The Big Book of UFOs. Chris A. Rutkowski

thorns. Storm clouds formed as they slowly made progress towards their destination. By the time they neared the thicket, a loud “Boom!” announced the arrival of the rain.

      The boys quickly ducked under a ledge to get shelter from the storm and its possible lightning bolts. They waited out the cloudburst as it sent torrents of water down onto the creek bed and lightning flashed around them. Such storms were common, but always short-lived.

      Padillo and Baca talked for a while, watching the downpour turn the dry creek bed briefly into a fast-moving river. In a matter of minutes, however, the rain stopped and most of the water had sunk into the ground out of sight. Soon, the clouds lifted and the sun came out again.

      They came out into the open and began travelling again towards the patch of mesquite. Suddenly, the ground quaked and they were startled by more light, but it did not seem like lightning. They assumed it was something involving the nearby army base.

      Nearing the mesquite bushes, they were able to hear the sounds of a cow from inside. Sure enough, as they approached, they could see the cow — and a baby calf. They decided to have lunch while the cow dried off its calf.

      While they ate, Jose happened to glance up, looking further along the creek bed. A wisp of smoke was rising from somewhere just over a rise in the desert scrub. He thought that lightning from the sudden storm had started a brushfire. They put their lunches down and left the cow to tend to its calf while they went exploring in the direction of the smoke.

      As they made it over a ridge, they stopped and gaped at a strange sight. There was a long groove dug into the ground, as long as a railroad train. And at its end, almost hidden by smoke, was a bowl-shaped object the colour of tarnished metal. They assumed a stray rocket had crashed.

      They moved in to the crash scene, but found that the ground was very hot, as if there had been a great fire. As they walked among the smoldering greasewood trees, they had difficulty breathing because the smell was bad and the air was unbelievably hot and humid.

      Baca noticed the ground was covered in patches of small pieces of shiny metal, but very thin, like the paper inside a cigarette package. He picked up one that was jammed between two rocks, and as he did, it unfolded by itself! Baca crumpled it together in his palm and let it go again. Sure enough, the curious piece of metal opened up and flattened out, without any help.

      Easing their way over boulders and broken rock, they were eventually able to get within three to five metres of the object.

      Padillo looked into a jagged hole in the side of the large, circular thing, and saw some people inside, moving around. But he was shocked to see they were not human. Instead, they were small creatures that had the general shape of people. These strange beings moved back and forth inside the object so fast they seemed to blur their features. They were barely bigger than the two boys, with no hair on their heads, and skinny arms and legs. The scene and the creatures’ appearance seemed somehow unreal.

      UFOS AND ALIENS IN LITERATURE

      Of course, the most popular alien of all time looks and acts very humanlike. In 1938, the first Superman comic strip appeared, about an alien who was not only friendly towards Earth people, but who vowed to protect them as well.

      Baca was very afraid at seeing these creatures, and began to run away. Padillo was more curious and didn’t share his friend’s concern, but he decided to go with him so they would not be separated.

      They both went back the way they came, leaving the gouge in the Earth and its occupants behind. They passed right by the cow and her calf, finally reached their horses, then quickly untied them, mounted, and galloped away.

      When they made it back to their ranch, it was already dusk. They found Jose’s father, Faustino Padillo, who asked them right away about the lost cow.

      The boys explained what had happened and what they had seen. Jose’s father was surprised at their story, but was more surprised at how they were acting. However, he reassured them that what they had seen was likely only some army operation. He decided he would go with them to check on the area in a few days. He called a friend who was a police officer and invited him out to their ranch to come along when he went with the boys to look into the discovery.

      Two days later, the four of them drove out in two trucks as close as they could get to the mesquite thicket, then hiked in to where the boys had found the gouge in the Earth and the strange craft with the little creatures. But when they got there, Padillo and Baca were surprised not to see any sign of a disturbance or a metallic craft. They went farther down the canyon and noticed that the ground was covered in shallow lines or grooves, as if someone had used a giant rake to even out the debris and rocks. Suddenly, they came upon the metallic craft, although it was now resting at a different angle than when the boys saw it, and it was almost completely covered in dirt and branches.

      The two men climbed on top of the large saucer-shaped object and looked inside. There was no sign of any life at all. They came back out, puzzled by what they had seen.

      Padillo’s father wondered what to do, but the police officer pointed out that the ranch was on federal land and that Padillo was paid by the National Wildlife Refuge for tending the land. Furthermore, Baca’s father worked for the government as well, and they worried that the army would be concerned if they knew the boys had been to this area. They decided to do nothing about their discovery, and told the boys that the object was probably a new kind of weather balloon, and they were not to tell anyone else about it. The small creatures were just figments of their imaginations.

      With that, they walked back to the trucks and drove home.

      The young Padillo and Baca were a bit disappointed. They were sure that they had stumbled across something very important, but Padillo’s father was right. Maybe it was nothing at all.

      They were even more surprised when, a few days later, some soldiers showed up at the ranch. They explained that a balloon did in fact come down in the creek bed, and to recover it and its payload, the Army needed to build a road over the desert scrub so that military vehicles could drive there safely.

      “But don’t tell anyone we are doing this,” the soldiers directed. “It is a military secret.”

      The boys watched the military transports and jeeps come and go over the next several weeks. They wondered what really had crashed into the desert.

      Many years later, when they were grown up men, they remembered the events of that night.

      “I am sure it was a flying saucer that crashed there,” Padillo told investigators. “Just like the one that crashed at Roswell two years later.”

      DID YOU KNOW?

      Less than 1

       percent of all UFO reports involve

       the observation of an alien.

      Almost everyone has heard the story of the flying saucer that was said to crash near Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. Some witnesses insisted that they saw pieces of the craft being carted away by the U.S. Army, and that a cover-up of the event has been in place ever since. According to some versions, bodies of small creatures were found in the wreckage, and they are being kept at a top secret laboratory, perhaps in a place known as Area 51 in Nevada.

      But Padillo and Baca may have seen an even earlier crash, of a different spaceship.

      “I don’t know what we saw,” Padillo says today, “but I will never forget it.”

KENETH ARNOLD: THE MAN WHO STARTED IT ALL

      At 2:00 p.m. on June 24, 1947, Kenneth Arnold finished his work as a fire control engineer at the Central Air Service in Chehalis, Washington. He took off from the Chehalis airport in his own Callair aircraft for a short trip to Yakima, but he decided to assist in the search for a marine transport plane that had gone down somewhere near Mt. Rainier, not far away.

      He flew around the area, then turned and began flying east towards Yakima. His altitude was about 2,800 metres.