Thom Nickels: UFOs — fact or fiction?

What is a UFO? In the New York Times bestseller, UFOs by Leslie Kean, many government officials and pilots go on the record with reports of sightings, but say that the sightings are not necessarily alien spaceships. 

While most sightings — nearly 95 percent — are explainable, Kean believes enough evidence exists to support the supposition that UFOs may indeed be extraterrestrial.

Levittown, Pennsylvania resident Denise Murter, grew up in Lansdowne and went to Archbishop Prendergast High School. In July 2008, Murter had an experience that changed her life.

“It was in the middle of the night and I was asleep with my husband and our little Yorkie. Suddenly our Yorkie was up and growling pretty bad. He never does that. I thought somebody broke into our place. He wouldn’t stop growling so I figured I’d better get up and see what’s going on. I went through the place to see if somebody was there. I figured since I was up I’ll take him out to go potty, so I took him out back and a light caught my eye. I thought it was the moon, but it wasn’t, it was like a craft overtop a treetop to the left of my backyard, about 1,000 feet in the air. I was staring at it trying to figure out what it was, and it wasn’t a helicopter because there was no noise, everything was absolutely silent and you could see these three giant white lights underneath this thing in the sky.”

What struck Murter was when the way the craft started to move. “It scared me, so I went to my husband and said, ‘I don’t believe in UFOs but I swear to God, you got to get your ass up and go out back, there’s a UFO in the backyard.’”

Murter’s husband got up and peeked out the door. “Yeah,” he said, “It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before,” then went back to bed. Murter, however, watched it shuffle across the sky. “You’d blink and it was in another position,” she said. When it finally did disappear she went back to bed but couldn’t sleep. 

One month later, the craft was back. Murter’s little Yorkie woke her up at 3 a.m. with a lot of growling. 

Like the first time, she went out back and opened the door and saw it much closer to her this time, a little distance above the trees.

“I called my daughter who was down the street, and I called my next-door neighbor to get out of bed to see it. I got my camera but every time I took a picture the camera kept going off. This kept happening. I just kept snapping but it kept going off.”

The craft returned for a third visit, only it was much closer to Murter’s house this time. “I was watching it; it was a little off to the right when it began dumping stuff on two trees. It was July when this happened, and the stuff looked like snow. I shut my eyes and opened them again to make sure I wasn’t sleep walking, but once the stuff hit the trees it was sparkling like a dance show. I couldn’t take my eyes off it; I could not move. It was as if I was paralyzed. As I watched the stuff come down something in my head said, ‘Don’t be afraid, we’re not here to harm you.’”

Murter says the entire episode lasted about twenty minutes, and that the “snow,” poured down from the craft in an inverted ‘V’ shape and was then sucked back up gracefully in regular ‘V’ formation. For a moment she felt as if she would be sucked up into the craft as well. “When it was finished, it was just gone in a flash of an eye. It was awesome.” 

The craft that night was seen by a number of teens hanging out at a swimming pool, and caused one boy to return home in tears. 

Murter talked about a fourth encounter she had while on her way to work via the Levittown train station. She told her husband she had seen a bright light over the station after he mentioned that a friend of his had seen something in the sky at the same time in the same location. 

“My experiences have caused me to become obsessed with looking at the sky,” she says, in effect concurring with the findings of many researchers that a large percentage of witnesses report repeated encounters. This seems to suggest that one sighting experience guarantees another sighting, a process that has led some to point to the possibility of tracking. 

After going public about her experiences through the MutualUFONetwork (or MUFON), Murter says she got letters and emails from people around the country stating they saw similar things. One letter stood out among the rest: it was from a scientist who told her he had the same experience with his father when younger. They both saw white stuff come down from a nearby craft, an experience so jilting, the letter writer said, that the father refuses to speak about it to this day. Murter says the scientist even sent her a picture of the snow coming down from that craft. 

“The trees in my backyard that were sprayed with white stuff were tested by three different scientists and found to contain huge amounts of Boron and magnesium. It’s as if someone took a microwave and radiated the tree,” she said.

After Murter told her story on TV’s UFO Hunters, and on the History and Discovery channel, the radiated trees in her backyard became a shrine of sorts, attracting the curious and other film crews. That ended when she and her husband took a trip to Florida to bring back her son’s family who were moving back to Pennsylvania, when something unpleasant happened. 

“When we returned home we saw that the apartment complex had chopped down the tree. They said it was their property. I was devastated. The other tree, which is further back, is falling apart now. The scientists who took samples from the tree earlier came back after the complex chopped it down to investigate this weird growth coming out of the remnants of the tree — it looked like celery stalks, but they took it all. They also took samples of the tree down the road and found boron and magnesium in that one too. They also said that the crystal stuff showed up on one of the leaves.”

Rich Ferello, a Northeast Philly accountant, was born and bred in the area. His wife, Jo Anne, is from the Fox Chase area. 

On the evening of August 1992, he and Jo Anne were walking towards Verree Road when suddenly something appeared before their eyes.

“Oh my God,” he said to Jo Anne, “What’s that?” Jo Anne didn’t know, but according to Rich it was “a large oval shaped vehicle, like an orange color with a bulge around the midsection, and underneath that it had like portals.”

 The craft appeared to be drifting north along Verree Road. Directly behind Rich and his wife a man who had been wiping down his car looked up in the sky and muttered, “Oh shit!” before disappearing into his house. 

The Ferellos did not run but watched the craft hover over the intersection where there was a large tree. “As this thing slowed along,” Rich says, “I separated from my wife and headed to the other side of the tree to see it pass along, but nothing appeared. I called back to Jo Anne and said ‘Where is it?’ and she said, ‘It went behind the tree.’”

The craft had been just several hundred feet above their heads before it disappeared behind the tree, almost as if it slipped into another dimension. 

As soon as the Ferellos got home, Jo Anne called the Northeast Airport and Philadelphia International and asked if they had a record of any blimps floating around. Both airports said no and asked “What did you see?”

“Nothing,” Jo Anne answered, and hung up. 

The couple told their respective families about the encounter but the reaction was not good. “This was in 1992, when people who said they saw UFOs were thought of as complete idiots,” Rich says. “We got a lot of that from our families.”

Eighteen years later, on an evening in March of 2008, in a new home in the Hatboro area near the Willow Grove Air Force Base, Rich took his dog for a walk when he saw four bright lights flying in formation coming towards his home. “I figured they were Black Hawk helicopters because of the nearby Base, but then I realized, hey, four big helicopters should be making a hell of a lot noise. The helicopters also don’t fly after 7:30 pm because of the neighborhood.” 

The lights then seemed to make a right turn and headed north. 

Rich took the dog inside and slipped into the bathroom before heading off to bed when he told his wife he thought he had another sighting. No sooner did he say this then he turned the lights off and opened the window blinds, and there were the lights again. “They’re back,” he told Joanne. He recalls that this time they resembled a police or military action.

“Two of the craft held back and hovered, while two rotated around and seemed to search for something. I called my son in and he came in and saw the craft and said, ‘Oh they are definitely not ours! I’m outta here!’ and went back to his computer.” 

Rich describes the lights as looking like a floating star of Venus. He says the two rotating craft stopped circling and joined the other two and then the four of them flew North in formation, disappearing behind trees. The entire episode lasted about 15 minutes.

Then, late one evening in 2011, while walking the dog, Rich saw what looked like a star moving very fast across the sky. “I’m watching it, there were two stars in the sky and the light was going between them. I called my wife; she came out. The light going between the stars makes a U-turn and disappears.”

“Is that what you mean?” Jo Anne said, pointing to the end of the street. Rich looked and saw three to four orange, spheres that just seemed to pop up over the trees and then flew away over the Southwest. “I’m thinking to myself, the ones up in the sky made a U-turn because of these things.” 

It’s no secret that witnessing unexplained phenomena like UFOs can cause many people to rethink old beliefs. For Rich and Jo Anne, this — sadly — meant the end of regular church going. “We used to be regular church goers. I was a lay minister, but seeing these things got me to reassess the birth of Christ and the role of the Virgin Mary,” Rich said. 

“This came in conjunction with the idea of article insemination. I thought… somebody impregnated her…” 

One theory among believers about why aliens are here is that they are working on a hybrid-mating program with human beings. Most abduction reports (usually via a vie hypnotic regression) include highly invasive surgical procedures involving semen or egg extraction, and an intense examination (and sometimes stimulation) of private parts. “A lot of things can be happening,” Rich says, “Perhaps they are our ancestors returning home, or perhaps we were created by the visitors when they manipulated DNA…that would explain the different ethnic groups.” He cites the possibility that the craft could even be from earth. “We don’t even know what the Government has or what’s going on,” he says. 

For Radnor resident Jennifer W. Stein, an independent documentary filmmaker, founder and Director of Main Line MUFON, reports of UFOs have not gotten adequate coverage in the United States. “We are entertained to death in this country,” she says. “In terms of getting the news, especially on the UFO phenomenon, we are much more hushed. And our files are much more closed than other countries. Russia has been much more open. In Tehran, Iran, in 1975, there was a huge UFO event that made world news and it was all over the front page of the newspapers in Iran…that would not have happened here in the United States. It would be hushed immediately, as it was in the Roswell case. Roswell was our 1975 Iran,” she adds. 

The story behind Roswell is that an alien craft crashed in Roswell, New Mexico in July 1947 and that alien bodies — the size of children — had been recovered. The crash, according to many, was the result of a mid-air collision of two UFOs. “By the time the newspapers were printing the Roswell story in California, Washington had already been in touch with them and said it was a weather balloon, so the papers had already recanted and had the original story killed,” Jennifer says. 

Stein told me that every American astronaut that has gone up into space has seen UFOs, including astronaut Edgar Mitchell who founded Noetic Sciences in 1973. Then there was astronaut Gordon Cooper, who spent 34 hours in space when he orbited the earth 22 times. Cooper, who saw flying discs while flying with the military over central Europe, reported: “They were metallic looking and saucer in shape and displaced themselves rapidly.”

Stein believes Americans are as sheltered from the truth as the Soviet Union was in the Iron Curtain, Cold War days. “There is filtered news in the United States. The government is aware that we are not alone in the universe.” 

Her one sighting happened when she was nineteen years old and asleep in her room in her parent’s home in Kulpsville, Pennsylvania. At 5:30 am she awoke from a nightmare, a dream in which she says she was falling, and proceeded to reach for her dream book to write the dream down when outside her window she noticed a rectangle of white light about 1500 feet in the air. At first she thought it must be light from an airplane that only appeared to be static but that any moment would begin to move, but that was not the case. 

“I was thinking ‘What the heck is that?’ when the thing skipped or jumped in three quick seconds, then disappeared, reappeared, disappeared and reappeared, and before I knew it, it was smack in front of me over this big tree.”

While hovering motionless above the tree she was able to estimate it to be about 90 feet long. “Its brilliant undulating white light undulated the way early screensavers did; there was no propulsion system, no sound, no beings, no big gray alien heads, except I am totally shocked and I am paralyzed. I want to get up and run the heck out of the room because I have the sense that some sort of consciousness is looking at me.” 

Stein says she started to cry when the craft communicated to her that it was leaving. “In leaving, it did almost the same movements but in an opposite direction.” 

She says that after the craft left she woke her mother up and asked if she saw it. “That was feasible because our house was almost all floor to ceiling Frank Lloyd Wright-style glass, designed by her father, an architect, but all my mother could ask was, ‘Are you on drugs?’ and ‘Why are your pajamas wet?’”

Copious tears caused the wet pajamas, and there were no drugs of course, but there was missing time. 

“I went back to my room and the clock said 7 a.m. but I knew it was 5:30. That’s when I realized that something happened that didn’t make sense.” Physically and emotionally exhausted, she says she collapsed into bed.

The question: Why, if UFOs exist, don’t they just land on the White House lawn or in City Hall Courtyard and announce, “We’re here, we’re alien, get used to it!”

John Ventre, Pennsylvania state director of MUFON, a science fiction writer, and the State Director of Security for Pennsylvania (UPS), thinks he has the answer to that: “I don’t go in my backyard and try to build a better any hill for the ants and I don’t try to communicate with the squirrels.”

He may be right. What would the ignorant among us do? Get out their guns and shoot? 

Ventre believes about 80 percent of the cases that MUFON gets are just misidentification. “We’ll go on a tracking site and find that a meteor passed at that time, or the space station passed over, but the 2008 case (Denise Murter) was the really first thorough case that I had.” 

Whoever and whatever they are — demons, glimpses of ourselves in the future, visitors from outer space — he knows that they “are not entirely benevolent beings.”

“For a long time I thought that they were not harmful, that they were benevolent, because logically I thought if they wanted to take over the planet for the resources they could get rid of us very easily — like a virus in the air or water, so I thought, ‘they are not harmful,’ but the as you read more and more about the abductions, you question that, such as the section in ‘Behold the Pale Horse’ by William Cooper, about UFOs during the Vietnam War, when flurries of them had both sides firing on them, and when soldiers and people were taken and some had been taken and mutilated and dumped.” 

Ventre tells me to look inside the FEMA-approved “Fire Officers Guide for Disaster Control,” where there’s a section on UFOs and the Enemy Threat. 

“The guide warns against coming into contact with UFOs or their occupants,” he says, “because of their psychological effects, such as radiation. People who have gotten under UFOs have gotten radiation poisoning. There are good solid examples of not walking up to them and raising your hand to be taken. Nobody comes away from an abduction experience with a positive experience.”

Sightings in Pennsylvania have jumped since 2008 with an average of 275 to 300 cases a year. MUFON holds regular conferences in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, while encouraging people who experience sightings to come forward, yet Ventre says he still shies away from a person when they say they were abducted. “In my mind they may need professional help, but MUFON is not qualified to counsel people on abductions.”

Could they be beings from another dimension? The Ferellos, after all, saw a UFO disappear behind a tree, as if it vanished inside a slit in the sky rather than veer off in any direction. 

The question of demonic beings is an old one. In Operation Trojan Horse, researcher John Keel maintains the UFO world “is one of ghosts and phantoms and strange mental aberrations… an invisible world which surrounds us and occasionally engulfs us….a world of illusion…where reality itself is distorted by strange forces which can seemingly manipulate space, time, and physical matter — forces which are almost entirely beyond our powers of comprehension….” Keel believes UFOs are masses of energy that have an intelligence of their own, a form of energy from this planet but they are not mechanical objects per se. 

Iowa professor Brad Steiger, in his study on the Air Force “Blue Book” files has concluded, “We are dealing with a multi-dimensional paraphysical phenomenon, which is largely indigenous to planet earth.” 

Christian writers from antiquity, namely St. Symeon the New Theologian (949-1022 AD), have warned seekers of God “to rarely look into the sky out of fear of the evil spirits in the air. These miracles,” he attests, ‘have no good, rational purpose, no definite meaning,… they are foreign to truth filled with lies… they are monstrous, malicious, meaningless play-acting, which increases in order to astonish, to reduce to perplexity and oblivion, to deceive, to seduce, to attract by the fascination of a pompous, empty, stupid effect.”

And what about Keel’s warning that dabbling with UFOs can be as dangerous as dabbling with black magic? “The phenomenon preys upon the neurotic, the gullible, and the immature,” he writes. “Paranoid-schizophrenia, demonomania, and even suicide can result—and has resulted in a number of cases.” 

But according to Chris Augustin, a MUFON member and paranormal researcher, the unidentified crafts are absolutely “nuts and bolts real.”

“I’m not saying there are no gray areas,” Augustin says, “they could be some type of spirit or energy, but some of the phenomena seems to be nuts and bolts craft. “

Thom Nickels is a Philadelphia-based journalist/columnist and the 2005 recipient of the AIA Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism. He writes for City Journal, New York, and Frontpage Magazine. Thom Nickels is the author of fifteen books, including “Literary Philadelphia” and ”From Mother Divine to the Corner Swami: Religious Cults in Philadelphia.” His latest is “Death in Philadelphia: The Murder of Kimberly Ernest.” He is currently at work on “The Last Romanian Princess and Her World Legacy,” about the life of Princess Ileana of Romania.