The UFO and the Human Fence, Part One
After keeping his 1980 Close Encounter a secret for decades, a retired soldier finds his voice
By Mark O’Connell
What makes a person decide to report a UFO sighting ten, twenty, even thirty-some years after the fact? As a longtime UFO researcher/historian and former field investigator for the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), I’ve been confounded by this question countless times. One might naturally expect a UFO witness to want to share his or her experience with someone immediately, while the memories and sensations are still fresh and perhaps even ongoing. Yet a surprising number of people who see and interact with UFOs keep the sometimes traumatic memories to themselves for years, sometimes decades.
The reasons for this silence are easy to identify and understand. Many UFO witnesses fear (often correctly) that they will be ridiculed by friends and relatives and even employers with whom they share their experience, and so they don’t talk. Some are pressured to keep quiet about what they’ve seen. Still others simply go into denial, unwilling to admit even to themselves that they have had a such a bizarre experience. Some maintain their silence for a combination of these three reasons.
In my twelve years of experience interviewing UFO witnesses I have come across all three of these scenarios multiple times, and I have come to recognize and understand the reasons so many witnesses keep quiet about what they’ve seen and experienced. What I have yet to understand is the corollary: after keeping their experience a secret for so long, why have they suddenly decided to share their story with someone else, when they apparently have nothing to gain by doing so? Why now? What was the trigger?
This was one of the things I asked Jeffrey Williams the first time I spoke with him over the phone in 2015. Jeffrey had reported a historic UFO experience to MUFON that, if true, would be a genuine Close Encounter of the Third Kind. Although he lived in North Carolina at the time we talked, and still does, his Close Encounter took place in Wisconsin in October 1980. Since I was living in Wisconsin at the time he filed his report, his case came to me.
When I got Jeffrey on the phone, the first thing that struck me was the stressful wavering in his voice, strong enough to cut through his pronounced southern drawl. Jeffrey, a proud retired Army man, quickly introduced himself and filled me in on the background of his sighting report. In October 1980 he was stationed in Company C, First Battalion, Twelfth Infantry, Fourth Division in Fort Carson, Colorado. Jeff’s unit was accustomed to being assigned what he described as “venturesome missions” that he and his comrades were ordered “not to mention,” as those missions sometimes involved riot control. So, it was no surprise when the unit was assigned to Fort McCoy, an Army training base in southwestern Wisconsin, on a high priority security detail. The unit’s mission was to guard nearly 15,000 Cuban refugees who had been temporarily resettled at the fort. These refugees had arrived in Wisconsin as part of the Mariel boatlift, having journeyed by boat to the US when Fidel Castro, Cuba’s then leader, allowed nearly 125,000 people to leave the country.
Jeff described to me how some of the refugees were afraid they were being permanently incarcerated, and over time tensions were rising. One night, in a carefully planned operation, some of the refugees set fire to their barracks, and while all hands were needed to put out the fires, another group of refugees tore down a large section of the fence that encircled the base. Countless refugees escaped in the confusion, and Company C was directed to apprehend the escapees without violence. It’s to their credit that every last escapee was rounded up without any firearms or major injuries involved. But with so much of the base’s perimeter fence destroyed, Jeff’s unit had no choice but to form a human fence.
One soldier named James recorded his memory of that night with the Monroe County, WI, Historical Society: “One memory that stays with me to this day was on a Sunday night around 9 or 10 PM I received a call from a US Marshall saying there were some problems with the fencing. I went out there and as I drove up to the 600 block I saw all the fences laying flat on the ground and military personnel shoulder to shoulder as a human fence. There was an eerie light from portable lighting and Cubans were sitting on second floor window sills shouting at the soldiers. As it turned out all the fences from the 500 through the 700 block were knocked down. The Marshals wanted to know how soon we could get the fences back up, but that proved to be a major undertaking and soldiers had to be used for several weeks.”
Securing the perimeter was exhausting work, so Jeff and the men from his unit took turns catching whatever sleep they could on the ground in sleeping bags near the human fence. One night as Jeff was getting comfortable in his sleeping bag, he noticed something odd in the sky ahead. There were two thick banks of tall trees ahead of him with a wide opening between them, and Jeff saw a dark flying shape emerge from the right bank of trees and into the clearing. “I was just fixing to lay down… when something caught my eye,” Jeff explained to me haltingly. “I looked up and the craft was coming from right to left, and as soon as I saw it, the guys on the road saw it. We all said, ‘God dang’ so that let me know right away that they all saw it.”
Often when witnesses report a sighting, they have difficulties describing what they’ve seen and experienced, simply because there are no words in our language that are adequate to the task. Sure enough, it didn’t take long for Jeff to struggle for the right words to capture his experience. In his lengthy, hand-written report to MUFON, Jeff wrote, “It looked as if it was just above the trees AND on the edge of space, amongst the stars. I can’t figure that one out.” Later, when I asked Jeff to try to explain this to me, the best description he could give me was, “It gave me the impression that it wasn’t where it was. How it was able to do that always baffled me, as if that was the craft’s purpose, as if to confuse my logic of the incident.”
“It was absolutely silent moving slowly but directly across the sky parallel to the road,” Jeff went on in his report. “It had a dim blueish light underneath, with other lights dimly showing the inside-out appearance with structures like braces on the side and bottom of it. It was almost box shaped or rectangle looking with a sloped front end and a squared-off appearance in the rear.”
“The rear of the craft had some light coming out of the back of it as it passed,” he went on. “It looked to me to be part of its propulsion system. The front end was an inverted slope that I still find hard to describe.”
“As soon as it went by, I could see the stars again,” Jeff told me.
But there was more. Further on in Jeff’s MUFON report he wrote, “Even though I’m still reluctant to say I saw two intities [sic] or outlines of two figures inside the craft. I struggled with this for years until one day I realized that… if I seen [sic] the craft and know that I did, I must also realize that I saw it all and I should just come to terms with it.
“This was the revalation [sic] that gave me the courage to say I’m O.K. with this whole incident and just want to be able to express it without the possibility of some kind of ridicule or disbelief from others,” he wrote. “Besides, I just turned 60 years old and back when I was 25 years old it was a little more difficult for me to understand what I witnessed and to talk about it with anyone.”
Over the course of many letters, emails and phone calls, Jeff has revealed more details to me about the entities he saw inside the object. There was an opening on the front surface of the craft that let Jeff see inside. The opening, he explained to me, appeared to be a large window, but Jeff felt certain that there was no glass in the aperture. Instead, he perceived that there was something more along the lines of a force field filling or covering the opening (this perceptual effect seems similar to Jeff’s earlier sense that the craft was moving in our space while being simultaneously in outer space).
“I never wanted to say this for many years, but yeah, I did see some silhouettes in the window,” he told me. “As they passed by, it looked as though they was looking back towards me [sic].” He didn’t detect any malice in the humanoid figures, only curiosity, as it appeared that the figures’ heads rotated as the craft moved past, as if they wanted to observe Jeff every second they could.
This is what makes Jeffrey’s experience a Close Encounter of the Third Kind. In his 1972 book The UFO Experience, astronomer and UFO scholar Dr. J. Allen Hynek laid out his classification system for UFO events. A Close Encounter of the First Kind is a sighting of a UFO within 500 yards of the witness, close enough to make out an outline or solid shape. A Close Encounter of the Second Kind involves some physical evidence of the UFO event, say scorched grass or cars’ engines stalling, or witnesses experiencing retinal burns. A Close Encounter of the Third Kind involves the presence of occupants associated with a UFO. Jeffrey’s encounter, then, is of the Third Kind.
Jeffrey’s description of the event begged the question, “How did the encounter end?” His response to that was troubling: After the UFO disappeared behind the left bank of trees, he looked across at his Lieutenant, who had also seen the craft. “I looked at the Lieutenant and he looked back at me,” Jeff recalled, “and his only words to me were, ‘Don’t say a word.’”
“I looked out to the road where all the other soldiers had gathered,” Jeff went on. “Some were pointing toward the sky where the object had passed by, others were chatting away, and a couple of soldiers were pointing at their cameras.” As a silence fell between Jeff and his Lieutenant, Jeff laid his head on his pillow, and then he fell fast asleep.
That bothered him. He had just witnessed an inexplicable, once-in-a- lifetime occurrence, but instead of investigating, he fell into a deep slumber. “Why did I fall asleep?” he asked me, the stress level rising in his voice. “That’s so crazy, man. Why didn’t I run off through the trees to see where that thing went? That’s just weird.”