the time of impact, and one blade had been embedded in the ground."” (ibid p. 156)  It was insulting for his family to accept the Air Force's official explanation of Mantell'’s death as down to chasing Venus, so air intelligence officers at Project  Sign tried to blame a Skyhook balloon.  Skyhooks were launched from September 25th 1947 until the 1970'’s as atmospheric testing devices by the Navy.  But even "“they were unable to locate any records showing that such a balloon had been sent aloft during the time in question." (Marrs (1997) p. 157).

Martians - "“A number of extremely prominent minds around the world were stating the belief that intelligent signals were being transmitted from the planet Mars.  Chief among these was a report made by the inventor Nikola Tesla that was registered in the colorado Springs Gazetter of March 9, 1901, and received worldwide attention: the eccentric genius was convinced that he had received intelligent radio transmissions from the planet Mars.  He had been attempting to achieve wireless contact with the Red Planet for at least two years, and had made statements to that effect.  Nevertheless, when the event came (if in fact it did), he did not immediately publicize it, certain that he would be ridiculed.  Ridicule was exactly what he got, until a year later, when Lord Kelvin publicly announced his concurring opinion that Tesla had been contacted by Mars.  The matter received no further press."”   (Rux (1997) p. 13).  William Pickering, the astronomer, reported "“absolutely inexplicable"” lights on Mars on December 7th 1900, adding to his Lowell Observatory observation of a "“self-luminous object approximately twenty miles above the unillumined portion of the Martian surface"” on November 24th 1894. (ibid p. 13)

Masse -– Maurice.  On July 1st 1965 this French farmer encountered alien lavender fanciers (or herbalists).  He was a lavender farmer, afterall, so it'’s only to be expected really.  In Valensole, 41 year old "“Masse heard a strange noise early in the morning and saw an oval object one hundred feet away in his field" (Dolan (2002) p. 283).  He thought it might be a prototype vehicle and so approached the egg shaped craft. Twenty feet away from it, he could see that the craft was fifteen feet long and had six legs attached to a central pivot.  He could make out a cockpit area.  Wearing greyish green all-in-one suits were two little beings, they were examining the lavender and had little containers on their belts, probably for sample collecting.  Their skin was very white and they had no hair but very large heads and barely any mouth.  They were under four foot in height.  On seeing Masse they seemed to be amused and spoke to each other in a gurgling language whilst pointing a stick-like device at him to immobilize.  Masse seems to have seen a sliding door on the craft through which the aliens entered and they departed with a whistling sound.  He remained paralysed for the next twenty minutes and was exhausted for a few weeks afterwards.  The local police knew Masse well and considered him "“absolutely trustworthy"”, and verified that there were landing traces of holes in the ground left by the legs of the craft.

Meier -– Eduard Billy. This charming one armed Swiss guru meditated in India, in a cave for a long time and was deported for claiming to see UFOs.  He went to live in Hinwil and married Popi.  He had a sense of contact approaching and would ride out on his moped to the woods and hills and meet Pleiadians, photographing and filming their beamships, scoutships and Semjase his contacter.  Semjase imparted very wise words to him "“that they are humans like the humans from this earth"” (Kinder & Intercep (1987) p. 104) but earthlings "represent an earlier part of their society"” (ibid p. 106).  He has received an enormous amount of defamation, seemingly for no good reason.  Jacques Vallee for example, who seems so sincere and thorough in other respects, mentions Meier out of the blue with not even a full sentence, on four separate occassions in Revelations (1991).  The first time is to call people naive for believing Meier (p.31) the second is to say "“I have told the story of Billy Meier"” (p. 224) when he patently hasn'’t, and the third mention is "“Billy Meier'’s Pleiades hoax" (p. 256) making the snide comment on page 257 "who is putting up the money for the dissemination of Meier'’s glossy photographs?"” [probably Wendelle Stevens]. No introduction to Meier, no summary, no respect, just snide assumptions.  This coming from such a prestigious ufologist as Vallee is suspicious.  Meier lives by the hardwork of himself, his family and his friends on their farmland.  He is not jetting around the world with government money.  He has had some beautiful encounters with spiritually advanced, benevolent beings, and in his unassuming, gentle manner wishes to do as Semjase instructs and share that knowledge.  He was chosen because of the vibratory rate at which his brain transmits, the Pleiadians have said that they find it easier to tune in with his thoughts than other people'’s. "“Meier explained that he had been [prepared] for the contacts since he was a small boy, and before that, in a previous incarnation" - “"the vibrations, the waves and everything, that'’s much higher"”."” (Kinder & Intercep (1987) p. 104). When he was seven on February 3rd 1944 he had telepathic contact for the first time with Sfath.  This continued all summer, until September when Billy was alone in the forest four miles from home.  "There I saw something falling down from the sky, very, very slow and it became bigger and bigger.  It was something like a metallic pear.  Then this ramp opened and it came out, going down like an elevator.  I entered the ship and we went up very high above the earth.  There was a very old man who looked to me like a patriarch.  His name was Sfath.  He was a human being, like each other one here on earth, only very old.  We talked for hours, then he brought me back to the ground" (ibid p. 78).  Sfath'’s voice communicated with Billy until his sixteenth birthday on February 3rd 1953, then a few months later there was Asket, a female from a parallel universe communicating telepathically with him.  He did travel extensively through the Middle East and India, working as "“snake catcher and a gardener, drove a nitroglycerine truck, sang in the streets, waited tables, herded pigs, sailed an oceangoing tug, sold pots, pounded nails, supervised a youth hostel, prospected for rubies and gold, posed as a veterinarian, coached, worked as a male nurse, picked grapes, designed jewelry, performed puppet shows, raised chickens, and taught German "– all "under the tutelage of Asket"” (ibid p. 81).  So with luck and persuasion he was able to continue his travels to India and back to Switzerland. In 1965 he lost his arm in an accident and met Kaliope Zafireou (Popi) who became his wife. His photographs are clear and beautiful.  He says the ships pose for him and that they have told him that he "“will get the best photos of any human on this earth"”.  Computer analysis only enhances the majesty of the ships by revealing the aura of energy enveloping them, and proving that they are the size and distance stated.  They are in the open countryside, and there is footage of them hovering, swaying in falling leaf motion, gyrating around a tree and "‘jumping"’ across the sky.  There were also metal samples, but many of the photos and the samples were stolen, for example; "The metal fragment, which represented one of the final stages in the manufacture of the material for the beamship hull, glistens under Marcel Vogel'’s electron microscope at IBM.  The unique sample disappeared while in Vogel'’s lab."” (Kinder & Intercep (1987) p. 106-7).

Menger -– Howard.  Astroeroticist with partner and wife Connie Weber, he wrote of saucey encounters dating back to 1932 with spacewomen and Venusians.  He sounds like a bit of a space tramp to me.  Menger was married with children but took Connie on as a mistress, and she soon discovered his Saturnian lustful nature (My Saturnian Lover (1958) with Menger using the nom d'’plume of Marla Baxter -– according to Jerome Clark (1998)). "“Venusian contacts - …in which Menger was able to offer help [by providing] "… Earth clothing for them to wear".  …According to the Venusians, there were civilisations scattered all over the Solar System, all of them perfectly human- looking.  In 1959 he published a book entitled From Outer Space To You which detailed his adventures, including a trip to an alien base on the Moon. [He got] "…some alien food, a piece of processed potato, which contained five times more protein than Earth potato" …part of the aliens'’ highly nutritious vegetarian diet.  According to Menger, this diet enabled them to live much longer than Earth people.  Their technology was approximately 2,500 years in advance of our own "…in the early 1960s, Menger performed an abrupt about-face and claimed that he had been working for the CIA in an experiment to test public reaction to claims of extraterrestrial civilisations". (Baker (1999) 158-9)