The Andreasson Affair (25 page)

Ashburnham Municipal Light Company records show that a power failure occurred in Betty's neighborhood on January 25, 1967. It was traced to a defective primary loop cutoff, which was replaced on the following day. (Unfortunately, the
time
of the failure was not recorded.)

The U.S. Department of Commerce weather station at Ashburnham recorded that a
trace
of snow was present on the ground between January 23 and 27, 1967. (The ground was
covered
with snow from January 28 through March 17, 1967. Depths ranged from 2 to 29 inches.) Weather records also revealed that the night of January 25, 1967, was misty.

Betty:
Three days later, on a Saturday, Becky mentioned a strange dream. Mother and father went home that Monday.

Saturday would have been three days after a Wednesday. The evidence was strong that the UFO experience had taken place on Wednesday night, January 25, 1967. Much of Becky's later testimony under hypnosis substantiated this date.

Becky:
Father in hospital.… It got real dark. Think I'm 11. Birthday long time ago…cold outside…ground cool and damp.… Traces of snow…grass dead.… Path was muddy.… Bozo on TV.…Saturday was three days after.

Weather records indicated that on January 25 there was a thaw with temperatures rising to 54 degrees Fahrenheit. That would explain why the path was muddy. And a check of TV records confirms Becky's statement that Bozo the Clown was indeed on television the evening of January 25.

During Becky's initial recall, it was very disconcerting to us when she described herself and her friend eating
apples
from the orchard!

Becky:
We both climbed up and sat down in the tree talking and eating apples.

Harold:
Are the apples hard?

Becky:
Yeah, real hard.

Apples seemed hardly in season during January, and we felt that Becky was imagining or mixing up this aspect of the account. Even though she talked like an 11-year-old while regressed by hypnosis, we sometimes treated her as the 22-year-old adult we saw at the present time—and in doing so, perhaps we expected too much of her. In this instance, however, she may have been giving us an accurate description.

On December 24, 1977, I visited a local apple orchard during a thaw. It was a balmy day with a temperature of about 50 degrees Fahrenheit. There were dried-up apples
on
some of the trees, and piles of both decayed and
firm
apples
under
the trees.

I picked one up and took a bite out of it. It tasted all right. Later, on January 28, 1978, I sent field investigator Jules Vaillancourt to the orchard behind the house formerly owned by the Andreasson family. Under the tree, Jules found apples that had frozen and thawed—and they were edible. It looks as if we underestimated Becky.

While under hypnosis, both Betty and Becky were asked what
time
the incident started. Because Betty had not noticed the time, she could only guess: “I don't know, but seven o'clock keeps going through my mind.”

Becky, however, could see the clock in the living room when the lights began flashing through the kitchen window: “They got there at twenty-five of seven.”

When Betty was returned to the house and entered the living room with the entities, she had noticed the clock: “It is ten-forty.… It's dim, but the hands look like ten-forty—in between ten forty-five and ten-forty.”

Inquiries revealed that the Andreasson family had eaten early suppers, between 4:00 and 4:30 p.m., during this period, so that the children might be fed and prepared for bed before Betty left to make her nightly visit to her husband at the local hospital. Betty ceased these visits when her husband was transferred to the VA Hospital near Boston on January 23, 1967, but the habit of early suppers was still maintained on January 25. Using information extracted from the hypnosis sessions, the scenario following on pages 187–188 could be constructed.

Another aspect tending to verify the account of the witnesses was that some portions of the story would be correlated with real-time events. We have just seen that their description of environmental conditions and circumstances corresponded to reality. Of course, the date and time of the incident were derived from this data. Interestingly enough, the present owner of the house in Ashburnham confirmed that because of the lay of the land, a dense, local fog tended to form behind the house. Weather conditions on January 25, 1967, were conducive to the misty conditions Betty described. Indeed, if not for the dense fog on that evening, the landed UFO could have been observed by others from neighboring houses.

In addition, measurements of the backyard demonstrated that an object of the dimensions Betty described could have landed only where she had reported seeing it on the ground. True to her statement, at the reported landing site, it would have needed adjustable landing gear. A check of the interior of the house (granting allowances for known renovations) also corresponded to the descriptions given under hypnosis.

Having established the estimated date and time of the Andreasson Affair, we continued on to complete a detailed analysis of the remaining data. During this study, we encountered startling similarities with other Close Encounter UFO reports, in more than a dozen important categories.

The sudden stillness that enveloped the Andreasson house has been reported in connection with other UFO reports as far back as 1933 (that is,
prior
to the influx of modern UFO sightings in the 1940s). APRO reported a sighting from the year 1933 that took place between Lehighton and Nazareth, Pennsylvania. A male motorist stopped his car to examine a strange violet glow in a field. Approaching the eerie light source, he found it to be emanating from a round object resting on the ground. While in the vicinity of the object, he neither saw nor heard a living thing and stated that the silence was “deadly.”
¹

Another report from this period comes from Canadian UFO researcher John Brent Musgrave, who documented a sighting which took place in the summer of 1933 at Nipawin, Saskatchewan. Several persons jumped into a truck and drove to an area where strange lights had been seen to descend. In a field they sighted a large oval-shaped object, supported by legs, with a central dome. About a dozen short figures could be seen moving around the craft. They reported that “all was a strange sort of quiet.”
²

We see this same peculiarity manifested in some modern sightings. On November 5, 1974, at about noon, Harry Pinhorn observed a strange gray object hover over the factory at which he worked in Lisarow, Wyoming. He stated that a strange silence that engulfed the area caused him to notice the object: “I looked up at the trees because the birds had all suddenly gone quiet and there it was.”
³

At 8:45, on a clear night, January 21, 1977, Robert Melerine was paddling his boat quietly up the Dike Canal in St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana. Abruptly a glowing object moved rapidly toward him and hovered overhead, engulfing him in warm light. He stated that there was a complete silence: “No wind. No frogs croaking or ducks calling. Silence.”
⁴
Three boys at Salisbury North, Australia, had a similar experience shortly after. A low-flying object cast a beam of light at their bicycles on May 27, 1977. Investigator Colin Norris stated that “the
stillness
that the boys noticed…is consistent with many other reported sightings.”
⁵

At 5:00 a.m. on June 24, 1977, a married couple living in Lubbock, Texas, were awakened by the sudden movement of their dog. Puzzled by the dog's antics, the wife got up and went to the door. She stated, “When I first woke, I could hear the sound of about a million crickets in all the trees here. But almost immediately, it was just deathly quiet—not a sound.” A glowing object hovered outside over her neighbor's house.
⁶
Still another case of this sort occurred on October 9, 1977, at 8:30 p.m., in Walcott, Iowa. Holly Prunchak, a security guard at the French-Hecht plant, watched a strange, lighted oval object descend over farm property across the street. The Center for UFO Studies dispatched veteran investigator Ralph DeGraw to conduct an inquiry. DeGraw learned that “all the ambient animal noises (cattle and crickets) went quiet when the object was in view.”
⁷

An identical effect was noticed by witnesses to a sighting that took place a decade earlier in Brookfield, Wisconsin. On August 12, 1967, at 2:30 a.m., a sleepy man and wife glanced out the window to see what their German shepherd was barking about. Shocked, they saw an oval object hovering at ground level over an adjoining pasture. A sharply defined beam of light emanated from the craft and the dog stopped barking. Everything
became strangely silent. The usual night sounds of insects and animals ceased abruptly. “There was dead silence outside.”
⁸

Note that the reported silencing effect appears to be connected with certain lights from the UFO, just as it seems to have been in the Andreasson Affair.

Earlier in this chapter, I mentioned the localized power failures sometimes associated with UFO sightings. These included the area surrounding Williamstown, Massachusetts, on January 18, 1967, and the case involving the manager of a small airport in eastern Massachusetts when his yard light dimmed concurrently with a Close Encounter UFO sighting.

Our local team of investigators has investigated a number of these so-called electromagnetic (E-M) effect cases, some of which have been quite spectacular. Walter Webb, assistant director of Boston's Hayden Planetarium, documented such an event that took place in Dorchester, Massachusetts, on April 24, 1966, at 5:00 a.m. An oval domed object, encircled with red lights, hit and shook an apartment complex. A simultaneous power failure was traced to a burned cable near the object's flight path.

UFO interference with radio and TV has been a common occurrence over the years. Two cases will suffice to illustrate this effect:

1. November 5, 1957, Ringwood, Illinois. UFO followed car to town. TV sets in town dimmed, finally lost picture and sound during same period of time.

2. November 10, 1957, Hammond, Virginia. Police chased UFO. TV blackout in city.
⁹

In 1971, I managed to secure a number of pages from a thought provoking textbook employed by the United States Air Force academy for a
course relating to UFOs. In a section captioned “Alien Visitors,” the following excerpt seems highly pertinent to the discussion at hand:

The most stimulating theory for us is that the UFOs are material objects which are either manned or remote-controlled by beings who are alien to this planet…The most commonly described alien is about three and one-half feet tall, has a round head, arms reaching to or below his knees, and is wearing a silvery space suit or coveralls. They have particularly wide (wrap-around) eyes and mouths with very thin lips.
¹⁰

This description is also borne out in civilian sources. Concerning height, an analysis of UFO occupant reports prepared for the Center for UFO Studies
¹¹
states that 27 such “dwarf” cases were reported in 1973. One such case allegedly involved another family's CE-IV on October 16, 1973, at Lehi, Utah. Using hypnosis, Dr. James Harder, consultant for the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO), elicited from one of the witnesses the following description: The beings were slightly over four feet tall, very thin, with large slanted eyes. Their arms were long and their hands gloved and claw-like, with a diminutive thumb. They were wearing what appeared to be glowing clothing with Sam Browne belts!