Contrasting Encounters – SUPPORT

Alien Base: The Evidence for Extraterrestrial Colonization of Earth: SUPPORT

In interviews with the Associated Press, Police Chief Donald Nunnelly and other law enforcement officers in Collingsworth County described Carroll Wayne Watts as ‘a stable family man, a church-goer, out of debt, and with no motive for fabricating his story’. Furthermore, Nunnelly said he knew of as many as 50 people who had seen similar strange lights in the area, and four or five who had glimpsed a cigar-shaped object. ‘This is the sort of thing they will talk about, but only over coffee with their very closest friends,’ added Nunnelly. ‘They don’t want to wind up in an institution. I’ve known of some law officers who got mixed up in things like this and lost their jobs and everything.’

At 04.00 on 11 April 1967, the day Watts was taken aboard the craft for his ‘physical’, Mickey Kendricks was awakened by what he thought was a truck driving into the freight depot behind his home. When he looked out of the window, however, he saw a cylindrical-shaped object, estimated to be 20 to 30 feet long, with red and yellow lights revolving around it.
On 3 November 1967, Hazel McKinney and two female companions were driving to work at Childress, Texas, when they noticed a huge bright light in a field beside the road.

Suddenly, the object, now appearing silver-grey in colour, ‘angled-up’ and disappeared. ‘It was big enough to drive a car in,’ said Mrs McKinney. ‘It was shaped like a cigar — one end was round.’ Sometime after Watts’s story hit the headlines, Childress Police Chief Alvin Maddox had been laughing about it with two colleagues. Shortly afterwards, driving ten miles north of Childress and eight miles south of Loco, Maddox observed a large bright light hovering in the sky at about 500 to 1,000 feet. ‘I took after it in my car, driving about 105 miles per hour,’ said Maddox. ‘I followed it about 14 miles, but it left me.’

So concerned was Watts about his experiences that he asked for a Congressional investigation. Nothing came of it, of course, following his confession. There are many parallels in Watts’s story, not just with published cases but also with reports which remained unpublished until many years later. Watts had little or no interest in the phenomenon, and by all accounts had not read any books on the subject prior to 1967. I have not met him, though I did speak on the telephone to his wife a few years after the incident. I found her to be sincere, and genuinely concerned about the whole affair. Surprisingly, both Carroll and Rosemary Watts temporarily retained a positive attitude towards what must rank as one of the most bizarre encounters with extraterrestrials. As the couple concluded in their report: What you have just read is a true story, and we have tried in every way to tell it as near to what happened as possible . . . We feel like if the public can hear about these things and know about what to expect, before they come face to face with them as we did, it will make it easier for them to understand and accept. We have written this because of the nightmare we lived when we had our first experiences with these UFOs.

Since we have found out that these people mean no harm, we are not afraid of them anymore; instead, [we] accept them as friends unless they prove themselves otherwise. Only time will tell the outcome of this, but we pray that God will have His way in seeing that things turn out for the best . . .

Things did not turn out for the best. Some years after these events, Watts began to have behavioural problems. His brother told investigator Don Worley that Carroll had become ‘influenced’ by a stranger. Paranoia set in, and Watts began to believe that certain people were out to ‘get him’. Finally, out of mistaken fear, he pulled his gun on a law officer, for which he received a prison sentence.

From his cell in Texas State Prison, Watts wrote to Worley: ‘The incident cost me my wife, my children, $285,000, my freedom, my health [heart trouble] and nearly my life. Simply because something happened to me that I didn’t understand, and that I talked about, and I think now that I would have been better off myself if I had died in the incident.’
Sinister incidents such as these should serve as a salutary reminder of the dangers that can be involved in encounters with extraterrestrials —particularly in their aftermath. But now, by way of contrast, let us turn to another, quite different kind of contact.