'South of the Border' Humanoids
It was Friday, April 4th, 1969, just a few days before Easter. My pal, Charlie, and I - two very bored soldiers - were setting out on a hitchhiking expedition from Fort Bragg, North Carolina to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina with vague hopes of scoring with some partying college coeds taking their Spring Break in the popular seaside town. Leaving the base with our backpacks and sleeping bags at about sunset we headed south out of Fayetteville on Interstate 95.
Reaching the large rest stop, South of the Border, a few hours later, we stopped at a coffee shop to grab a cup and get our bearings before continuing on. SoB, as the soldiers called it, was located just across the border in South Carolina outside the town of Dillon. While drinking our coffees and looking over our map we couldn't help but notice a rather loud group of local rowdies, talking [Item Moved/CMS/nd] and throwing dirty looks our way. This was the way it was during the rambunctious 1960s. In the area of the South we were in it could be dangerous for hitchhiking strangers, especially blacks, hippies, Yankees and soldiers. Accordingly, Charlie and I took the leering snarls very seriously, finishing up quickly and moving on down the road.
Soon, we were walking through downtown Dillon toward route 25, the old Latta highway cutoff toward Myrtle Beach, still 70 miles away. One good ride would get us there and at the same time get us away from the trouble we both sensed. And sure enough, it wasn't all that long before two cars showed up with our friends from the coffee shop on board, hootin' and hollerin' as they went by. As empty as the town was at this time of night (nearly 10 PM) it didn't bother us too much because of the street lights and the occasional traffic on the road. But, as we reached the edge of town near the cutoff - with the rowdies going by every few minutes and the chances of a ride looking increasingly doubtful - the two of us began looking for an escape hatch. After the loudmouths passed by us again and drove out of sight we took the opportunity to slip off the road into a dimly lit area behind a vacant, broken-down gas station. Walking by the left side of the deserted building we followed a wheel-rutted dirt path up and over a small crest, by now barely able to see more than a few feet in front of us as we passed by trees on the edge of the gas station lot into almost complete darkness.
But, as the two of us picked our way carefully down the car path, the whole area suddenly lit up in an aqua-green glow showing a small field no more than a few acres in size. Now I could see clearly, and what I saw amazed me; there was a three- or four-story high, multi-decked UFO standing on what seemed to be metal legs. In addition, there were beings similar to humans - a head with two eyes, two arms and upright on two legs - but colored green, either an effect of the ambient light or the result of my extreme confusion and fear. They were walking in the field and on decks which curved around the ship, with the nearest one about 20 feet away. He/she/it turned our way, and said firmly (I believe telepathically) "LEAVE! NOW!"
In spite of the danger that had caused us leave the highway in the first place, both Charlie and myself, like the trained soldiers we were, executed a smart about-face and marched right back toward trouble. We hiked at a pretty quick route step down the road a few miles without saying a word to, or looking at, each other, hoofing just as fast as we could out of Dillon into some farming and pasturage area.
Presently, the rowdies showed up once more in their cars, making it clear we were their targets for this night. Once again, as the cars went out of sight we left the highway, into a cow pasture this time. From a spot a few hundred yards off the road we watched them as they returned looking for us. Eventually, the night settled down the cars were gone and we climbed into our sleeping bags.
The next morning we continued on to Myrtle Beach.
Here's the best part. As far as I can recall we had forgotten about the UFO.
One day, thirty years later my buddy called up from out of the blue and asked me, "Do you remember Dillon?" I had no idea what he was talking about. But as soon as he said, "The UFO," the whole experience came back in a flash. - MUFON CMS
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Could the mythical beast Bigfoot help step up tourism in the Washington County town of Whitehall, as legendary lake monster Champ has done to entice visitors to Lake Champlain?
Last month, about 200 people with an interest in Bigfoot — a hulking man-ape creature said to have been spotted outside of town several times in the 1970s — crowded into a former armory turned athletic club for several hours to tell stories to a film crew from the Animal Planet show "Finding Bigfoot."
Bigfoot itself did not make an appearance at Whitehall Athletic Club, said manager Beth Gugliotta, but she did spot a number of out-of-town license plates in the parking lot. "I saw plates from New Hampshire, Maryland ... we definitely had new people in town for it."
While the alleged Bigfoot sightings happened decades ago, the creature is part of the area's history — which also includes being the birthplace of the U.S Navy during the Revolutionary War. A quick tour of the historic, compact downtown shows Bigfoot is already being used to draw attention to several area businesses.
Last year, the athletic club held a Bigfoot Fest, featuring local music, food and traveling Bigfoot artifacts. A few blocks away along the scenic Champlain Canal, the new Historic Grounds restaurant has added a Bigfoot breakfast sandwich on the menu.
"It is two eggs, two cheeses and two meats. It's a really big sandwich," said owner Nat Huntington, a native who said he first heard the Bigfoot legend when he was a teenager.
Elsewhere in town, a liquor store is named for Bigfoot and sells a locally made metal sculpture of the beast, complete with yellow reflectors for eyes. Purtorti's, a family-owned convenience store and deli, has Bigfoot on a t-shirt guarding its beer cooler. A carved wooden version of the creature stands near the town pavilion along the canal.
And just outside of town, at Skeene Valley Golf Course on Norton Road, the logo has a shadowy silhouette walking past a golf course flag. The course owner, who died in 2012, had a close encounter there in 1975 with what he described as a seven-foot, hairy, man-like creature with red eyes that disappeared into the woods. Cliff Sparks repeated his account over the years, including in interviews with the Outdoor Life and History channels, and was visited by numerous curiosity seekers.
"Now, I have never seen Bigfoot, but when I was little, I believed that he was real," said Holly Robideau, another Whitehall native who manages the local branch of Community Bank and who is also president of the local Chamber of Commerce.
"We would love having more people come to town because of their interest in Bigfoot," said Robideau. "Any publicity we can get from it, we will be happy to take. It would be great if more comes out of it from the Animal Planet episode."
Added Bethe Reynolds, a local real estate agent, "It's funny, it's amusing, so why not?"
When she travels elsewhere in the state on bank business, Robideau said she is sometimes asked about Whitehall and Bigfoot. "So we do kind of have a claim to fame."
Such notice helps the town attract visitors to its scenic setting, nestled at the southernmost point of Lake Champlain, within minutes of Lake George and its mountains, and Vermont.
Coincidentally, there appears to be an actual scientific reason for why the area appears to be particularly attractive to solitary, wide-ranging predators, such as bears, bobcats and fishers, and perhaps Bigfoot.
A 30-mile stretch of mostly undeveloped forest country that covers about 1,700 square miles between Whitehall and Rutland, Vt., is being studied by The Nature Conservancy for its role in allowing such large animals to migrate undisturbed between the Adirondacks in New York and the Green Mountains of Vermont.
Not that Bigfoot can be so easily contained. The crew from "Finding Bigfoot," now in its seventh season, has traveled to 27 states and foreign countries including China, Nepal, Australia, the United Kingdom and Canada in the quest for stories, according to an Animal Planet spokesman.
After the crew filmed in the Whitehall athletic club, they moved to the woods in an undisclosed location somewhere in the area believed to present the "best opportunity" for a potential sighting, the spokesman said. Everyone got out of the woods unscathed, he said, and continued to the next location in Massachusetts. The Whitehall episode is set to air sometime later this year. - Times Union
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Are We Ignoring Alien Technology?
In his memoirs, former prime minister Lester Pearson said he would always wonder what might have happened had Paul Hellyer, not Pierre Trudeau, succeeded him in 1968.
But not in his wildest imaginings could Pearson have reckoned on the intriguing ways Hellyer would pass the decades even without the country’s top job.
All going well, Paul Theodore Hellyer — who first served in a Canadian cabinet 11 prime ministers ago under Louis St. Laurent — will be 92 this summer.
On Saturday morning, he was keynote speaker at a Toronto symposium on UFO secrecy, an event that saw about 150 people gather at a University of Toronto auditorium for the old politician’s fascinating review of what ails the country, the world economy, the entire planet.
In short, explained Hellyer, it is a secret cabal’s stranglehold on the international banking system, humankind’s failure to adopt the technology available from extraterrestrial visitors, and to apply it to the climate crisis of global warming.
“Most of us do not know what is going on,” Hellyer said. And the problem, he said, in the punning way he was famous for a half-century ago in Ottawa, is that “what you don’t see is what you get.”
To all appearances, the audience Saturday seemed to get pretty much what it came for.
Those in attendance passed through a lobby that, on its walls, had exhibits telling the story of doctors Banting and Best, and on tables beneath had vendors offering copies of Science Was Wrong, Flying Saucers and Science, UFOs and Aliens and, of course, Hellyer’s own books.
Hellyer was raised a devout Baptist, added a rich baritone to his church choir and studied as an engineer. After being elected, he served in cabinet for a few months under St. Laurent in 1957 before becoming defence minister under Pearson. In that portfolio, he played a key role in changing the Liberal government’s nuclear arms policy and integrating the Canadian armed forces.
Then things got a little hairy.
Hellyer ran for the Liberal leadership but lost to Trudeau in 1968, quit Trudeau’s cabinet and the Liberal party a year later, sat as an independent MP, joined the federal PCs and ran for their leadership in 1976, when he denounced Red Tories for not being true conservatives.
After that erratic phase, he tried unsuccessfully to negotiate the merger of the Canadian Action Party he founded with the NDP, rejoined the Liberals, made a few more doomed bids for election before turning his attention to UFOs, grand conspiracies and such.
Hellyer’s old pal in the Commons, Judy LaMarsh, with whom he sneaked across Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin in 1962 in a caper much frowned on by their bosses, once said “he wants to give people their money’s worth.”
You’d have to think that he did to those who’d ponied up $50 for a ticket on Saturday morning.
At first blush, it could have been a weekend continuing education class on, say, creative writing, or financial literacy for retiring baby boomers. But it was rather less banal.
Hellyer said that when extraterrestrials landed a flying disk in New Mexico — shortly after the end of the Second World War, a war that established the United States as the most technologically advanced nation in human history — well, “it was extremely upsetting” to the Americans to learn there were, in fact, other societies “light years ahead of theirs.”
Much of what has ensued over the last 60 years has been an effort to keep the public in the dark about technology available from ETs, he explained. “Why all the lies and coverup?”
Hellyer said he receives emails by the day from all over the world from people reporting UFO sightings.
From time to time, these visitors have interfered with control systems of nuclear missile installations on Earth, he said. The ETs have taken an inventory of earthly goings-on — “they have the whole picture” — and are not amused by what they see, he warned.
“It is my opinion that they look at us and say, ‘the children have been playing with matches.’ ”
Our planet is down to a few years, if not months, to get our house in order, he said. A key window for the massive monetary reform Hellyer says is needed to free up the resources to address climate change (in part by collaborating with the extraterrestrials) is in the final months of President Barack Obama’s administration, when he has little to fear from bold action.
During a question period after the talk, one audience member suggested those on hand call themselves “Hellyer-ites,” the better (assuming, he said with a laugh, that Bill C-51 didn’t infringe on their activities) to reveal such alarming developments and demand action.
Though admittedly flattered, Hellyer — who said he is frequently on radio in the U.S. these days — suggested something like “Truth-ites” might better fit the bill.
Even the unflappable Mike Pearson, long in his grave, would surely be astonished. - The Star
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Robert Wadlow Was The Tallest Man In History
When Robert Wadlow of Alton, Illinois, was born in February, 1918, no one suspected that he would be taller than his father by the age of 8. They also didn't peg him to officially become the tallest man in recorded history. Little did they know what would happen to young Robert.
Wadlow was born to normal-sized parents in the small Illinois town of Alton. By the time young Wadlow was 8 years old, he was already taller than his father, who stood at almost 6 feet tall. Read more at Robert Wadlow Was The Tallest Man In History
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