Alien Base: The Evidence for Extraterrestrial Colonization of Earth: TRACES
The following afternoon, Mary and her mother-in-law went up to the site where the incident had taken place. Mary found three places where ‘something cone- shaped and round at the bottom, very heavy and spaced in a triangle about 15 to 20 feet to a side, had set into the ground’.
They were at an angle like they were the legs of a tripod, [with] something on it that was very, very heavy, because one of them had set on a rock and broken it, and gone down a little ways into the ground where it was bedrock, or maybe shale. The impressions on the bare ground that didn’t have any rock underneath were about 14 inches wide and up to 18 inches deep. The shallowest hole was about four inches deep. There were two sets of these, one at the top of the hill and one down the slope. They were set like an equilateral triangle — one hole wasn’t any further from the other two.
On the Monday after the sighting, Mary went with her husband to search for traces of the cable, and about 50 or 60 feet below the lower set of holes he found a three-inch piece of peculiar wrapping.
It looked like a strip of something they had missed. The outer part of it looked like the wrapping, something like a brown paper towel, only it wasn’t like our paper towels . . . And in the center of it — it had been cut out laterally — you could see the strip, maybe an inch long more or less, something that looked like very finely shredded aluminum strips [about 1/16 of an inch thick] laid in there, and it was as long as the piece of paper and had been cut, and had the color and feel of aluminum, although it wasn’t aluminum [and] didn’t behave like aluminum. Aluminum will crumple and this didn’t crumple. You couldn’t crease it.
Though Mary’s husband was a chemical engineer, he did not press for analysis of the material, and although the family searched for the sample when Bloecher interviewed Mary in 1973, unfortunately it was not found. Interestingly, a number of UFO landing sites elsewhere in the United States in the 1960s involved residue of aluminium-like strips. These strips were often found in bundles, and in some cases may relate to aluminium ‘chaff’ discharged from Air Force planes for radar countermeasures, though it is either coincidental or curious that some have been found near UFO landing sites (and, in one instance, inside the mouth of a cow believed to have been mutilated by aliens).
Investigator Don Worley sent me samples from a 1968 landing site he investigated in Indiana. I arranged for analysis of a sample at the Oak Ridge laboratories in Tennessee. Unfortunately it was lost, so I then sent two more samples to a private laboratory in Kent, England. According to Dr Anthony Fish, the samples consisted of aluminium with trace impurities of iron and silicon, similar in composition to 99.5 per cent aluminium cooking foil, the major impurities of which are silicon and iron. ‘Mary Merryweather has at no time sought publicity as a result of her unusual observation,’ Ted Bloecher commented. ‘To the contrary, she has gone out of her way to avoid it and has discussed the incident with no more than a dozen people, most of whom were family members or close friends.’