Alien Base: The Evidence for Extraterrestrial Colonization of Earth: Contrasting Encounters
Carroll Wayne Watts, a 39-year-old cotton farmer living in Loco, near Wellington, Texas, saw his first ‘spaceship’ on the morning of 8 February 1967.
Together with another sighting six weeks later, it was to be a prelude to one of the most bizarre, fascinating encounters ever reported; an encounter that led to nationwide press coverage, though with a sinister sequel of events for Watts and his family. Perhaps owing to the seemingly ludicrous nature of the encounter, and Watts’s subsequent ‘confession’ to having perpetrated a hoax, it is seldom cited in the literature. Here follows the story, based largely on an unpublished report he wrote together with his wife, Rosemary.
At about 11.00, Watts saw what he first took to be a fast-moving aircraft, flying from the northwest on a southeast heading, at an estimated altitude of about 1,300 feet. ‘I thought it to be a jet at first until I noticed that it didn’t have any wings and didn’t leave exhaust streams,’ said Watts. It looked like a long cylinder shape at that height.’
On 21 March, at about 15.00, Watts was measuring cotton land on one of his farms when he noticed another peculiar aerial object. This time it was much closer. ‘It was about 200 feet off the ground, traveling about 50 miles per hour,’ he recalled.
The front of it was raised at about a 30-degree angle. When it passed me at the closest point of about 200 yards, I could see an opening in the front which looked to be a window. There was also a window on the side which was oblong. The ship looked to be shaped like a cylinder about 100 feet long and eight to ten feet across. The color was a light dull gray which did not reflect the sunlight. It traveled about three-fourths of a mile northwest and turned northeast and set about a 70-degree angle and completely vanished in about 30 seconds. It didn’t make any noise nor did it leave a vapor trail.
A CLOSER ENCOUNTER
On the evening of 31 March, Watts’s wife had gone with their children to a church meeting. At around 22.30, returning home after visiting his parents, Watts spotted a light in a field by an old house on his farmland. ‘There was some equipment stored in the house so I thought that I should go up and take a look around,’ he said. ‘The light at first looked like a car with four headlights on bright. As I approached, I noticed the lights were much brighter.’
I stopped within 200 feet of the vehicle when I noticed it was something other than a car. It was about 100 feet long, eight to ten feet high and ten feet across. It was shaped something like a .38 bullet, long and round on one end and the front end came to a point where the light was and sloped a little downward. It was between a dull gray and aluminum in color. It didn’t reflect light.
Watts pulled up about 50 feet from the craft and got out of his truck to take a closer look. He walked around behind it, then for about 20 feet along its left side. Here he noticed a slight ridge where he assumed there might be an opening.
In an interview with reporter Tony Kimery, Watts described what followed:
I thought it must be some new aircraft the Air Force had developed and that it must have made an emergency landing, or something. I also thought that there might be injured crewmen aboard, and I wondered how to find out, since there weren’t any windows or doors. I scrounged around and found an old rotting fence post and pulled it out of the mud, and started banging and sounding out the machine by hitting it with the post.
Suddenly, a door he had not seen slid open. ‘The door opened from the top and came down to make steps,’ Watts explained.
Inside, there were no crew or anything, just machinery and all kinds of meters and dials, lit up by this strange bluish light. Then there was a loud crackling, like the beginning of a Victrola record, and then a voice, sounding like it came from a machine or was recorded, began talking to me. It knew my name and everything and it told me that it wanted to give me a physical examination.
‘I asked them what was the reason for the physical and they said [that] a man had to pass a rigid physical before he could stand the flight. They told me to stand in front of this machine if I would take the physical. The machine reached almost from the floor to the ceiling. They also told me that they had a machine that could go within 300 yards of a building or house and could tell how many were in the house and also what age [the occupants] were. ‘After they told me this, they asked me again if I wanted to step inside, take the physical, and experience some of these things. I told them “no”, that I didn’t think that I wanted to. The only other things that I could see in this compartment were some gauges on the ceiling, which I couldn’t read, and some maps on the wall.’
The maps were about three feet square but only about 12 inches from the floor. The complete map was a light gray color. It looked like they were large scale maps of land. There were seven or eight crooked lines running diagonally that looked like rivers and also moon-shaped markings that could have represented mountains. It had latitude and longitude lines on it. ‘After I was asked the third time to take a physical, I got a little jumpy and decided that I had better leave,’ continued Watts. ‘After I left, it raised about three feet and turned south down in a pasture. There was no noise at all coming from it except for the time when the door opened. When it was standing still, it never did touch the ground. When it took off, its lights changed from a fluorescent light to an amber or soft red light. It had only this one large light on the front . . . about 20 inches across!
Without bothering to turn his truck around in the thick mud, Watts ran back the half-mile to his home. After hearing her husband rather incoherently explaining what had just happened to him, Rosemary Watts called the police in Wellington, 11 miles to the northeast of their farm. Chief of Police Donald Nunnelly, a relative of Watts, together with Collingsworth County Sheriff John Rainey, arrived and accompanied Watts to the scene of the incident. Nothing could be found, except Watts’s truck, stuck in the mud.
Sheriff Rainey informed the Air Force, and a lieutenant interviewed Watts. The lieutenant was unable to reassure Watts or offer any helpful advice in the event that another, similar incident should occur.