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Last weekend, believers and skeptics alike descended upon downtown Chehalis for the fifth annual Chehalis Flying Saucer Party.
According to Lewis County Historical Museum Executive Director Jason Mattson, an estimated 1,000 visitors poured through the downtown area on Friday, Sept. 12, and Saturday, Sept. 13, for the two-day festival, which featured a film festival, a variety of free-to-attend family-friendly events and four speakers.
The annual event celebrates Kenneth Arnold’s historic 1947 UFO sighting, when he saw nine metallic objects flying in an echelon formation stretching nearly 5 miles between Mount Rainier and Mount Adams while flying near Mineral.
Originally from Idaho, Arnold took off from the Centralia-Chehalis Airport that fateful day and flew into the history books, putting Lewis County on the map as the first incident that kicked off the “Summer of the Saucers” in 1947, when thousands of other sightings were reported nationwide.
This year’s speakers included former Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) Washington State Director Maurene Morgan; U.S. Army veteran turned history professor and author Bruce Solheim; science educator, author and Universe University Podcast co-host Chris Grant; along with filmmaker, local historian and Pacific NorthWEIRD Podcast co-host Vince Ynzunza.
The focus of this year’s Flying Saucer Party were the accounts of those who claim to have either been contacted by extraterrestrial beings, or even abducted.
And according to Ynzunza, Lewis County might be the cradle of the modern contactee movement, as he told the story of Samuel Eaton Thompson.
While many consider George Adamski to be the first modern contactee after he claimed to have been contacted by a “submarine-shaped” object on Nov. 20, 1952, Ynzunza challenged that notion.
A Centralia resident, Thompson was driving between Morton and Mineral on Tuesday, March 28, 1950, when he said he saw a massive “so-called flying saucer” in a clearing just off of state Route 7. He decided to pull off to investigate, he said.
“(Thompson’s story) is almost always presented as this oddity, this strange tale — because it kind of was,” Ynzunza said.
What he claimed to discover was not only a ship, but the passengers themselves, of which there were more than 40 who all came from Venus, he said.
“The weird thing was all of them were completely naked,” Ynzunza added. “... He thought he had stumbled upon a nudist colony, but they said they were from Venus.”
Thompson’s "interesting story” was published in the Saturday, April 1, 1950, edition of The Chronicle for readers to “decide for themselves whether it’s April Foolishness or the ‘straight goods,’ which Mr. Thompson says it is.”
According to Ynzunza, the Venusians came with warnings about the dangers of nuclear weapons and a call to mankind to improve its ways. They welcomed Thompson onto their ship, where he claimed to have stayed for 40 hours.
“A lot of these same pieces that Adamski said later, were all there,” Ynzunza said.
Following his own sighting in 1947, Arnold would go on to investigate and interview others who claimed they had seen UFOs or aliens — including Thompson.
Ynzunza was able to track down a copy of Arnold’s interview with Thompson, and played it during his presentation.
In the interview, Arnold gathers as much information as he can, and does play the part of a skeptic, at one point even asking Thompson if there was a bathroom on the ship as he would have had to have gone to the bathroom at least once during the 40 hours he was on board.
“Can you imagine what’s going through Kenneth Arnold’s mind at that point? He’s basically recording the first time a story like this had been told,” Ynzunza said. “All of those elements that we take for granted now are put forth for the first time — A flying saucer comes down, people come out, they have a message, they want to help. This story that no one’s ever heard before.”
While not widely publicized, Thompson’s story was mentioned in some of Arnold’s writings, which were published before Adamski went public with his own contact story.
The idea that alien societies currently exist on Venus seems completely impossible even with our modern technology, as the average surface temperature on our neighboring planet is over 800 degrees Fahrenheit.
According to another speaker, Grant, other contactee and abductee stories often have this issue, with people reporting aliens telling them they come from galaxies thousands of light years away — an impossibility as the Milky Way Galaxy itself is approximately 100,000 light years in diameter with other galaxies being millions of light years away.
He likened this phenomena to when Christopher Columbus landed in the Americas for the last time, he was denied food from the locals. Taking advantage of their primitive tribal knowledge — or lack thereof — of lunar eclipses, he told them if they did not provide him with food he would soon make the moon turn red like blood.
So when the eclipse began, they believed Columbus, not knowing the moon was turning red due to it simply passing through the Earth’s shadow.
“Columbus came from a more technologically advanced society with more knowledge of astronomy. This was true contact between two different civilizations of human beings. An opportunity to share knowledge was marred with an ugly deception,” Grant said. “Is it possible human beings today are victims of a similar deception by a higher intelligence?”
During his presentation, Solheim stated that there are those who theorize contactee stories may be people experiencing contact not from aliens, but from humans themselves, either in different dimensions or even possibly the afterlife.
The theory is known as the quantum nexus theory, and Solheim quoted Whitley Strieber, an author who claimed to have been abducted in 1985.
“He said, ‘Maybe where the aliens are in the mirror universe is where our dead go,’” Solheim said. “I think that’s true.”
He’s not the only one who believes this either, as being a former employee of the Department of Defense (DOD), Solheim has been contacted about his own paranormal experiences by DOD officials throughout his life.
“This is with NHI, non-human intelligence. Which is what they talk about in these Senate and Congressional hearings. You’ve heard them talk about interdimensionals and they’re very cryptic about what they can say. Whenever it gets too detailed, if you noticed in the last one, they said, ‘Well I have got to talk in a SCIF (sensitive compartmented information facility) to you about what this is,’” Solheim said. “But this story tells you they take this very seriously.”
Morgan told the story of Chris Bledsoe, a modern contactee, and confirmed what Solheim was saying about the federal government’s interest in what contactees and abductees are claiming.
Bledsoe, a strongly religious North Carolina construction worker who was quite successful and a prominent member of his local Pentecostal church, had a life-changing encounter in 2007 — when he, his son, and three coworkers encountered mysterious orbs while camping on the banks of the Cape Fear River.
Since that initial encounter, Bledsoe and his family have continued to encounter unidentifiable objects, leading to them being ostracized from both Bledsoe’s religious and professional circles.
“Chris could not find work because he was considered unreliable and just plain crazy,” Morgan said.
Eventually, Bledsoe got in contact with MUFON representatives who took his accounts seriously, and learned astonishing details — including the fact that Bledsoe had been miraculously cured of his Crohn’s disease.
Bledsoe also claims to have been visited by the Vistula, an angelic-like female being who has been reported to have appeared to others throughout history including to George Washington and during the Battle of Warsaw in 1920. The Vistula told him a new age was coming, and it was his duty to tell the rest of humanity.
Many believe the Vistula to be the Virgin Mary and her appearance is also associated with the appearance of the star Regulus in the Leo constellation.
“This I find very interesting because this same star appears in (DOD) intelligence logos. I have to wonder if this knowledge didn’t come with the Paperclip Nazis we brought over after World War II. Because Hitler and his cronies were very much involved in the occult … I can’t think of any explanation for this other than there are elements within intel, the government, whatever, that are well aware of this story and the coming of a new age. I think these logos reflect that.”
Bledsoe’s full story can be read in his book, “UFO of God,” available on Amazon.
