Now for a personal post (albeit something I've discussed on the board a few times in the past, here, here, here, and here). Following is a quote from the "Eyes of the Mothman" thread that gives a little background on my family's encounter. My brother recently uncovered the photo above, and I was quite surprised to find that it existed. The model in my grandfather's hands is the original; it was taken from the family home during their first break-in. This photo conveys the main reason why I post on RI today.
I just realized that I've never posted the story in its entirety, as I understand it, on RI. I told some fellow posters verbally when we had our meetup, but that's it. I have to wonder how many damning cases in the canon of UFO lore there are like this that never saw the light of day.
My grandfather ran away from home to become a wingwalker in the circus when he was 16. This was approximately 1932. During the war, he never enlisted, but he flew counterespionage missions in Brazil, Mexico, Alaska, and throughout other parts of South America, trained foreign pilots, and assessed their capabilities. I believe he was already operating within an FAA capacity at this point. By 1959, he had thousands of flight hours, well beyond the usual for that era. That summer, he took my family (grandmother, mother, and three older uncles) on a camping trip in Montana along with a fellow pilot, and his family. While fishing from a lakeshore, both families (upwards of a dozen people) witnessed a spinning disc, with counter-rotating outer band, at very close range (approximately 30 meters), for upwards of 20 minutes. This was a nuts-and-bolts, metallic, dark grey/gunmetal craft, with various nodules on the top. It accelerated away at a phenomenal speed from a standstill, upwards of thousands of miles per hour, and was gone in an instant. My grandfather was an expert on aviation, aeronautics, and experimental aircraft in the States at this time, and he didn't think that it was possible that Russians had the technology either. He was always very hesitant to claim that it was extraterrestrial, but the family understands and I think we all mostly agree with that hypothesis. When he first wrote a report to his superiors (he was a regional FAA officer, so this would have been somebody pretty high up the chain of command), they told him to can it. He tried some numerous outlets for a number of years after that, as he frequently wrote for FAA newsletters and aviation journals, but continued to be stymied. He built the above model sometime in the early 60's, and began researching various means of exotic propulsion. He was working on a more in-depth report when the family home was broken into, and both the model and report were stolen. He stayed in favor with the FAA up through his retirement, winning numerous commendations and awards and receiving letters from several U.S. presidents, but after that, in the early 90's, when they feared he would start working on a book (we believe he was), they filed some trumped-up charges of misappropriation of funds and various graft-like incidents against him, was tried and convicted, and spent the remainder of his life on house arrest.
My brother and I are going to try to collect more information, and I'll update this thread with anything we might find.
Luther Blissett wrote:I have to put this question to the board because my stance is biased - in the 80's and 90's, before the movie, was "men in black" a household phrase? "Men in black" have been a part of my family's history since the 60's because they were the ones who broke into my mother's childhood home (twice), ransacked my grandfather's office, and stole his reports and models of their experience. Though these guys were always presumed by my family to have been agents of the FAA, my grandfather's employer.