For years now I've kept careful records of all the encounters I've witnessed, investigated or had reported to me. I'm going to share a number of these reports with you through this blog, in a kind of sporadic, ad hoc series. And I'm starting with a recent story - one I came across during a recent tour through the South and East while on 'rest leave' from my job.

Case #: 1073

Date: Aug 13, 2008

Location: Algebra, Kentucky

Report type: Verbal report to investigator

Entity type: Triangular craft

A young man, identifying himself as 'Charles' (real name withheld on request), aged 24, approached this investigator at a hospitality establishment outside Horse Cave, Kentucky. He was in an agitated state.

I had been talking with the manager of the establishment and had informed him of my interest in UFOs and unexplained phenomena. The manager called to Charles and told him to relate his own story. It appears, from the comments of other members of the establishment, that he had been doing little else since the event of two nights before.

Following an evening spent at the same hospitality establishment, Charles had been walking to his trailer, about five miles away. He had recently been deprived of the privileges of his driver's licence, for reasons unexplained.

It was a dark night - apparently moonless and with a thick cloud cover.

Charles spotted what he thought was a fire in the distance. Then it vanished. From time to time, he saw the same orange glow appear between trees, apparently on the distant hilltops, but his vision was frequently obscured by the forest. But he became aware that the location of the 'fire' did not seem to be fixed.

He also started to be aware of a strange noise - a deep "rumbling" or "throbbing". He said he found the sound "disturbing" and yet, at the same time, "kinda frisky."

Charles said he then stopped by the side of the road to "relieve the tension." As he stood there, "the sky just seemed to get darker," he said. "I thought it was, you know, gonna rain or something. But then I saw that the sky was moving, and that it wasn't no cloud. I figured it was time to button up and get the hell outta there."

But Charles found himself unable to move. As he stared at the sky he could make out a huge triangular shape, darker than the sky. He estimated its length at 300-400 feet and a similar width at its base. It was impossible to make out any details in the craft itself. But it seemed to emanate a strange force that made Charles tremble, caused a "churning in the guts" and made his hair stand on end.

The craft had nearly passed when a bright orange light appeared at the rear end, "like its ass was on fire." The craft vanished quickly. Charles was so overcome that he collapsed into the ditch by the side of the road.

When was was awoken the next morning, following a brief search by his common-law wife, 'Tina', it was found that Charles' watch had stopped at what he estimated was the precise time the craft had disappeared. He was still weak from the experience and took several hours to gain sufficient strength to revisit the hospitality establishment.

No-one else in the vicinity has reported any sightings.

I can't remember the first time they came. Memory is so treacherous. How much do we forget? How much do we invent?

There was one occasion I can recall clearly, if not reliably. And I have reason to believe it's the oldest of my memories of such visitations. But it can't have been the first time. There must have been occasions before that. Because as night fell, I was already afraid.

We were living on Cape Cod. Through an old Army buddy my father had got a winter job as caretaker of a trailer park. He changed jobs a lot back then and we moved from one to the next, up and down the East Coast. That was around the time he sold his Silver Star.

It was another world. Out of maybe sixty or seventy trailers, only half a dozen, give or take, were occupied year-round. The rest, I was told, were for the summer vacationers. I never saw that. We'd moved on long before the weather turned warm enough for tourists.

My father painted and fixed stuff. I had no idea what. I was nine years old and all I knew was that our trailer was cold and damp and I hardly saw my father at all. Except some nights after he got back from the bar and needed help getting to bed. Or the times I made him angry.

Mostly I was left alone. I explored the park imagining I was the only survivor of a nuclear attack. This would have been 1982, I guess. Reagan was in the White House so it felt like the End Times were happening already.

I liked it most when the fog rolled in and the whole world beyond the trailer park vanished. I never went outside much anyway, except to school, when I had to.

I hadn't seen my father for four or five days. It wasn't that he was coming home so late. He wasn't coming home at all. And for some reason that has always eluded me, I have never been able to recall how my mom was taking this. It was like he was there, still with us, so there was no cause for comment, nothing to discuss. He was just invisible.

My teacher sent me home with a note. Sleeping in class again. There was no dinner. Mom was going out. It was still afternoon, only just dark, but she was already putting on make-up and was wearing her best dress, the one my father said made her look like a slut.

She read the note. I thought she was going to slap me but she just shook her head and sighed. Then she looked me up and down and laughed at me the same way she used to laugh at men when she told them to "beat it" or worse. I wanted her to hit me.

I spent the evening wandering the trailer park. A few times I thought I saw my father and wondered if he wasn't coming home because he was just too busy. But it always turned out to be shadows or, once, the weird old guy from trailer eighteen. I was supposed to keep away from him.

About midnight, I crawled into bed. It got real dark in that trailer park because they kept the floodlights - the lights that normally lit up the pathways and roads - turned off to save money. And my father got mad if we left lights on in the trailer for no good reason.

Our trailer was near the park entrance and the only light I could see came from the bar across the road. I guess that's where my mom was. It was just enough for me to make out the shape of my room, the stains on ceiling that I spent hours forming into shapes - sometimes they were countries in new continents of my own design, sometimes mythical beasts, or just clouds.

Sleep took me at some point.

I woke in a timeless state, at an unknown hour in an unknown century. I could make out my bedroom ceiling but knew myself, somehow, to have been removed from my normal existence, that during my sleep I had traveled outside of myself, beyond the trailer and the park and the life I knew.

I couldn't move. Nothing but my eyes and barely those.

And I was not alone.

Something dark occupied all of the space in the room that I could not see. I could smell it. I could hear it. I could sense its proximity. And I knew it was watching.

My breaths came in hard-fought gasps. My limbs were paralyzed and numb but an electric anticipation thrilled through my body. Whoever, whatever was there had a purpose and it involved me. It was there for me.

I experienced sensations that night I would fully recognize only many years later. I felt myself touched, contacted, engaged in strange and wonderful ways. I became connected to a level of spirituality I believe few have experienced.

I have no idea how long it lasted. There were other times, of course, many of them remembered only after extensive hypnotherapy. Since that night, I have suffered and enjoyed more significant experiences. But none more magical. None more strange.

I noticed a while back that there seem to have been a number of UFO sightings within a fairly small area. I've always kept records of every sighting I've investigated, but for some reason I hadn't thought about how they were distributed geographically. Could there be any significance in this?

I started with the past year's worth of sightings. Quite a few. More frequent than at any other time I can remember. I've added a few older ones, too, sightings that I know are reliable.

As best I could, I marked the location of each sighting on a map. It's not always easy. Sometimes the witness is unsure of his or her location when the event occurs. Sometimes, they tell me, when the event is over, they find themselves in a different place to where they started.

And sometimes, to be honest, I'm not sure how much to trust them.

This is something all UFO investigators have to confront. Among those who claim to have had contact with the unknown, there is a small portion who are liars, a handful who are simple fantasists and perhaps some who are just confused or flaky. It's my belief that most are genuine, but how do you decide where any one witness fits into these categories?

I have to go on instinct. As the Weekly World Inquisitor is ... well, the kind of publication that it is, we probably get more than our fair share of liars, fantasists, and flakes contacting us. I have techniques for weeding them out - obviously I can't say here what they are. But the rest is down to gut feeling.

If I feel the report is from someone reliable, and the information is detailed, the sighting gets a solid dot - the size of the dot representing the significance or importance of the sighting.

In the case of witnesses who seem genuine, but who are unsure or confused, I draw a ring. That ring represents uncertainty of various kinds - of exact location or my reservations about the witness.

The dots and rings are building up. There are more rings than dots. Why is that?

I'm looking for patterns. We are pattern-seeking animals, after all. But I think something is starting to emerge. I haven't finished yet, so more when I've completed the map...

It started with lights in the sky, that's what she told me. Just lights. So at first she was entranced. It would be a while before that fascination turned to horror.

It's amazing how many old-timers you find in out-of-the-way places in and around the desert. Some are still scratching a living as farmers of one kind or another. Some are just playing out their last days.

When I get the call, it's usually women. I don't know why. Maybe they spend more time looking into the skies and hoping.

This one - we'll call her Daisy - had pigs. "Knew something was going on by the way the hogs was acting up," she told me. She lives way out to the north-east of Nevada, near where it morphs uncaringly into Utah.

It was her neighbors who called me first. I don't think they see her often, but they complained that when they did, her encounter was all Daisy could talk about. They persuaded her to call me too, and I set a date to see her.

The farm, if that's what you could call it, wasn't strong on creature comforts. This wasn't someone who spends much time lazing about making up idle fantasies, I decided.

When the hogs had started hollering, she went outside, shotgun in hand, ready to see off whatever was causing the commotion. At first she couldn't see anything. That's because she wasn't looking up. It was when her german shepherd began howling at the clouds that she finally turned her eyes to the heavens. That's when she saw the lights. "Ain't never seen no plane move that way," she said.

She told me she got bored with the lights. I didn't believe her. She went indoors and, unusually, locked the door. Then she turned in and was quickly asleep.

At some point - she has no idea how much time had passed - she realised she was not alone. She lay rigid in the bed, unable even to move her head. She felt a very strong presence nearby. What happened next took her an hour to describe to me. But I won't relate it in detail. Some of it was very personal. Some of the details seemed fantastic. And after all, neither I nor anyone else can confirm them. But in general terms, the old woman was subject to molestation, not all of which, I reckon, she found objectionable. She described small creatures, but her description kept changing and I got the impression that she started to invent details when she found me unresponsive. During these interviews I try to show as little reaction as possible, in order that I don't unwittingly guide the witness. 

I wanted to post the picture I took of the woman, but the more I look at it, the more I think that her trauma and confusion might be mistaken for insanity. 

The thing is, I've heard a lot of these stories, all with pretty much the same outline. But they seem to be getting more frequent, and there seems to be a rash of them in one area.

Whatever the truth of the woman's tale, there is something real behind it. And I get the feeling that, whatever it is, it is going to be revealed soon. 

They used to be saucers. Sometimes they were cigar-shaped. Now they're mostly triangles.

Fashions come and fashions go. But do the aliens know about this?

I have seen so many strange things in the sky, but usually lights at night, so I've never really seen a shape. Other people have been luckier, I think.

But it seems that people see what other people have seen. Or they see what they think they should be seeing.

The first UFOs, defined as such, were the objects seen by Kenneth Arnold from his private plane, back in 1947. He didn't say they were saucer-shaped. He said their movement was undulating, like a saucer skipped across the water. But once he was misquoted, other people started seeing saucer-like objects in the sky. Why? Were they simply trying to conform?

And if these reports are shaped by people's expectations and desires, can we trust them? Maybe they are simply manifestations of our desires, not of physical artefacts.

I hope one day to see an alien craft in clear and unambiguous detail. I've no idea what shape it will be. Maybe that won't matter at the time...