Jim Bradshaw
No little green men, yet
A new report by the federal Office of the Director of National Intelligence doesn’t use the term “flying saucers” or even “UFOs,” but says there are dozens of instances of “unidentified aerial phenomena” that it can’t explain.
The report does not mention aliens, or even hint that the “aerial phenomena” might be connected to explorers from other worlds, but some people are suggesting — or saying outright — that this is the first time the feds have admitted that there might be little green men visiting us from someplace far away.
It’s true that the feds have for decades been mostly silent on the subject, but this isn’t the first admission that something funny might be going on. For example, the muckraking columnist Drew Pearson reported in July 1952 that the Air Force was watching “a mysterious rash of flying saucers” and that officials admitted they “could be space ships from another planet.”
Pearson said the reasoning behind that admission was that “it will soon be possible for us to build a space ship to visit the moon,” therefore a more advanced civilization could already have a spaceship and “could be keeping this planet under surveillance through flying saucers.”
Had he asked around, Pearson would have found at least a handful of UFO believers in south Louisiana.
In the summer of 1949, for example, a flying saucer made a visit to her sister’s house especially memorable for a Mrs. Dardeau of Ville Platte. The Ville Platte Gazette reported on its front page on July 14, 1949, that she and her sister, Mrs. Edward Wolff, were sitting on the lawn of the Wolff residence in Alexandria “when they became aware of a saucer zooming overhead.”
They said it was the size and shape of a plate, flew lower and slower than an airplane, made no sound, and had a yellow light in the center. The sisters were “emphatic that it could not be anything else but a saucer.”
The Alexandria Town Talk’s editors scoffed at the story, but N. L. Martin and his son Gene believed it because they’d seen saucers themselves. They told the Crowley Post-Signal that about 9 o’clock on the morning of July 11 they were driving near Prairie Hayes in Acadia Parish when they saw two of them. They were “of an aluminum color … kept glinting in the sunlight” and “would spin in a clockwise motion and reverse themselves.”
Then, in October 1951 something the newspapers called “The Thing” appeared over south Louisiana.
“Many honest and sober residents reported seeing an eerie stationary ‘red pencil of light’ hovering over the horizon at night, and no one seems to have a plausible explanation for it,” the Lafayette Advertiser reported on Oct. 26, 1951.
Henry Mullins of the Civil Aeronautics Administration was on duty at the Lafayette airport when he got a call about 6:15 p.m. from a man in Milton who’d seen whatever it was.
“I told him that possibly it was a reflection of gas flares. Then I went out and looked and it didn’t look like a reflection at all.” Mullins described a “pencil of light” south-southeast of the airport.
“The ‘pencil’ was not horizontal but up and down, and it had no base,” Mullins said. “There were ... only a few low stratus clouds far to the east. So, the lack of clouds, plus that the light had no base, rules out the possibility of a reflection of a fire.”
The red pencil hung around for an hour and then just “faded away,” Mullins said.
Mrs. Clarence Leger described it as “about three feet long and about as wide as a baseball bat.”
This time, however, there was an explanation. The sighting was still the talk of the town when one of the men who flew military jets came home on leave from Korea. He explained that these new-fangled aircraft left something called a “vapor trail” that often picked up reflections from the setting sun or even from moonlight. Skeptics said that might explain the “pencil,” but what they saw sure didn’t seem like vapor.
None of these folks could have been more convinced of alien visitors than a cousin of mine who, when we were teenagers in the early 1960s, dreamed that a delegation from another world came to take her to their planet and make her their queen. In the dream, her daddy wouldn’t let her go because he thought the spaceship didn’t look safe. (She couldn’t ride in my third-hand ’49 Ford for the same reason.)
She readily admitted that all of it was a dream, but I’m pretty sure that for a long time after that she watched for wise creatures who knew a queen when they saw one, and hoped that her daddy wouldn’t be around when they showed up for real.
A collection of Jim Bradshaw’s columns, Cajuns and Other Characters, is now available from Pelican Publishing. You can contact him at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.
