One of the campers, Jack Friedman, a former flight instructor for the Coast Guard, observed 15-20 orange, glowing, translucent spheres hovering over a clearing about a half a mile away in the valley below his location just before dawn. He said “…they were glowing a warm, orange glow, translucent. Like those glow necklaces they sell at rock concerts, except orange.” He ran to wake up the rest of the group, but by the time they got up, the objects were gone. Friedman suggested they hike down the mountain to the clearing.

It took the group a few hours to make it to the clearing, where they discover a single circle, swirled clockwise in grass with four triangular ‘depressions’ located along the inner edge of the circle which were located at the cardinal points. The flattened, “scorched”, swirled circle was stunning enough, – but even more unusual – the group sees “hundreds” of mutilated animal carcasses, including moose, grizzly bears, elk, caribou, and even a killer whale. The whale carcass really spooked the campers because they were hundreds of miles from the Gulf of Alaska, the closest place to find a live killer whale. Many of the animals were missing certain body parts, including some with whole skeletons missing, with no trace of blood to be found – “…like some kind of new ‘bloodless surgery’ had been performed. We could only guess how it had been done – maybe some kind of laser.”

The group also finds a feathery-kind of white filament (sometimes referred to as ‘angel hair’) which disintegrated when touched along the outside of the circle. The men also reported finding “odd-shaped black rocks” with unusual markings strewn around the whole of the site.

The five men gather up some of the rocks and a few of the animal bones, and make their way back to Anchorage where they notified every government agency “they could think of” including the Air Force, the FBI, National Park Service, Fish & Wildlife, and the Alaska State Police, and could not get anyone to pay attention to their claims. Going back home to New York, they are stopped by the Canadian Border officials who ask them to recount their story which they did. They were told not to speak of the incident. One of the men, Siim Hanja, a Phd geology student from Columbia University recounted that his samples of the black rocks were stolen from his luggage after that meeting, but before they made it back to New York.

Crop type: grass

Sources: Ideal’s UFO Magazine #4, December 1978 “UFOs Terrorize Alaska” by John Love Pgs 28-30