Understanding and Decoding UFO Flaps

By Bill Knell

A UFO Flap is generally considered to be a designated period of time when a number of objects of unknown origin are seen in the skies over a particular area for an extended period of time. People began to talk about UFO flaps in a serious way during the early 1970s thanks, largely, to comments and observations by John Keel.

Keel, a noted Fortean, serious journalist and author of The Mothman Prophecies, has a way of digging deeply into all things paranormal. He asks questions and finds answers that most people would never even dream of. One of his most important contributions to Ufology is his observations about when and where UFOs tend to appear.

After studying a series of UFO reports, Keel came to the conclusion that most UFO Flaps begin in mid-October and last about five years. It’s important to understand that UFO Flaps do not just encompass sightings, but include multiple eyewitness accounts, landings, physical evidence cases and abduction incidents. Since reading what John Keel has had to say on the subject, I have built on that.

Rather than jump back to what may or may not have been historical UFO Flap periods before the beginning of the last century, I will attempt to keep my observations within the past hundred and twenty years. If I do that, it would be easy to begin with the famous Airship Flap which began in 1896, began more intense in 1897 and may have continued until 1905.

Although much has been made of a few descriptions of ships with propellers and rudders which were seen from the East Coast to the Midwestern United States, it’s important to remember that others reported seeing disc and cigar shaped crafts from California on the West Coast all the way to Florida on the East Coast. A drawing which appeared in a 1905 edition of Harper’s Weekly, a popular magazine of the time, clearly showed a classic disc-shaped craft with a humanoid-looking being on board which had been seen in the New York City area earlier that year. And that was just the tip of the iceberg.

In April of 1897 a farmer’s publication reported that Alexander Hamilton of Leroy, Kansas, witnessed a cigar shaped airship above a cattle pen on his property along with his son and another witness on April 20, 1897. Hamilton told the publication that a red cable came down from the object and attempted to attach itself to a cow. Eventually, the craft did manage to remove one cow while the farmer and other witnesses stood by watching the craft and animal disappear out of sight.

Just a few days before the Kansas incident, an airship appeared over Aurora, Texas. On April 19, 1897, the Dallas Morning News reported that the mysterious craft had crashed into a windmill in Aurora. Witnesses said that the UFO exploded. A body believed to be the pilot of the object was recovered from the scene and buried in a local cemetery.

Although there was once a tombstone there which identified the pilot as being from the planet Mars, the marker later vanished. It’s interesting to note that this event occurred in a region which includes the towns of Stephenville and Dublin, Texas, where UFOs have been seen and photographed in recent years. Those reports began in December of 2007, gained strength during January of 2008 and continue today.

Powered flight became a reality for humans after the Wright Brothers flew their aircraft on December 17, 1903. As experimental aircrafts of all types began to fill the skies after that time, UFO reports became less reliable for a time. During that time and ever since, skeptics worked hard to eliminate the idea of any airship flap at all. They pointed to the fact that many prominent scientists of the day had alternative explanations for the airship sightings.

A number of newspapers reported that most of the sightings that occurred during the late 1890s and right up through the early 1900s could be attributed to stars and planets. Scientists told these publications that most people do not know enough about the stars and planets to understand what they are looking at in the night sky. That would be fine except for the fact that some sightings and related incidents occurred during the day.

As people became used to seeing things like hot air balloons and powered aircrafts in the sky, credible UFO reports made a comeback. It soon became obvious that not everything that people were seeing were identifiable. By the time World War One began, there had been major sightings in Russia, Belgium and Scandinavia. The Russian sightings may have began as early as 1892 and seem to have extended well past their borders.

Odd craft were reported in the skies over Norway as early as 1916 and continued for over twenty years. The famous ‘Mystery Rockets’ seen in Sweden during the 1930s were long thought to be early Russian rocketry experiments or Nazi attempts to test early rocket powered missiles. Neither of these theories has ever been proven to be true or even credible.

Pilots on all sides of the conflict during World War two reported seeing circular, disc and cigar shaped crafts buzzing their aircraft. Allied pilots nicknamed them Foo Fighters and a number of photos were taken of these objects. During the last couple of years of the war, General Douglas MacArthur ordered a secret report prepared on the Foo Fighter sightings. As the Supreme Allied Commander in the South Pacific, he was very concerned about the origin of these objects.

Although MacArthur’s report is still classified, my father worked on it and I can tell you that the General believed that the sightings began before the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. In fact, the report indicated that civilian pilots operating in the Hawaiian Islands and other South Pacific locations between the mid-1930s and right up until the war began had often reported seeing glowing white and red lights which seemed to play tag with their aircrafts.

The Hawaiian incidents bring to light some of the reasons that a UFO Flap might occur. Both Japan and the USA had been building up their military presence in those areas for years. Alien visitors seem to be interested in such build ups. A prime example of this is another UFO Flap which began just after World War Two ended.

By 1946 people in the Southwestern and Northwestern areas of the USA were reporting all sorts of strange objects in the skies. Most of the newspapers of the day tended to automatically attribute anything unusual seen in those skies as something the U.S. Government was flying around. Talk of new and powerful secret aircrafts being tested by the military took the edge off many of those sightings for awhile.

A number of strange aircrafts continued to be seen in the Western USA during the summer of 1947. The Kenneth Arnold sighting which occurred in June of 1947 caused the public to reconsider the idea that what everyone was seeing were just secret aircraft flight tests. Arnold was a former military pilot, respected civilian flier and Federal Marshall. He seemed to feel that what he saw was not something we had available based on the technology he saw displayed.

Less than a month later, the UFO crash at Roswell and subsequent crashes in the region over the next several years also made people wonder what was really going on. It also brought home to UFO researchers the possibility that Aliens were very interested in what we were doing militarily. UFOs were also seen near advanced military ships and submarines during that time and such sightings continue today.

Although many people consider the 1950s the classic age of UFOs, that’s only from a cultural standpoint. The UFO Flap which began in the late 1940s ended for the most part by 1952, although there were still many credible sightings and incidents during that time. However, Hollywood started to crank out Flying Saucer flicks and a number of people that claimed contact with human looking aliens came forward. Contactees like George Adamski became famous almost overnight.

There were a number of UFO sightings during the 1950s and by then the U.S. Government was officially investigating them through Project Bluebook. If it had been an honest search for the truth, Bluebook would have provided the answers that people were looking for regarding UFOs and Aliens. Instead, the official investigation which coined the term U.F.O. (Unidentified Flying Object), proved to be a sham which attempted to embarrass witnesses and provide conventional explanations for sightings.

The 1960s and 1970s saw a number of UFO flaps and many amazing encounters. Thanks to publicity surrounding the Betty and Barney Hill incident, the UFO Abduction phenomenon became known to the public. Although it had probably been with us for as long as UFOs have been visiting the Earth, people now felt comfortable talking about these incidents.

Many researchers now believe that the 1960s Michigan UFO sightings, Canadian UFO incidents and even the 1965 Kecksburg, Pennsylvania, area all connected and part of a huge flap that occurred during that time. It was during this period that Project Bluebook began to run out of steam.

After Bluebook offered their ‘Swamp Gas’ explanation for a major 1966 UFO sighting that embarrassed local residents and authorities, as well as other cases where police officers and trained observers were belittled by Bluebook investigators, the project lost credibility with the public. The project finally ended in 1969 with few answers and many more questions.

I was living in Florida during the early 1970s at a time when UFOs seemed to be all over the place. Apart from the Bermuda Triangle reports, it seemed that a Flap began there sometime around 1970 and continued throughout most of the decade. One of my first investigations involved several children that observed a classic disc land in a schoolyard not far from where I lived. After coming home hours later than expected, I determined that they all had missing time and had probably been abducted.

The 1980s saw a major resurgence of UFO reports throughout the world. UFOs reportedly landed in large cities and populated areas. One such landing occurred in Kissena Park, New York City, and another in a public park in Russia. I believe that a worldwide UFO Flap begin around 1987 and continued throughout the early 1990s. Who can forget the amazing reports which began coming out of Mexico during that time?

Our attempts to classify UFO activity are meager at best. Even the idea of UFO Flaps are just another way we choose to report what they are during in terms we can best understand. The truth is that although we know much more about UFOs today than we did a hundred years ago, we still know very little compared to other subjects. I guess that shows us that they, not us, are really in the driver’s seat.

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