Unsolved strangeness
An almost forgotten and very strange alien abduction episode is re-examined but not solved, though CIA involvement is unlikely
No Return UFO Abduction or Covert Operation?
No Return
revives a curious episode from 1959. Originally investigated soon after its occurrence by pioneering ufologists Jim and Coral Lorenzen and mentioned by Jacques Vallee in a couple of his books, it is remembered only by ufologists with a taste for the historical arcana of their subject. Ironically, those who know of it recall it vividly. Those few, who include the undersigned, first read of it in an article the Lorenzens published in a 1962 issue of Ray Palmer’s Flying Saucers.
David Booher, a Wisconsin man intrigued by UFOs, has disinterred the case, but he hasn’t solved it. From this distance (or, probably, from any distance) no certain explanation is recoverable, given the nature of the event. The witness’s crippling amnesia related not only to the occurrence but its subsequent circumstances. At least Booher has answered the question posed in the subtitle. That answer, respectively, is probably yes and probably no. (A qualifying note: one need not believe in literal alien kidnappings to acknowledge that UFO abductions are experiences, however generated and whatever their true nature, it is possible to undergo.)
Driving through rural Utah on the evening of 20 February, Army Private Gerry Irwin spotted a light falling silently from the sky. Concerned that it might be an airplane, he stopped his car and stared out at the ridge it had disappeared under. A brilliant glow flashed, then faded. Irwin scrawled a note to the effect that he had gone to investigate an apparent crash “about onequarter mile to my right,” then employed shoe polish to spell ‘STOP’ on the vehicle’s side door before heading out. The next thing he knew, 24 hours had passed, and he lay in a Cedar City hospital. No plane was missing.
The story gets complicated after that. Though Booher’s book is fairly short, it is packed with details requiring focused attention. They include other episodes of amnesia as well as Irwin’s frustrating interactions with puzzled or suspicious civilian and military personnel. Booher sometimes belabours the notion of an official coverup without demonstrating one. Most readers are likely to detect only understandable confusion.
Early in the experience’s wake, Irwin had flashes of recollection in which he walked to the top of the hill, looked down, and saw on the ground a fiery UFOlike object, manifestly not an aircraft or a meteorite. (Neither then nor later would Irwin evince the slightest interest in UFOs.) On being administered truth serum, he spoke of an “intelligence” that forbade him from revealing anything more; he added that it had all begun for him when he was three years old. None of this made sense at the time to anyone, but it resonates with a body of testimony waiting to be culled in the coming era of abduction narratives.
In his reconstruction of the incident, Booher uncovers evidence, missed by all previous analysts, that Irwin was transported more than 20 miles during the blackout. He also describes behavioral anomalies, such as Irwin’s burning without reading a note he had apparently written during the event. There is also the matter of the jacket on the bush.
The author’s foremost discovery, though, is of Irwin’s continued existence. In the infrequent citations in UFO literature, Irwin is said to have vanished mysteriously. Booher tracked him to his native Idaho, where he lives happily, his one encounter with notoriety (the incident attracted national press coverage at the time) only uncertainly remembered. Irwin was perplexed at Booher’s interest, but he cooperated, helping the author to recover Army records which illuminate, if only barely, the aftermath.
No evidence supports the proposition that Irwin suffered the effects of a mind-control experiment. His interactions with doctors and hospitals did not happen till after his initial sighting and amnesiac episode. For a decade between the mid-1950s and mid-1960s, under the MKUltra code name, the CIA conducted secret behaviouraltering experiments on hapless uninformed subjects (e.g., prisoners, patients, and other confined, monitorable persons). It was exposed by a US Senate committee in 1975 and widely condemned; it is still judged among the Cold War CIA’s vilest crimes. In 1973 then-CIA director Richard Helms ordered all surviving records burned, a gift to conspiracy theorists everywhere. Fanciful speculation notwithstanding, proof that the CIA engineered faux-UFO encounters remains as elusive as evidence for crashed saucers.
No Return is admirable work, clearing up – to the limited extent possible – a curious case from the early UFO age, among the first to hint that even higher strangeness was lurking just over the horizon.