So I'm watching all of this hoopla with congressional UFO/UAP hearings, references to U.S. Navy images of unknowns and encounters and what have you, and in my eternal frustration with repeat performances of "the one that got away" I lean increasingly toward the impression that these little occasions where we or military personnel bump into bizarre manifestations involve some kind of temporary alteration with the here and now, with time and space. What does that mean? Darned if I know, but I'm not the first UFO writer, researcher or investigator to feel that way. Can a thing or event exist in our frame of reference at a certain moment, and maybe affect our environment in some manner -- yet be somewhere else simultaneously, so as not to be affected by anything we throw at it?
When legendary UFO researcher Wendy Connors assembled her extensive "Faded Discs" collection of old UFO-related radio and TV broadcasts, witness audios, etc., a few years ago (many of which are available online with free access) I reviewed a number of her releases for the late Errol Bruce-Knapp's "UFO Updates" Web site. At this moment, I write this with no Internet access, but do recall a specific British incident in which a witness encountering something very peculiar was immediately caught up in a situation where speech was impossible and nothing seemed to make sense. No normal, for a brief instant. I'm drawing from memory here, but I also remember a road incident where something resembling trees seemed to move as the witness watched, stunned, during a possible encounter with the unknown.
The question becomes, if incidents arise where reality bends in some other direction, what is reality? Issues of this nature make me uncomfortable because I'll be forced to mentally reincarnate my old college philosophy classes. Descartes comes to mind. So do my B grades in philosophy, which was never really my thing.
I was looking over some old newspaper clippings this week and found a few regarding the 1988 Knowles family UFO case in Australia, and the details brought home to me this very issue of the elusive reality we think we know, but can't necessarily be certain about.
The Knowles incident impressed police investigators tremendously, with that particular day in January, 1988 also notable for another UFO incident some 50 miles away at nearly the same time -- and neither group involved was aware of the other.
According to news reports (please check elsewhere for updates to the original investigation, as what I include here is bare-bones and minimal)), at approximately 2:45 a.m. Faye Knowles and her three children were driving on a remote outback highway in Western Australia when a bright light came into view, and closer observation revealed that it appeared to be an "egg cup" shaped object. Without warning, per witness accounts, the thing seemed to pick the car up off the highway, shook it violently, then deposited the automobile back on the road surface with such force that one of the tires blew out. The car's exterior and interior were covered with a black ash-like powder (later obtained for analysis). There are many details not included here, so again I caution the reader to search reliable sites for more.
Ms. Knowles and her children (two of them, teenagers Sean and Wayne, are shown here) stated that during the brief airborne episode their speech changed. That is, their voices became distorted, as if talking in "slow motion."
In addition to the high strangeness of the Knowles incident, at about the same time the crew of a tuna fishing boat some 50 miles away were "buzzed" by a strange object and told investigators that as they spoke among themselves during the affair their voices became "unintelligible."
Might there have been a connection between the two events? Was the same object responsible at exactly the same time as the Knowles encounter -- in at least two different places at once? Or was there a companion phenomenon near the tuna boat? Why would two groups of witnesses 50 miles apart experience specifically a speech or "slow motion" distortion? Was existence itself slowed or manipulated as forces unknown to us used the very concept of time to either get something from the witnesses, or to leave something with them? What of those recent experiments, and I'm hoping my memory sans Internet serves me right now, with subatomic particles hundreds (or thousands?) of miles apart in which researchers exerted some action on one and its "twin" far away reacted immediately with the same response to the stimuli? For various UFO appearances, can there be a similar event somewhere else, perhaps able to twist our perception of the entire episode?
1988 represented an era still rife with scientists who often seemed unwilling to look beyond the limits of their discipline. Therefore, it wasn't much of a surprise when Charles Morgan of Sydney Observatory was quick on the draw to suggest a "large carbonous meteor shower" coupled with witness responses as the culprit which ruined the Knowles family's otherwise pleasant highway excursion. Nevertheless, to his credit, Morgan actually did concede that something truly unusual may have caused the event.
Where do the Knowles car/tuna boat events and untold numbers of other dramatic UFO encounters leave us 34 years later? Maybe some trace of an answer to The Strange and Unusual materialized during the closed-door congressional hearings laid out last month. Yet, how would we know, when knowledge is perpetually drenched in layers of presumed national security at the whim of intelligence officials? SNAFU by intent, we may surmise.
