Silent Invasion: The Pennsylvania UFO-Bigfoot Casebook

By Stan Gordon

Stan Gordon Productions

Website: www.stangordon.info

2010, 348 pages, US $19.95

ISBN: 978-0-9666108-3-3

Reviewed by Brent Raynes

Silent Invasion: The Pennsylvania UFO-Bigfoot Casebook by Stan Gordon chronicles a truly bizarre and fascinating wave of activity that erupted in the Keystone State back in 1973 and 1974. Back in 1974, Stan reported in the MUFON Symposium Proceedings that from 1973 up through February 18, 1974, he had documented 118 anomalous creature sightings. Many of those cases can now be found in the pages of this thoroughly thought-provoking book.

Chapter 7, Drawn deeper into the Unknown, bears a title that is a bit self-explanatory. While Bigfoot-type encounters across the Pennsylvania landscape are hard enough for many to assimilate into their worldview, some cases really began to have Stan and his colleagues scratching their heads. For example, the case on the night of September 27, 1973, in Beaver, Pennsylvania, where two teenaged girls were reportedly startled to see a 7 to 8 foot tall white haired Bigfoot-type creature crossing a nearby road, heading into the woods nearby, all the while carrying a luminescent sphere in one hand! The father of one of these girls soon afterwards went into those woods to investigate, during which time a UFO appeared overhead and shined a light beam down into the woods. People who knew this man noticed afterwards how he began to act very oddly, began talking about the end times, and even expressed how the world was going to end in a few months. Investigators felt that he may have had a period of missing time, as his daughter insisted he had been in the woods for over an hour, while he began to deny that he had even gone into the woods. He owned the woods where this had all happened, and began to object to anyone else going in there. “There are some things that shouldn’t be discussed,” he was quoted to say.

Stan and his team began to notice that a good number of their UFO and Bigfoot witnesses had a history of paranormal events in their lives too, and the reports were getting decidedly stranger and stranger. Chapter 8, Into Another Realm, contains one of my favorite high-strangeness UFO/Bigfoot case histories. Stan even called the psychiatrist/paranormal investigator Dr. Berthold E. Schwarz onto this case. Dr. Schwarz would later write a detailed summary of it for England’s Flying Saucer Review (Vol. 20, No. 1, 1974), which later appeared in his book, UFO Dynamics (1983, Rainbow Books). A truly chilling, extraordinary account, this story began around 9 p.m., October 25, 1973, at Uniontown, Pennsylvania. A total of 15 people had initially observed a large red sphere low in the sky that appeared to slowly descend down into a nearby pasture. Three men armed with a 30.06 rifle headed into this pasture, which is when all hell began to break loose, so to speak. In the field, they found a huge bright white dome-shaped object with a flat base, sitting on the ground. Producing a loud whirring noise, it appeared to be about 100 feet across. Suddenly their attention was drawn to a nearby fence line about 75 feet away, where two tall Bigfoot-type creatures, making baby crying sounds, were slowly moving towards them! In the mayhem that was to follow shots would be fired, a state trooper would shine his flashlight beam on one of the Bigfoot’s from a mere distance of about 10 feet, and then later when Stan and his team arrived on the scene one of the main witnesses would suddenly behave strangely, growling and making an “extremely loud, inhuman-like scream”, during which time a strong, sickening sulfur-type smell soon forced the group to leave the field! Soon afterwards, the witness who had acted strangely wouldn’t be able to recall his odd behavior, but did report seeing a figure cloaked in a black robe and hat carrying a sickle, warning that the world would end if mankind didn’t change it’s ways.

While that witness had had no prior paranormal experiences, since 1973 he began to have precognitive dreams of future events. One bombshell element of this case was when this witness revealed to Stan and another investigator how he was approached by two unidentified men (one dressed in an Air Force uniform) who did a hypnosis session with him. At the time, he thought that they were representatives of Stan’s group, and in fact, the man in the Air Force uniform resembled one of Stan’s key members (which it wasn’t).

A couple of months before this case, the police department in Derry contacted Stan about a caller who reported how on August 20, 1973, he and his wife were driving along between Hillside and Millwood when a large ape looking creature ran out in front of their vehicle, swearing that upon impact the beast simply vanished into thin air! Stan wrote, “Looking over the incidents of this day, as well as reflecting back on some of the odd details that had been revealed with some other creature encounters in the past, I began to wonder what indeed we were really dealing with. A creature walks in front of a car and the motor begins to stall. In another case, a creature reportedly is hit by a car and vanishes upon impact. What about the fellows who say they saw a creature near Grapeville, which appeared on their one side, then suddenly re-appeared at an opposite location?”

There’s definitely plenty of fascinating high-strangeness in this book, with a number of interesting photographs and illustrations. Factually and thoroughly investigated and documented, this book compiles a depth of thought-provoking material on the UFO-Bigfoot scenario that is quite rare.

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The NASA Conspiracies: The Truth Behind the Moon Landings, Censored Photos, and the Face on Mars

By Nick Redfern

New Page Books • The Career Press, Inc.

220 West Parkway, Unit 12 • Pompton Plains, NJ 07444

2011, 240 pages, US $15.99/CAN $18.95

ISBN-13: 978-1-60163-149-7

Reviewed by Brent Raynes

Quickly glancing over the cover’s subtitle my initial reaction was, “Ho hum, more rehash on the so-called NASA faked a moon landing conspiracy and the whole drawn out Mars Face saga,” but instead I was delightfully pleased to be proven wrong as I came upon story after story that I was completely unaware of. For example, chapter 13, The Monsters of NASA, was for me a real eye-opening walk down the wild side of high-strangeness. Here we read how Frank Shaw, an archivist at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, late one night in 1986, had a frightening experience in which he observed atop a nearby building a large black man-like figure with a cape draped over its shoulders and two huge wings protruding out from each side of it’s cape. The wings made a cracking noise, he said, as they slowly flapped in the strong, howling wind of that night. Initially frozen in fear, only able to stand and stare at the gargoyle-like spectacle above him, he finally managed to gain his mobility and ran straight for his car, got in and got the hell out of there without even looking back one more time.

Weeks later, the experience still gnawing at him, he broke down and reluctantly shared what had happened with a supervisor. To both his surprise and relief, he was not treated like a nut case. In fact, he learned that there was a secret file on such matters, and that file was recently opened as the bodies of two German Shepherd’s had been found mutilated and drained of large quantities of blood in the same area that the winged creature had been seen. NASA security people were reportedly flown in from Arizona to interrogate him about his incident and naturally he was strongly advised not to talk about the matter any further.

Even the famous SETI scientist Frank Drake was a little perplexed and bewildered when, in the mid-1960s, in his early tenure as director of Puerto Rico’s Arecibo Radio Telescope, a security guard one night reported encountering a sinister appearing black cloaked figure walking a narrow trail around the perimeter of the bowl. The guard said that he believed the being was in fact a vampire! Though skeptical, Drake took the guard’s account and agreed to read it. About 48 hours later, the body of a cow was found on a nearby farm, drained of blood. Drake recalled, “The vampire rumor had already spread through the observatory staff and now the cow incident whipped the fears of many people into a frenzy.”

In addition, the author ponders whether there was any truth to the stories he found circulating in Puerto Rico that chupacabras and U.S. military personnel had a deadly series of confrontations after a UFO crashed in the El Yunque rain forest in 1984, and that two of those chupacabras were captured and taken to a secure underground lab facility under the auspices of NASA? Also did a mysterious two night siege between security personnel and small high-speed balls of blue light buzzing around NASA’s John H. Glenn Research Center in Ohio end up with the retrieval of an approximately 9 foot tall Bigfoot type creature that was shot during the otherworldly skirmish?

Then there are stories like that of P.T. McGavin, a former employee of a company that contracted with NASA during the Gemini program, who in 1973 underwent a full-blown contactee experience. It began with a disembodied voice that instructed him to leave his home in Colorado and head out for Aztec, New Mexico. He even had a vision like of a triangular craft hovering over a canyon. Though he initially feared that he might be suffering signs of possible mental illness or a brain tumor, he decided to go ahead and follow the mysterious instructions he perceived and made the more than 350 mile trek. As a result, around 2 a.m. the morning after his arrival, McGavin, who had fallen asleep at this point in the back of his car, awakened to the sound of a deep and intense humming noise. Then he looked out the window and was shocked to see a large black triangle hovering low overhead, almost identical to the one he had seen in his vision the day before. He got out of the car and was soon approached by a tall human looking figure with long blond hair who wanted McGavin’s help to spread the message of the space people that consisted pretty much of the standard love, light, and a better future for us scenario of past contactee lore.

There was something about this alien being that McGavin wasn’t sure he trusted. He thought very deeply about what had happened for several weeks and then made the decision to contact several of his former old friends from NASA’s Gemini program and tell them what had happened. A few weeks later, he received a telephone call from a gentleman who identified himself as a Mr. Callahan. He claimed that one of his friends on the Gemini program had contacted him, though later they would all deny this. At any rate, Callahan claimed he worked for NASA on “security” matters and claimed that the aliens were actually from our own planet, an ancient and deceptive race who were hell bent it seemed on removing us from the surface of this planet so that they could again resume their former role of being earth’s primary inhabitants. Though he would later try and track down this man, no one it seemed knew anything about this “Mr. Callahan.”

Needless to say, The NASA Conspiracies has all sorts of tantalizing and thought-provoking surprises and details in store for the reader. This is just a teaser to entice you to begin the process of assimilating its pages for yourself.