There are plenty of sighting reports of unidentified flying objects, but very few reports of sounds associated with these sightings. This has been the major focus of my research as an independent investigator over the past few years. My observation that aerial and audio phenomena can be linked together is based on the fact that I was a direct eye and ear witness to the combined phenomena back in the mid 1970's. It was that experience that started my research and it is due to the greater cooperation and interest available in this field that I have pursued this further.

I lived in a small, rural town called Orton, in Southern Ontario back then. It was part of an area that experienced a "flap" of UFO sightings. My husband at that time had given me a daily journal for Christmas, so I happen to have the events and dates recorded. Starting on March 3, 1975, my neighbours and I began to witness aerial phenomena: brilliant white, red, and green lights would do impossible aerobatic manoeuvres in the night sky, darting about in angular or triangular movements. Sometimes they would band together into one bright light, only to blink out, re-appear and split again into several more bright lights. One of the more spectacular displays looked like The Star of Bethlehem one night. The rays from this "star" took up a good 60 degrees of the horizon, and there was this tiny red light that kept darting in and out of it. My girlfriend Julie and I watched this display for a good two hours. I noted in my journal we both experienced headaches that night afterwards.

The sightings always seemed predictable, at least by me; I always seemed to be aware of when they would appear. On the evening of April 26, 1975, I heard a strange, loud, metallic beeping sound coming from the woods behind our home. It sounded mechanical, like the pings of submarine sonar, and it had a peculiar rotational quality to it, like a Doppler effect. I even wondered if someone was out in the woods- with some type of broadcasting equipment; the sound didn't seem natural and it was too loud to be anything else. You could hear this sound from a quarter mile away and even from inside the house with the doors and windows closed.

Upon walking down to the woods to investigate this sound, I noticed my cats had beaten me down there and were sitting on fence posts facing the sound and listening attentively. I decided to tell my neighbours about it. I heard later they were making fun of me; not only was I seeing strange lights in the sky, but now I was hearing strange sounds in the woods.

Several weeks later, on the evening of May 19, 1975, my neighbours and I had been sitting around a bonfire in front of our large garden. There was a rest-less excitement in the air: you could feel. Even the animals were reacting to it. At 10:30 p.m. the roosters were crowing, the chickens clucking, and you could hear dogs barking and the pastured cows bawling for miles. I even remember remarking that Orton sounded like the introduction to an old TV series I watched as a child called "Rawhide," starring Clint Eastwood. The program starts off in the middle of a cattle drive. It was that noticeable. We soon ended our conversation and went back to our homes. A couple of hours later, while taking the day's garbage out, I noticed these loud, peculiar beeping sounds again and I decided to get my neighbours over to investigate. I called Bob and Lynn Adams from across the street and Cal Stodts, a paramedic who lived next to me. Standing there, we could see red lights in behind the trees while we faced the beeping sounds.

All of a sudden, the beeps stopped and everything got deathly quiet. Just as I pointed to the woods, a bright light rose out of the trees from the brush at the rear of our property and made a right-angle 90 degree turn, and started slowly to approach us in a wide arc. I ran behind a shed to get a better look at it, as our shadows were being cast over the yard by our back door spotlights, causing a glare. I could see that it was silver and disc-shaped with a soft white dome on top of it. It appeared to be larger than a long van, approximately 20 to 25 feet in length and maybe 8 to 10- feet wide in the middle. It was very low, not more than 100 feet up, and was coming in over my neighbours' pine tree, about 150 feet from where I was standing. When I could count the several red lights moving about its perimeter counterclockwise, 1 started to become alarmed, thinking this thing was going to land in my back yard! I ran back to my neighbours who were just as alarmed as I was. We were ready to take shelter, when the craft shifted its flight path and passed slowly off to the east. We were all shaken, but I was exhilarated too. I noticed my knees felt weak.
 

OTHER LOCAL SIGHTINGS 

The UFO sightings persisted, along with the beeping sounds, but not necessarily together. Something unusual was happening in our little community and the word spread fast. One night, Harry Walker, who lived around the corner from us, had been putting his tractor in his drive shed when a disc-shaped object hovered over him beneath a low cloud ceiling. He hollered for his family to come outside and look at it, but his cries went unheard. His son Patrick came running down to tell me what his Dad had just seen and that he was "white as a ghost."

I immediately went down to interview him and was slightly relieved that another resident had seen some-thing similar to the rest of us. I also talked with Jim Overland, a teenager back then who lived about a half mile from us on the same county road. He claims to have been out ploughing his field one day when a small, silver disc-shaped object came over him and his tractor. I believe he said that it chased him and that he ran into the house.

Recently I was sent a clipping from the Letters to the Editor of the Toronto Star from a fellow who lived near me during those years. He requested that "perhaps someone else residing in Orton could share their experiences with me." I have since talked to this fellow and heard another story of a spectacular close encounter that he and his brother had 18 or 19 years ago. They had a boomerang-shaped craft hover motionless above them. They also saw the "light shows" along with their neighbours and described the aerial phenomena exactly as I remember it. This fellow plans to go back and interview our old neighbours. There will be more to this story as time goes along.

The editor of our local newspaper, Bill Doole, had wanted to print my story for some time. I was reluctant to let him write up a story for The Erin Advocate because of the ridicule I was getting from the neighbours who hadn't seen anything. Finally, a year later, he ran a story on our sightings and was surprised by the number of calls he got from other local residents who had seen various types of craft flying around. Several described these UFOs as shining pencil-thin beams of light on to the ground. These articles caused some alarm and other articles were written trying to "explain it all away." Talking recently with our old post mistress, Evelyn Nevifles, I learned that some of the village people still talk about the old sightings.
 

THE INVESTIGATION

I felt these unusual sightings should be documented so I contacted and met with J. Allen Hynek (then the Director of the Center for UFO Studies) and Henry McKay, who was then the MUFON Director of Canada. I invited Chris Purton, then a Professor of Astronomy at York University in Toronto to come over and record the sounds, as he lived not far away from me in the village of Erin, Ontario, and he could come over quickly should the sounds occur again.

The opportunity came the evening of June 14, 1975. The beeping sounds were loud and constant. At first, his tape recorder refused to work. Thinking perhaps we were in some type of electromagnetic field that might be affecting the batteries of his recorder, we moved further away from the source of the sound and were able to obtain a two-minute recording. This tape was the catalyst for me to start researching the audio phenomenon and has since proved invaluable to me. Others came out to investigate the sounds and the sights, bringing along with them parabolic micro-phones and infrared cameras. Biologists were called in to try to explain the beeps as a bird call, all to no avail.

Through the following year, the sightings continued on an irregular basis and so did the sounds. I was fascinated and would notice my heart start to race when-ever I heard the now familiar metallic sounds. I found I could approach the source of the sound. Having had by that time acquired aerial maps of my location, I was able to gauge how far away from me the sound was. I figured that I could get as close as 50 feet, then the sound would stop and instantaneously be in a location about 200 feet away.

The sound also appeared to have a biological response to your actions. if you approached the source of the sound slowly and talking quietly, the beeps would be low and steady. If, on the other hand, you were loud, excited and moving quickly, the beeps would get louder and faster in direct relation to your excitement. When I wonder about this many years later, I feel the sound was similar to a biofeedback machine, which I certainly didn't know about then.

One night while investigating the sound with friends, Pat Walker claimed he couldn't hear the beeps at a distance of about 200 feet because he thought the batteries in his hearing aid weren't working. Directly in front of this "wall" of sound, which was about 50 feet. from us, he claimed he still couldn't hear it, but that he could feel it in his chest. I thought this was a good observation as I had noticed on other occasions that the beeping sound seemed to penetrate the center of my chest as well. My friends then encouraged me to whistle the pitch of the beeps and after some prod-ding I decided to try. Immediately upon whistling the same pitch, we were astonished to experience the beeping sounds speed up and turn into a vibration that shook the ground we were standing on! I tried this several times with the same results until we were all huddled together in amazement and ready to get back to civilisation. It was just too much to take.

I noticed a compass spun rapidly in my hand when I got back to the house after this event. There were other unusual events happening at that time as well. I saw orange, gaseous balls of light in our backyard, drifting slowly along the ground. There was one occasion I re-member of long, gossamer threads of spider webs about 30 feet. long flowing through the town of Orton. Since then, I have read about the "angel hair" seen in con-junction with some UFO sightings. After a while, living in Orton began to resemble something out of the "Twilight Zone."
 

THE SEARCH

I moved out of the area in 1977 and didn't encounter the phenomena for another 10 years. A series of events led me back into my search for answers. On a return trip to Canada in 1989, I met with Henry McKay in his home in Toronto, as he said he had a couple of tape recordings of UFO-related beeping sounds that might be similar to mine. I was very excited when I heard them, as they were the same as the ones I had recorded in my own backyard. I was relieved I wasn't "alone" in my experiences; someone else was reporting and recording the same phenomena in other locations! The tapes Henry presented to me were from a flap of UFO sightings and audio phenomena that happened in Alberta and British Columbia in the late 1960's. For a detailed report on these sightings and the subsequent analysis of the beeping sounds, see pages 177 to 206 in the 1979 MUFON Symposium Proceedings.

Quietly, I started making contacts and inquiries, looking for more cases. I attended a MUFON conference in New Hampshire in the fall of 1992 to meet with my friends Colin Andrews and Dr. Steven Greer of CSETI to compare notes and update our research. Dr. Greer plays a portion of my beep tape at his lectures. Cheryl Powell, then a MUFON investigator, was in the audience and was floored when she heard the recording! She had one just like it, recorded by a New Hampshire family on their camcorder during an encounter with a huge, triangular-shaped craft that flew over their house in the spring of that year. Unfortunately, only the audio- came out on the tape, the video part was black. Steven briefly introduced us and I was able to obtain a copy of her tape at a later date. I was stunned when I heard it; the phenomena was still happening!

I was really excited by now and wanted to know more. I placed an ad in the MUFON Classifieds and was immediately assisted by Ron Johnson, the late Deputy Director of Investigations for MUFON. He filled me in on the UFO flap in the Pacific Northwest that was accompanied by beeping sounds back in the 60's and 70's. The earlier cases from the 1960's were thoroughly investigated by the Air Force and the Department of Civil Defence. These cases mostly occurred in the states of Washington and Oregon, along the Puget Sound.

Ron also introduced me to Dr. Ronald Stearman, an Aerospace professor who was interested in analyzing any recordings that might be UFO-related. Dr. Stearman has some of the most commercially advanced, acoustical analysis software currently available in the field. Now we should be able to get a better picture of how these various tapes from different locations in North America look on paper.

The basic procedure currently employed in analyzing these sounds is to sample them with a digital signal analyzer and then obtain a graph of the sound in the frequency domain. Further characteristics of the signals were also determined after filtering. This included variable speed analysis and strip chart time domain studies. The outcome of these preliminary results show that the sounds are remarkably similar! The peaks associated with the beep frequencies all match up at about 1050 HZ with the median beep-frequency interval occurring at approximately 1.7 HZ. (The assumption has been made that the Orton tape was recorded at a slower than normal rate due to the electromagnetic influences that initially stopped the recorder. A speed reduction of approximately 18% was made on the Orton sound to bring it into the range of the other tapes. Otherwise, the spectral peak associated with the beeping was found at 1350 HZ.) The beeps are roughly spaced at 0.6 to 0.7 seconds apart. The common spectral peak frequencies of the first four recordings varied only by 7 per cent. This variation was expected due to the various types of recorders and generations of source tapes available for use. The Professor and his students have just finished another 50-page report for me, which I haven't finished absorbing yet. They are using newer, higher-order auto-bicoherence spectrum analysis software in this most recent study.
 

ANOTHER RECORDING 

Working with Greg Long, who is also interested in the phenomena that acoustics play in the UFO field, I was able to learn about the Yakima Indian Reservation sightings in Washington State that he wrote about in his recent book, Examining the Earthlight Theory - The Yakima UFO Microcosm (The J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies, 1990). Beeping sounds were reported there as well, along with other locations in the state. While digging through his files, he found a cassette tape of beeping sounds recorded exactly one week to the day that they started for me in Orton, Ontario, over 2,000 miles away! Recent analysis of this last tape reveals that it is almost identical to the previous four.
 

OWLS & CONDON 

As I stated before, the UFO beeping noise cases from the 1960's caused quite a stir in the Pacific Northwest. The Air Force commissioned the University of Colorado to do a complete investigation and their findings were published in the now famous Condon Report of 1968. They concluded that these beeping sounds were being produced by a Saw-Whet Owl. Professor Stearman obtained recordings of the Saw-Whet Owl and did a de-tailed analysis of the owl versus the five beeping recordings I had given him. His conclusions are completely different. He says we can rule out the Saw-Whet owl. But what the beeps are, or what they represent, is entirely up for speculation now.
 

WHERE TO? 

There are several things I want you investigators to know. Not only do these mechanical beeping sounds occur before and after UFO sightings, but they appear to produce electromagnetic effects as well. Battery and electrical failures have been noted on car radios and engines, flashlights, hearing aids, and indoor lighting. Most astounding of all is that the beeping sounds have been heard being broadcast over AM/FM, CB, long wave and short wave radios. That's a pretty talented owl! In several cases that I have collected, those orange globes of light have been reported nearby. The beeps also affect the environment by causing excitement in animals, insects and humans, who report the unusual sounds to the police. Some note the date on their calendars or go out in search of the sound, which usually has no visible source. Others become afraid and return quickly inside because they "can't stand it." The earliest case I have is from 1962 and the most recent case is from 1992 - that's at least 30 years of this phenomena. While detailing all the locations on a map of North America, I have noticed that crop circles are appearing in clusters within a 50 mile radius of where these beeping sounds have been reported.

This is even more intriguing. I have a reliable group of professionals to help pursue any other cases that might surface. Right now I would like more information on a case that comes from Bilbao, Spain (UFONS, #170, September, 1987). A family witnessed a UFO for 3 hours over their house and got a half-hour tape recording of this strange whistle, "similar to the sonar of a ship." Apparently it was analyzed by audio frequency experts. This information was published in the Croniga, a newspaper in Buenos Aires, Argentina on March 12, 1983. The exact date of the incident is unknown at this time. Anyone with knowledge of this case or others such as I have described in this article are encouraged to write to me at P.U.R.E. Research, P. 0. Box 627, Sebring, FL 33871
 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank the following people for aiding me greatly with contacts or information: Michael Strainic, present Director of MUFON, Canada; Henry McKay, past Director of MUFON, Canada; the late Ron Johnson, MUFON Deputy Director of Investigations; Dr. Berthold Schwarz, MUFON Consultant in Psychiatry; and Greg Long, author of Examining the Earthlight Theory

© 1994