1953 Italy JOHN B. BLACK AND JOHN J. VAN ALLEN: little pale man pequeno humano

 JAN

mar - may

documento CIA ufos terrestres 10952 e 1953

ufo - UFOS at close sight: URECAT-000078 May 20, June 20, 1953,

Small figure in green trousers, jacket and tie, returns to UFO - Nexus Newsfeed

ufo - UFOS at close sight: URECAT-000078 May 20, June 20, 1953, Brush Creek, California, USA, John B. Black and John J. Van Allen

   MAY 20, JUNE 20, 1953, BRUSH CREEK, CALIFORNIA, USA, JOHN B. BLACK AND JOHN J. VAN ALLEN:

John B. Black and John J. Van Allen were two miners who set up a camp on the side of a mountain in Butte County, California, USA. Three years long, they dug there, without having filed a claim, and told about looking for "fissile material" - although later sources said they were digging for titanium or gold. The men's activity rose suspicion of the guard forester as he feared that their campfires could set the brush on fire. Nobody in the area knew exactly were they came from, they just dug each summer and went away in the winter.On June 24, 1953, Black saw the County Sheriff Captain Fred Preston and asked him whether he knew of flying saucers reports in the area. The Sheriff didn't, and Black then told him that he and Van Allen saw saucers seven times, four times in the air and twice on the ground. He told him that the saucer landed on May 20, and again on June 20, and proposed that it might possibly land again on July 20.When the saucer landed on June 20, Black had seen its pilot, whereas Van Allen who had see the saucer in the sky on the previous occasions but only saw some traces on the ground this time. The men were not much impressed with the saucers in the sky and did not remember the exact dates, but as for this June 20 landing, Black has much details to tell:

At 06:30 p.m. Black was in the woods, and looked towards the Brush Creek and Jordan Creek junction, when he spotted a small sized person leaning above the water. He thought that it must be a young boy fishing, and thus he wasn't puzzled that much. But later Black went down the hill leading to the creek and saw this person again at only 12 meters of him, taking water in a bucket. He then saw the saucer and understood that the little chap was not a fisherman. 

Whimsical saucer magazine editor Gray Barker is practically the only ufological source to provide the description of this character, as obtained by one Paul Spade who stayed four days camping with the two witnesses to win their trust and get their full story.

Black told Spade that the small man was wearing green trousers, a jacket, a tie, a green cap, and had brown hair on the head. Only his shoes seemed weird because they appeared to be of a remarkable flexibility, and although they were easily recognizable as being shoes, they seemed to form an integral part with the feet. He had a walk as if his muscles were stiff, broad shoulders, a robust stature, a nice look, a very pale skin, black stating "he resembled somebody who would never have remained a long time in the sun." Except his small size and his moderately odd clothing, he looked like a normal man.

Black said he watched the small man drew water from the creek with a flat-bottomed and round bucket, which had a handle, but was different from all other buckets, because "the sides were rounded like the segments of a cone," and it seemed to be made of aluminum or some other shiny metal.

Black advanced, but walked of a piece of dry wood, it made noise which was heard by the small man who then looked around the creek but apparently did not spot Black who was hiding in the trees and bushes. The small man then rushed all the same to the saucer not far from him, he climbed its tubular infrastructure with his weird flexible shoes rapped around each bar of the ladder. Then the tubular base of the saucer was withdrawn into the craft's body, which oscillated in the air a few seconds, then took off in a whistling noise.

The saucer description is entirely classical and of the science-fiction movies type. It was shining with a metallic aspect and without visible rivets, of a diameter estimated by Black as of approximately 2.50 meters, and 1.30 meters in height in its center. It had some sort of window on the side. No gas odor nor other substances was perceptible and no visible means of propulsion was observed.

For either the May 20 or the June 20 sighting, Black specified that the saucer was under intelligent control because it was in the middle of trees and tried to take altitude, without having the space to cross the summit of the trees, so it maneuvered intelligently to get out of the woods before taking altitude.

On another occasion, Black had agitated his hat at the saucer and it seemed to answer by oscillating a little. Whatever Black told the Sheriff on June 24 happened to come to the ears of the Press and received a national attention. Newspapers generally ridiculed the story, but because the saucer might return on the 20 of the next month, on July 20, more than two hundred people arrived in the course of the day to see the saucer and its pilot land again.

Among the curious and Press people were also two cameramen of the Movietone films of United Press and Telenews Corporation with their heavy cameras, one George T. Wolfer, a sales manager of Milwaukee equipped with a modified Bolex cinema camera which allowed shooting in three dimensions and color. Black was interviewed and recorded for KXOC, the Chico local radio station. There was also an archer who planned to knock the space visitor unconscious with pointless arrows to capture him, but other people dissuaded some, recommending a friendlier approach. Lastly, two telepaths had come to read the thoughts or communicate with the space visitor.

No saucer came, and the crowd dispersed.US Air Force's head of the Air Tactical Intelligence Center had wondered about the stories of the saucer at Brush Creek he had read in the newspapers, and had ordered an investigation. The local Air Force representatives first interviewed local authorities; which revealed that while the two men had not caused trouble in the area previously, their background and origin were quite unclear. As no saucer showed on June 20, the Air Force stamped the report "case closed: hoax."Gray Barker's correspondent Paul Spade returned in the area for to check if the saucer might return on September 20. He found out that Black and Van Allen had unexpectedly left the area, started to watch for lights in the sky, and ultimately, the County Police found him and thought he was some nut who didn't realize how dangerous it was to spend nights in the mountains haunted by bears and pumas, without carrying a gun. They put him in jail for the night for his own security. Spade, or Barker, seemed to make a federal case of this; Barker used the story in a rather paranoid book about "men who know too much about flying saucers" and the Police intervention at Spade came handy.

Later, the case entered in the US ufology literature, although never being cited as a classic or bulletproof case. Coral Lorenzen, head of APRO, provided a very shortened version on the event, noting that at the time, APRO was just started and they had no ufologists to indicate. she noted that US Air Force was said to have investigated, but as the report was confidential she could not know that they found no evidence and no credibility in the story and labeled it a hoax. She seemed not willing to describe the incident fully and notes that the newspaper had not told all the details. It is apparent that Mrs Lorenzen did not fully believe the story but was nevertheless thinking it was fascinating. She and other sources started to strongly believe that on both landings, the spaceman did exactly the same collection of water in a bucket, although nothing of the sort seem to have been specified initially. The "repetition" of the landing events obviously fascinated ufologists who wanted to reason that aliens are two absurd to be aliens so the landing is of course not a hoax and not an alien landing but something much more paranormal.

Jacques Vallée then put down the alleged saucer landings in his catalogue with two entries, one as of May 20, 1953, the other as of June 20, 1953, without checking anything and in the US version where the man in green suit, tie, and brown hair had become a creature in a parka-like spacesuit. Later still, footprints in the sand Van Allen claimed to have seen became "physical traces" of the saucer landings. From then on, with the exception of "ultraskeptic" ufologist Martin Kottmeyer, who seems to be the only one to remember that the alien had a tie, the deformed and incomplete story lived on and appears today on various website in the form popularized by Vallée

1954 ***