721. Len Filppu

In this in-depth episode of Podcast UFO, host Martin Willis is joined by Len Filppu, a lifelong experiencer whose 1967 Brockport, New York UFO sighting became a pivotal moment that reshaped his understanding of reality, consciousness, and the unexplained. Len recounts witnessing a low-flying, fiery orange object, accompanied by a smaller white orb, moving silently across the sky—an event corroborated by multiple police officers and dozens of civilian witnesses across western New York. The sighting later inspired the animated short documentary Psychedelic in the Sky, which explores not only the event itself, but the deeper psychological and spiritual impact it had on those involved. Beyond the UFO encounter, Len discusses a series of profound anomalous experiences, including a verified poltergeist incident, altered states of consciousness, and how stigma and ridicule once silenced witnesses for decades. Together, Martin and Len examine how public perception of UFOs has evolved—from mockery in the 1960s to serious scientific and academic inquiry today. 

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:14):
Hello, and welcome to the show on Martin willishure Hopes
and that intro, I just have to explain a couple
of times that that was basically an AI video of
myself in the hot tub in Carmel Valley back in
two thousand and six when I had my UFO sighting,
and not too far away from where our guest is from.

(00:35):
I'm going to be bringing him in just a minute.
And his name is Lenn Philipooh, and he had a
documentary made about his sighting. We're going to be talking
about that and we're going to be showing it at
the end of the show. But it's a very short
it's a short clip, but it's really interesting. Just a
couple of things. So last Thursday, as I mentioned, and

(00:56):
that I was giving away some T shirts for Christmas.
And by the way, to all those who celebrate Christmas,
it's coming up in a couple of days. There is
no Christmas show Thursday lands on the twenty fifth, and
there will be no Christmas show and no New Year's
Day show. But anyway, I want to thank all of
the listeners that have been watching me and all these

(01:18):
people that have been you know, like dedicated fans and
listeners for years. Thank you so much for being here
all this time. And the people that text me last week. Now,
I had checked just before the show. Everything was working fine.
I had other people text me, not just myself, and
I had Google Voice and the text were coming in fine.

(01:40):
Then as soon as the show started and I tried
to give away T shirts, I looked in the chat
room and people were saying, hey, you know, nothing's happening,
and I did not get a single text. I did
catch one person. I have emailed that person. So if
you know who you are, if you were in last
week and you were trying to text when I was
asking you to text, I will send those people that

(02:03):
send me an email. I will do it in order
until I run out of T shirts. And that's Martin
at podcastufo dot com. So please send me an email
and I will get you a T shirt in the mail.
Really prefer people in the United States if possible, because
I have sent things overseas before and it gets a
little tricky. So anyway, a couple of other things here.

(02:27):
We have a great blog. I'm really excited. I haven't
read it yet. It's on its way in and it's
by Charles Lear as always and the name of it
is twentieth and twenty first century Cube in Sphere Reports.
So that makes me wonder how many reports that Charles
has dug up, because we're just thinking of what Ryan

(02:47):
Graves has talked about, and it sounds like there's some
going back a ways. So I'm excited to hear about that.
And just another thing. I have a good friend for
a long time, since we were little kids, and I
was up the lake here he is right here, Steve,
my friend Steve. I was up at the lake this summer,
and you know, I had told him that I do
a show on UFOs, and he was telling me a

(03:11):
story of Now his dad was such a nice guy.
I really thought the world of him. His father was
a teacher and in the high school. Great guy, as
I say, and they had five kids and they would
all pack up the cars in the seventies, in the
late sixties, early seventies, and they'd all jump in the

(03:32):
car and they'd go looking for UFOs. I thought that
was great. I never knew that about him and his family.
So he brought that up this summer when I was
at the lake with him, And so this morning he
sent me this text right here. He lives in Maryland
and or Baltimore, i should say, and he was walking
along this morning and he thought of me and sent
me this. I guess it's a flying saucer. I don't

(03:56):
see any Reindeers or anything like that, but anyway, there
it is. But anyway, I got to kick out of that,
and I just thought i'd share it. So again, I
wish you all Merry Christmas to all those people that celebrate.
And I'm bringing in my guests right now. Len, welcome
to the show. Hi, good to have you, very happy
to be here.

Speaker 2 (04:14):
Thank you, Martin, thank you.

Speaker 1 (04:16):
And yeah, so I was saying, Carmel Valley's not as
far as the crow flies. You know what is that?
Fifty sixty miles from where you live right now?

Speaker 2 (04:24):
Yeah, we're in Palo Alto right now, and we're kind
of in between San Francisco and Carmel. Yeah you get it.

Speaker 1 (04:33):
Yeah. Now, so you have this documentary made of your sighting.
How did all that come about?

Speaker 2 (04:41):
I was at Comcast, one of the comcasts, and I
was I went to an experior group experiencer group meeting
where a number of people sit around and talk about
their sightings, and I shared some of my original sighting

(05:01):
in nineteen sixty seven in Brockport, New York. And then afterwards,
the next day, Matthew Salton, the director of the documentary,
approached me and said he was interested in that particular
sighting and what I had to say, and would would

(05:22):
I be would would I mind if he taped me?
So we began an ongoing conversation that lasted over several
months as he followed up and gathered more information, and
then he produced the very interesting short video It's it's

(05:43):
in It's about eleven minutes or so, and it's animated,
and he has a very unique and interesting style that
I think people would find real interesting.

Speaker 1 (05:53):
And so I thought we'd take the time to, you know,
talk about your sighting and what that was like for
you and what a changed in your life all that,
but first of all, a little bit about yourself, if
you would.

Speaker 2 (06:06):
Oh. Well, I'm not retired, but I've had a career
of I did some I have a degree in journalism.
I had I was working in presidential politics on a
successful candidate, this peanut farmer from Georgia who wanted to.

Speaker 1 (06:25):
Oh yeah I heard of him.

Speaker 2 (06:26):
Yeah, also he also saw a UFO and reported it
back when he was governor of Georgia.

Speaker 1 (06:35):
Yes, but can I have to stop you? Can I
stop you right there? I do believe that that that
was explained. Have you heard about that the missile launch
build missile launch?

Speaker 2 (06:48):
No, I have not heard. I haven't heard that it
was identified.

Speaker 1 (06:54):
Go ahead, Well, now I know that his grandson was
contacted by some people that figured out they figured out
the date in the time, and it was some type
of failed missile launch. I do believe now people can
look into that. And what I will do is I'm
going to make a note right now and I will
try to find that information and get that straightened out,

(07:14):
and I'll put that in the show notes. I always
have interesting, you know, show things that happened during the
show in the show notes for any of those who
are listening to this and in the audio, and sometimes
I actually remember to put the show note link in
the YouTube video as well. But anyway, yeah, I'll look
into that more. But I do believe that Jimmy Carter's

(07:36):
UFO was explained. But still it's great that you know,
at least he he treated it like it was something
special and you know, it really got some attention. I'm
glad he still talked about it, you know, because you know,
anything that happens like that kind of reduces the stigma.
I mean, if someone that actually made it to the

(07:57):
presidency and talks about having UFO, they're going to take
a lot more serious than the average show. So I
was glad he talked about it.

Speaker 2 (08:04):
My hat's off to Jimmy Carter for that. Not only
was it, what did he report it at a time
where most people reporting sightings were labeled lunatics and ridiculed,
and there was a massive stigma against it. But he
was a politician, so they're even especially more careful about
any kind of controversy that they might bring up. And

(08:25):
yet he saw something and he was true to himself
enough to go ahead and report it. And I think
he was already governor and running for a second term.
I'm not sure, but it was right in the height,
right in the heat of his political life. So I
admire him for that honesty.

Speaker 1 (08:44):
Yes, I'm trying to think. I think it was Jim
Kucinich that who was running for president at the time,
and he talked about having a UFO experience. Did you
ever see that he basically was ridiculed by you mean
Dennis Dennis is that? Who is it?

Speaker 2 (09:03):
Dennis Mayor of Cleveland.

Speaker 1 (09:06):
I believe he talked about it, and I think it
was Chris Christy that ridiculed him live during a debate,
and so he basically that was the end of him,
you know, which is really sad.

Speaker 2 (09:18):
That did hurt him. I remember that period of time,
and I remember how how it was it reflected negatively
on him, the way he came forward and presented it.
I mean it is. I really appreciate your show over
the years because you bring more fresh air and light

(09:38):
into this subject, and I think we need more and
more of it. Since I've been retired, I have begun
to explore these incidents in my life that are that
I would call UFO and anomalous experiences. But I had
no time while I was working and raising a family,
and and and climbing the corporate ladder and meeting the

(10:00):
the mortgage payment and running round you can't talk about
this stuff. So now that I have time to explore it,
that's what I'm doing.

Speaker 1 (10:08):
And I do think that you know, these days, I
would consider the ridicule factor softened quite a bit, Like
I believe right now, if someone was well, I would
hope so. But we I mean, we have such a divisive,
you know, political environment. But you know, I'm just thinking,
like if someone's running for president twenty twenty eight and

(10:30):
they it was brought up the data UFO citing, I
would like to think that it wouldn't be so detrimental.
But it's awful hard to say, you know, you know,
because of the climate of people attacking each other constantly.
So but I would hope that it would be a

(10:50):
little easier because of what we've gone through in the
last several years of it being more acceptable in so
many ways. Ever since you know, the twenty seventeen article
came out in the New York Times and you know,
scientists taking it serious, taking a look at it. I
think there are all these things that I'm not afraid
as a professional out there as I don't bring it

(11:13):
up unless it's a great comfortable conversation with the client.
But if I feel comfortable enough, I'll bring up that
I do this show. And I actually have a couple
of people that have told me they've been listening, so
that I would have never dared to do that years ago.

Speaker 2 (11:31):
As a quick illustration of the change in how this
information is received. Back in nineteen sixty seven, after my
sight and this sighting was seen by four different uniform
police officers who reported.

Speaker 3 (11:44):
It, and.

Speaker 2 (11:46):
Maybe fifty people along a fifty mile stretch of land
in western New York. When I would talk to friends,
good friends of mine, they laugh, they'd ridic you all
it was a joke. And so over the years I
just would only talk to people, and you know, people
who were special, people who I knew would listen to me,
and people who were somewhat open to this, because the

(12:09):
ridicule was just so great, and you just get tired
of trying to fight over fight over it. Then maybe
about five years ago, I attended my first UFO conference.
I always wanted to, was always afraid to attended. One
didn't know what to expect, tinfoil hats, And you know
what I found were researchers and scientists and journalists and

(12:32):
experiencers and very serious people who are trying to make
heads or tails out of this phenomenon. And I was
standing in the lobby. There was a main speech going
on inside this room, and I was just standing in
the lobby and somehow I mentioned to someone out there
in a quiet voice that yeah, well I did I

(12:53):
saw UFO. And the funny thing was, I went looking
for the UFO that night. As soon as I said that,
people appeared out of nowhere, people I didn't even know
where around. A camera came on, my figure light came on,
and people surrounded me. The guy stuck a microphone and
he was asking me questions, and I just backed out

(13:13):
of it. My point is that what a difference between,
you know, in the sixties being ridiculed and then in
the two thousands people actually wanting to hear the story.
And it's been dramatic for me to see this change.
And you're part of it, Martin, you and your colleagues.

Speaker 1 (13:33):
Well, well, thank you, thank you. Now it's I have
been I'll give a plug because I think it's someone
to plug his eyes on Cinema on YouTube. That's a
channel on YouTube, and there they have just uncovered so
many vintage, wonderful conversations and about this topic, people being interviewed.
So I've been watching a bit of that lately, and

(13:56):
I'm listening to a lot of people talk about well,
I sure wish I never saw that because of all
the trouble I've had, and one person was saying about
how much he was getting badgered. I do believe one
person talked about that he had his life threatened and
that he'd just better not talk about it. You know.
It was the air Force that showed up at his door,

(14:19):
and not only you think of maybe one or two,
but they came and they were guarding the area where
he claims that it landed. There was some trace evidence
as well, and they there was there on each corner.
This is at a farm, and there they were guarding
it in each corner and they wouldn't look at him.
This is his own property, and I don't know what

(14:40):
they were doing, but anyway, he was totally threatened by it.
And you know, so I don't know what would happen
today if that same situation would happen today. It's awful,
you know. I mean, you do hear about them somehow
knowing an event happens and showing up all over the world.

(15:01):
I have James Fox coming on on Tuesday to twenty ninth,
and we're going to be talking about the situation in Brazil.
He has a second release of that with a lot
more information and so. But in that particular case in Vargina,
when that UFO incident happened with the beings and it

(15:22):
was like two days later, the Americans are there. I mean,
it's just baffling. It's almost like we just don't understand
what part of whatever it is has all this information,
how they get it, and how they show up.

Speaker 2 (15:39):
You know it. It is a labyrinth, isn't it. It
is hard to figure out, especially when you get into
the government and disclosure and the misinformation, the disinformation, the
counter intelligence, I mean, and all of that, all of that. Frankly,

(16:05):
I'll say, I'm glad that people are looking into it.
I'm glad that people are researching that stuff that is
providing headlines and news and commentary on an almost daily,
if not weekly basis. I'm glad the congressional hearings have
gone down. I'm glad that the New York Times front page.
I'm glad that they've printed it and opened it up

(16:27):
a little bit. For myself, I have found that the
UFO incident I had when I was sixteen years old
seemed to begin a series of other anomalous experiences in
my life that were not related to UFOs, but that

(16:53):
were of a profound consciousness raising nature, so that ultimately
I've been able to utilize the change in my attitude
toward living a better life and having a better life.

(17:14):
And it's while while I don't know if this is
everyone's experience, and I know it isn't everyone's experience, and
I can't positively say that my UFO experience was the
initiator of all these other things, but I do know

(17:36):
that there are some researchers such as Diana Pasalka, who
has included much of my story in her book Encounters,
Jeffrey Kripel, who does a lot of this work at
Rice University, and that they have seen academic evidence of

(17:56):
some of these initial incidents is opening one up to
other experiences, other sci or paranormal experiences down the road,
so that in fact, there's I'm part of a survey
right now Sean Osbiorn Hargins. He's with the California Institute
of Human Science, and he is doing a survey that

(18:19):
basically he calls super Experiencer survey, and he's looking at
and four people who have experienced several anomalous experiences that
are not the same in other words like I had
a UFO, then I had a Poultergeist experience, and I

(18:41):
know you've had a poulter I heard you talk about
your Poultergeist experience, and.

Speaker 1 (18:45):
Yeah I had that. I had that first, I had
that in the nineteen nineties.

Speaker 2 (18:49):
Yes, yes, And apparently the order doesn't really matter on
these things. So anyway people are at looking at maybe
for me it's been spiritual. I will just frankly admit
for me it's been a matter of consciousness and spirituality
over the long term. This did not come fast or easy,

(19:11):
but that's where my path has gone. So I'll let
other people try to figure out how much the Pentagon
is hiding and where the information lies with men in Black.

Speaker 1 (19:27):
All right, so I want to hear what happened in
nineteen sixty seven. Let's go right into it as much
detail as you'd like.

Speaker 2 (19:34):
Well, in kind of a nutshell, because some of this
is in the movie. And I do recommend people watch
the movie because.

Speaker 1 (19:41):
Oh yeah, we're playing that at the end. Unless we
hear from your producer friend, I know you actually text them.

Speaker 2 (19:48):
I have. I haven't heard back from him yet. I
don't think he will mind if we do play it,
he'd probably be honored, but that the sighting itself was
in Brockport, New York. And it's more, what I'd like

(20:08):
to try to explain to your viewers is it's not
so much the sighting, but the circumstances surrounding the sighting
which have influenced me, stayed with me, and have led
me to further and deeply explore this. When I first
read about UFOs, when I was probably thirteen or fourteen

(20:32):
years old, I'd had like an epiphany that I knew, Yeah,
this has absolutely got to be true. I listened to
the I read the way the witnesses described their citing.
It just made so much sense to me. My understanding
of the universe was such that it was so vast,
Why wouldn't there be other kinds of life out there?

(20:54):
So I became a UFO nut. I started to read
all the books about it in the early sixties, and
the magazine articles i'd cut out, newspaper articles i'd talked
to the subject about my friends, and America was UFO crazy.
Back then? Project Bluebook was going on, there was swamp gas,

(21:17):
many kinds of different activities were happening. So it was
in the air, not to mention all the science fiction
movies of the fifties and sixties about UFOs and aliens
and Robbie robots and all of that kind of stuff.
But I didn't know if there was anything to it.
I kind of enjoyed some of the notoriety of being

(21:39):
the UFO guy, you know, in my group, the UFO expert,
and so all my friends knew me, as you know,
that was part of my interest. I also played sports,
and I did well in school, and so it wasn't
It was just a sideline kind of thing, but I
joked around about it a lot. One day, my buddy

(22:00):
Tim called and said, there's strange activity in the sky
over my house. Will you come up and take a look.
So I went up, and he explained that he had
seen some things in the sky, like green flashes, and
he felt something was looking at him. And we went
outside and we looked around. We couldn't find anything. There

(22:20):
was some kind of pink orange reddish glow in some
of the cumulus clouds in the western New York, but
it was it wasn't remarkable enough to make any kind
of a report or anything. So we called it quits
for the night. The next night he said let's sleep out.

(22:42):
And it was in the summertime, and he said, let's
sleep out. Come on up. So I was leaving my
house with a sleeping bag and my dad asked where
are you going, and I said, I'm going to look
for flying saucers and he gave me a wave. He
he taught economics at the local college and that probably

(23:04):
didn't quite fit into one of his equations, so he
waved me off and I went up there. I never
said that before either. I'd never gone looking for flying saucers.
I never voiced that before. So when we were up
at Thames, his brother in law Whitey, his brother Joe,

(23:28):
and I were getting into our sleeping bags. It was
it was late at night, and someone said, oh, there's
a there's a flash. Did you see that? And you know,
I caught out of the corner of my eyes saw
this like flash and people were going, there's a bean there.
They're being in us, you know, And there was this
frenzy like kittens chasing laser points or something. And and

(23:52):
finally I caught Whitey, who was the older one. He
had a flashlight and they were playing a joke on me.
They were shining the flashlight and they were all in
on it, acting as though, oh there, you know, there's
you know, there's a there's an alien beam coming. We
all laughed. I laughed, it was a funny joke. No problem.

(24:13):
They went to sleep. I stayed awake. I was staring
at the universe, pondering it. Just couldn't sleep. At about
two am, a very large about the size of a
full moon. Take the full moon and bring it down
to about two hundred two hundred and fifty feet height,
orange red ball of flame was just gliding, taking its merry, slow,

(24:41):
silent way across the horizon, parallel to the horizon, almost right.
It was probably no more than thirty yards horizontally from me,
and probably at around two hundred feet is the best
that I can recollec But the thing that I'm hoping

(25:05):
to connect with you about, Martin, is that it was
it almost it just when it appeared. It wasn't a me.
I've seen meteorites, I've looked through telescopes, I've done all
this stuff before in science class, in science fairs and
come scout boy scouts, and this thing seemed to announce

(25:26):
itself when it came into my sight, like here we are,
take a look. I really felt, and I still feel
to this day. Although I didn't talk about this a
lot during the Stigma days, it felt as though something
was flying by and waving hello, you've been a good supporter,

(25:52):
You're on the right track. How are you take a look? Enjoy?
And that's how it felt. I woke the other guys up.
They saw it. I thought I would go in and
report it, like a good boy scout to the to
the police or something. And I stopped. I opened the
door to his front front house, front door to his house.
I stopped. I turned back around and said, why am

(26:13):
I doing this? Go look at it, Go behold this,
this this torch that's just slowly going through the sky.
Which I did. And there's another very important detail. There
was a little white star, a little white orb about
the size of a star, following in its trail. Now,

(26:36):
when I looked closely, it looked as though there was
a there was something solid underneath the orange plasma glow
of this and the flames that were coming off the
side and and veering toward the tail. So there was
something something solid. And then there was this little white
orb and it kept, you know, zigzagging, jerking in it's

(27:00):
and I thought, oh my god, this vehicle, this thing
is in trouble, it's going to crash. This orb was
a small satellite type craft that's trying to get back
in or trying to help, or was left behind or
something like that. That's what I thought immediately. So everyone

(27:21):
saw it and fell asleep. And then in the next
few days it started to come out in the newspapers,
and there were some reports that were identical to mine.
As I said, there were four cops in the Brockport area,
two Brockport police officers and two Monroe County sheriffs who
not only saw it but reported it. There were a

(27:43):
bunch of people out at State University of New York
at Brockport campus that were rehearsing for a play. One
of the police officers was Dave Martin's who was my
basketball coach. He would work summers as a police officer.
Now one other important aspect of this. Martin and I've

(28:05):
been researching more and more about this Brockport UFO, and
the more I talk about it, the more I presented
in Facebook and other social media, the more information I'm
able to extract from some of the old timers like
myself who lived in that era. There was another person,
a guy named Sidney Zipken, who worked in a town

(28:28):
five miles away, Churchville, New York. He worked as a
night watchman in a park, and he claimed that four
hours before we saw the Brockport ufo, he saw was
his headlights flashed onto two small beings who were dressed

(28:49):
in black, and when they saw his headlights, they ran
into a spaceship, a flying saucer, and they took off.
That's what he claimed. What happened was as the newspaper
reporters tried to put this together, the Sydney Zipken sighting

(29:14):
of aliens took all that took, all the print took,
all the attention, took, all the ridicule. It just about
obscured what we had seen, uh, legitimately.

Speaker 1 (29:28):
And so do you think that do you think Sydney's
was not legitimate?

Speaker 2 (29:35):
That's a that is the perfect question, Martin. And I'll
tell you why. When I read that he what he said,
I thought, there's no way that he's trying to get
in on our act. He's trying to he's trying to
embellish this thing. That happened. No, I did not believe
him at the time. We didn't. The only thing we

(29:57):
had was Betty and Barney Hill. We didn't We didn't
have a lot of alien abductions. We didn't have the grays.
The grays were not part of the lexicon. It wasn't
part of the world yet then. So no, it was
too far abridge to accept for me, who had just
had what has turned out to be a life transforming

(30:17):
experience with this thing, and so I didn't believe him.
Others didn't. He got fired, He had a life of
crime afterwards. I think he might have died in jail.
So his history trails off a little bit. So. But
now as I have been able to see more and

(30:41):
more of the reports, the legitimate reports and stories of
grays and aliens and that kind of stuff. When I
look back at what he's quoted in the newspaper articles,
sounds exactly normal in these kinds of cases. It sounds

(31:03):
like he was telling the truth all a lot. But
he was too far ahead of his time.

Speaker 1 (31:08):
Especially the coveralls, the overalls, the black suit. They yes,
sometimes they're saying they're wearing gray, black or white, but
they all say they're coveralls, they're you know, like one piece.
They all talk about the same thing, yes, what they
see and he oh, yeah, that was early on for sure,
and he mentioned that, Yes, well the Sacoro case in

(31:31):
nineteen sixty six actually did talk about coveralls also, you know,
you'd hear about it, so that's just a year prior.
But yeah, very very interesting. And it's too bad if
he actually did see that and received all the ridicule,
and you know, I mean, that was a hard thing
to live with, and you know, it's sad.

Speaker 2 (31:53):
Yeah, I think absolutely it was sad, and I think
it helped to keep our mouths shut. It helped to
keep me quiet about the whole thing because if I
talk to other people, they thought it was the Sydney
Zipken thing because that had got the you know, the
more the coverage than anything else. So I was part
of that lunatic crowd even, you know, so we we

(32:15):
just it wasn't as open as things are now.

Speaker 1 (32:20):
So I'm going to try to do you are there's
still information out there about his what his story was. Absolutely,
yeah we should we should put that also in the
uh the show notes for everybody to read about that
as well. I think that would be a good idea.

Speaker 2 (32:36):
Now, Diana. Diana mentioned some of it in the book Encounters.
There are if people want to take a look Sidney
Zipken z I P K I N. Rochester, New York.
If you check the archives of the Rochester Democrat and
Chronicle newspaper, you will you will find stuff about him,

(32:57):
quite a quite a history because he did have a
number of crimes after this sighting. You know, cause and effect,
I don't know, but.

Speaker 1 (33:07):
Yeah, I've found things all July thirty first, nineteen sixty seven.
I have the whole I'll put that in the show
notes for everybody to read as well. In Churchville, New York.
I got it.

Speaker 2 (33:17):
Yes, you are thorough.

Speaker 1 (33:20):
So yeah, that's that's interesting. So this that was the
same night though, right, you.

Speaker 2 (33:25):
Saw what was four hours earlier, So he saw it
very late. He saw at ten pm on July thirty first,
and then our ufol was seen four hours later on
August first, at two am.

Speaker 1 (33:41):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (33:42):
So the other one last thing about a little white
orb in the in the in the tail, Now, none
of the I didn't see any of the reports that
mentioned that, And I showed the reports to my dad
and he looked at me and listened and said, oh, okay.
And then I found another report because I was doing

(34:03):
some research on something where people and workers in Genesee
on New York working at a factory trick work were
mentioned to the reporter of the little white orb following
in this trail, and I cut that out. I showed
my dad and he read it and he looked up
at me. He says, now I believe you.

Speaker 1 (34:21):
Huh. Well, that's good vindication.

Speaker 2 (34:24):
It was vidication, but it was also damning because I
didn't know he didn't.

Speaker 1 (34:29):
Believe exactly exactly. So you know that also when you
talk about the little orb following, you hear that a
number of times, and you know, even heard about in
the Ariel school incident that there were these little round
orbs spinning around the outside of the crafts that were landing,
you know.

Speaker 2 (34:48):
So it's fascinating. And Spielberg included that in close Encounters
of the third kind, when the crafts really come, you'll
see little orbs that come flashing through behind it. Whatnot? Now,
how are your next movie?

Speaker 1 (35:04):
How are your friends talking about the situation afterward?

Speaker 2 (35:08):
I have a good friend who called me after the
New York Times put had the article by Leslie Kane
on the front page of the New York Times and
talked about the Pentagon, UFOs, the tic TACs and the others,
and he said, Wow, then you know, I'm really starting

(35:31):
to pay attention to this now. So I think that
people are starting to take this more seriously. They have to,
the rest of the world is taking it seriously.

Speaker 1 (35:42):
Yes, I'm met in particular about your friends that were
with you that night. Did you talk about it a
lot after that or did they not want to really
talk about it?

Speaker 2 (35:51):
Not a great deal. I did talk a lot with Tim,
who was in my class and we played basketball and
football together. We lost touch after a while, but when
I started to do some when Diana wanted me to
provide some input on this story and others for encounters,

(36:14):
I wanted to get in touch with Tim. So I
gave him a call and asked what he remembered and
if I could use his name, and he said, absolutely,
use my name, Tim Hurley, and so I did, and
then I went. I went down to Rice University for

(36:34):
the first Jeffrey Kreipel Archives of the Impossible conference and
found out that Tim lives probably two blocks away from
that Rice conference hall. So when I walked from my
hotel over to the conference hall, I'd stop and say

(36:55):
hello to Tim. So we reminisced and we caught up
on it. So, yes, he still talks about it. The
two other guys don't have quite the memory of it
that we do. But I think they were groggy. I
think they were sleeping. And I think also you may
find I have this with my poltergeist experience at sometimes

(37:18):
something right in front of you that is dramatic, other
people just aren't recognizing, they don't see it, and it's
a part of a phenomenon within this.

Speaker 1 (37:31):
Yeah. I had a conversation the other day with someone
that had an amazing sighting. He's been on the show before.
He really didn't want me to talk about it because
he was traumatized by his situation. But what I thought
he said was very interesting. He said he felt as

(37:53):
though that the whole situation was orchestrated ahead of time. Somehow.
He has that feeling, and this was a major sighting
that he had with lots of people that witnessed it
with him, and he has just like this feeling that
it was all orchestrated and meant to happen. Did you

(38:15):
I've never really heard anyone mention anything like that. Is
there any point that makes you ever think of something
like that about this encounter?

Speaker 2 (38:25):
Well, we're getting into it, Martin, and I appreciate the
surgical skill with which you're asking these questions, because yes,
in a way I do. Now please understand that I
I you know, I can't swear that I know for

(38:46):
certain that there was something planned about the whole thing,
but because of me being a UFO, not me going
up the only night ever I've said that I'm going
to look for flying saucers, the kids playing a prank

(39:08):
on me with the light and making fun of the UFO,
them asleep, and then this thing appearing and getting the
feeling it wasn't you know, It wasn't words or language
or anything like that, but it was this warm kind
of feeling of increasing consciousness that that we we know

(39:37):
what you've been going through, and here we are. Keep
up the effort, now, Martin, I have to say I
was a kid. I was seventh what was I sixteen?
And I knew even then that if I thought that way,
that is so egotistical, that so typical of adolescent behavior.
That I'm not going to let that stay in my head.

(39:59):
I just rejected that. I didn't talk to anyone about it.
I couldn't bring myself to believe. Then later, as other
things have gone on, and I've had that same feeling
almost of a you know, of a consciousness reconstruction effort
going on that I just wonder if maybe maybe there

(40:23):
was something planned or or some symbiotic synchronicity going on.
I just don't know. That's partly why I'm I'm doing
these things. That's partly why I'm researching it, because I
think ultimately it's dealing with the very nature of reality
and how human beings, what's real and true and authentic

(40:49):
with human beings that our our materialistic, Western scientific focus
does not allow into the conversation. So I'm not as
articulate as I'd like to be on this subject.

Speaker 1 (41:04):
But no, you're doing You're actually really great.

Speaker 2 (41:07):
So.

Speaker 1 (41:08):
Ted Rowe is a longtime UFO researcher lives in Hawaii.
He talks about a situation where he was in Oakland
and he saw like this thing coming down and somehow
he knew it was there. He was just riding in
the back of a car, and he looked up and
saw this thing and somehow he felt as though it

(41:31):
was there for him. I know it sounds egotistical, but
it's not really, because there's so many people that just
have this feeling for some reason the thing shows up,
they know it's going to show up before it even
shows up, and then they somehow there's somehow, some type
of weird connection. And I've said on the show before,

(41:51):
you know, I questioned reality all the time when it
comes to these things, and you know, so many different things,
especially if you go down to the quantum level. But
that's a whole nother discussion, you know, but.

Speaker 2 (42:04):
That as part of it. I think that's part of it.
And I've talked to I've talked to Ted Rowe about this,
and yes, and he's told me many story that's not
the only story that he that he had, and he's
he's fascinating with with the things that these that he's undergone.
So uh, it's it's all very interesting. Then as you

(42:30):
peel the onion back a little bit more, I'm just
gonna go ahead and and and throw this out there.
As I've as I've researched this more, it came to
my attention in the newspaper articles that one of the
Brockport police officers who who reported this Brockport UFO, reported

(42:56):
it from his location at Maine and Monroe Avenue. Now
I know that intersection very well. Brockport's a small village.
I know that it's right right across from the Catholic Church.
It's right down the street from a bar that would
stay open very late and police would sit there and

(43:19):
looking for impaired drivers leaving. So I know exactly how
he was parked because you can't park on the other side.
He's facing Main Street. Right across Main Street, just right
across is South Street where my parents lived. So if
he's sitting in his car looking out his windshield and

(43:40):
he sees it, I don't know if he was standing
or sitting. He's probably sitting. If he's sitting in his
car looking at his windshield, it would would have been
it would have had to have been somewhere over the
house on South Street where I grew up, where my
parents lived, But I wasn't there. I was up at Hurley's.

(44:01):
And when the when the and if if if if
it had been coming from fans Or New York and
going past South Street and up Rockport to go in
the direction that it did over me, it would have
had to have taken a left hand turn or or
a turn to the east and and taken a turn

(44:23):
to come, you know, and be just so full uh,
you know, full square in my view now, I I
just add that, if there's any I have no idea
what that means. I don't believe that they were like
looking for Len, but it does add a It seems

(44:45):
to help a little bit explain this almost familiarity I
had with with citing this. It was this, It was this,
though I was answered in a way, it's very strange.
I've still trying to figure it out, Martin. I'm writing
a book about it. I haven't processed all this stuff

(45:05):
right now. I'm throwing out information.

Speaker 1 (45:09):
Now, when you had this happen, do you believe that
that nothing ever happened before?

Speaker 2 (45:16):
You know?

Speaker 1 (45:17):
I mean, or how about afterwards this other? Have you
had other UFO sightings after this?

Speaker 2 (45:24):
I never had another UFO sighting after this. I had
a Poulter a very dramatic poltergeist sighting. I then had
a this this Kundalini kind of this this eruptive Kundalini experience,

(45:44):
and I didn't even have language for at the time.
It's only in retrospect that that it sounds like a
Kundalini experience. And then I had another experience that Diana
talks about where I had a vision of Archbishop Fulton
Jay Sheen on the night he died when we were
both in New York City, that Diana talks about in encounters.

(46:10):
So for me, there's been this progression of opening my
consciousness more and more in kind of a spiritual path
so that when I needed to make a leap, I
was able to more realistically make a leap. That has

(46:31):
made all the difference in my life. It's I have
had a very positive experience with all of this, but no,
only that one UFO experience.

Speaker 1 (46:45):
Okay, well, you know I'm not going to let you
get away without telling your Poltigeist story. I want to
hear you.

Speaker 2 (46:52):
I I heard yours. I enjoyed it a great deal. Yeah,
we were. I was kind of a hitchhiking hippie and
wound up in a in a sort of a commune
farm working situation in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It was in the
early probably nineteen seventy one, and I was with a
bunch of friends and the guy who rented the farmhouse

(47:16):
also ran a construction company called Empire Construction in Tulsa,
and we all were construction for him. He gave us
jobs and we worked. One day, he invited all of
us out to his house to enjoy a Sunday brunch
that was packed with pancakes and eggs and bacon and
you name it. We had a feast and after we ate,

(47:40):
we retired to the living room and we were talking.
You know, back in those days, in the in the
late sixties early seventies, there was a lot of talk
about astrology, gurge, consciousness. There were drugs around, all kinds

(48:01):
of things. There were no drugs involved in this poltergeist
experience at all, but we were talking things metaphysical, and
al said, the owner of the house and the construction company,
he said, well, we have a poultergeist here in the house.
And we all were kind of looking and I think

(48:22):
it was me. I think it was me who asked,
did you name it? I was kind of joking but
wanted him to keep talking about it, you know, have
you named it? And he said, as a matter of fact,
we're all in the living room. There's probably about eight
or eight, could have been ten of us, he says,

(48:44):
as a matter of fact, we have And then he said,
we've named it blank. And I don't remember what the
name is. I do not remember what the name is.
And as soon as he said the name, there were
two French doors leading to another room, not to the outside,

(49:05):
that were right in the in the living room that
flew flew open so much so that the the the
curtains on it, you know, extended horizontally like a like
like a Wyath painting. Uh, you know, it was, it was.
It was remarkable, and I felt this this thing just

(49:30):
sort of whoosh into the room. And I've tried and
the way I've described it is that it felt like
if say, you're reading at home and you you all
of a sudden look up and your wife's looking at you.
You kind of sensed her looking at you before you
looked up to find out she's in fact there a person.

(49:52):
It felt like that kind of a uh, human presence
of some kind was being forced rapidly through the room.
Now I looked around, you know, in a split second,
I looked around, and many others were still just looking
at Al. They weren't looking at the Poultergeist. And I

(50:12):
couldn't understand that. It was as though some of them
were in like a form of I can only describe
it as suspended animation. It was. It was bizarre. And
I looked around and then Al said something like, you know,
the grass is getting long outside. I've got a mow
it soon. And the snell broke and everyone got back

(50:34):
to normal, and no one talked about this UFO and
didn't talk about a phase. There's one person, what.

Speaker 1 (50:42):
Did I say, you said, UFO? Nobody talking about I
met polger guys.

Speaker 2 (50:46):
So I did some research on this because it was
one of my anomalous experiences. And I and I talked
to Al. I talked to his former wife, I talked
to his daughter. I talked to a number of people there.
They all verified there was Poltergeis activity. There were cookies
crumbled in the middle of the floor, dishes that were
broken in the middle of the floor, banging cupboards and

(51:07):
steps and all that stuff. And they figured that there
had been a young boy who drowned in a park
across the street who lived in that house, and they
thought that he was the Poultergeist. What Al and his
wife did was after many years or after a while,

(51:30):
they had some kind of a cleansing ceremony with you know,
with the burning incense and smudgeling the smudger thank you,
and they invited the poultergeist to leave. They say, okay,
you don't have to stay here anymore. We invite you
to leave. It's okay to leave. And he said that
was the end of it. So I interviewed him before

(51:51):
he died. But I wanted to get some of the
other hippies who were with me to verify. And I
called several of them. Some are dead and some were
still alive, and they don't remember it. And I'm going,
I'm allawing my hair outgoing that's the reason for my
lack of hair. I'm trying to figure out what in
the world, How could they not remember this right? And

(52:15):
so I really gave up. I was writing it for Diana.
I was putting diligently, trying to be as factual as
I possibly could, and I just gave up because I couldn't.
I on the Martin, I swear to you, on the
very day that I said I'm not going to get anyone.
My friend Mike de Groat from Brockport gave me a call.

(52:36):
Hardly ever calls. He called me. I said, did you
hear Al Frampton died? He goes, oh, I'm sorry to
hear that. I remember Tulsa. I remember the farm, I
remember construction. I remember the ghost. I remember I said,
what stop, rewind? You remember the ghost? He was there.
I forgot that he was there because he left the

(52:58):
commune early. He left and he wasn't part of and
so my memory did not include him. I didn't even
check with him. So I have him on tape. I've
taped him, I've interview him. He saw exactly what I
saw exactly, except he felt cold. That wind was cold
and chilling. He said it was the scariest thing that
he's ever experienced in his life. So there's the thing, Martin,

(53:22):
where you can have eight people, two of them experience
it and the others don't. And I don't know why,
but something is about the nature of reality, and.

Speaker 1 (53:34):
Yeah, I think it's Yeah. I have a situation where
I have talked about it on this show before, and
that is I had a fireball sighting around nineteen eighty
five that was just absolutely incredible, and I explained it
to someone like Mark dey Antonio as astronomer because it's

(53:56):
such a weird situation. Look like a like a ball,
perfectly shaped round. It was turning as it was going
over It was huge, and it had cracks like orange
cracks in it like lava looked like, and sparks were
popping off of it. No noise. This thing's turning going overhead.
And I'm in a hot tub again, two times hot

(54:19):
tub for that UFO hot tub for this. So I'm
yelling at my son's mother. She was in the hot tub,
and I'm saying, look, look, And on the third time
she looked and she goes, oh wow. You know, as
we were seeing it go over towards the Atlantic, and
I was had a house three miles from the Atlantic
at the time.

Speaker 2 (54:37):
So.

Speaker 1 (54:39):
I think it was about two months ago. I saw
my son's mother and I was talking to her and
I said, hey, you remember when that that fireball that
went right overhead, And I'm telling you to look. And
by the time I said the third time, you finally
turn and saw it, she goes, no, I don't remember that.
It is like what I mean, it was so dramatic.
How could you not remember that? You know it's it's

(55:03):
it is baffling.

Speaker 2 (55:04):
And your fireball flying Martin.

Speaker 1 (55:07):
I could I couldn't tell you for sure. I mean
it looked like I could throw a rock at it.
I mean it really did. But I but I didn't
hear any sound either, so it had to be up
really high. It was just massive, yeah, And but you
would think it would have like a streak behind it,
like a tail, but no, there was sparks popping off
of it. And when I talked, like I said, I
talked to Mark ti Antonio, I said, has anyone ever

(55:29):
and he goes, oh, yeah, that's you know, like it
was no big deal to me. It was like much
more dramatic than my UFO citing. I mean, but did
he have a.

Speaker 2 (55:39):
Did he have an astronomical reason for it?

Speaker 1 (55:44):
No, he just said, no, it's not He acted like
it was not all that unusual. I'll have to revisit
him and talk about that. But I think, you know,
we are at the end of the show, so I'd
like to play the the documentary and if you could
just kind of go guess you basically already explained it,

(56:04):
But can you introduce this thing and then I'll bring
it in play it.

Speaker 2 (56:08):
Yeah, this is by a very creative filmmaker, Matthew Salton.
It's called Psychedelic in the Sky and I believe in
one of my conversations with him, he said, what was
it like? I said, well, this UFO I saw it
was like a psychedelic in the sky because it was
a mind altering experience for me. And he used that

(56:33):
as the title. And what he does, he's explored. It's
not really all about Len and the UFO and the
Brockport UFO. What he's doing is exploring his own fascination
with this subject from an early age and he still
remains fascinated, doesn't know, doesn't have any answers like I
have no answers. I am exploring it and he's exploring

(56:57):
his exploration.

Speaker 1 (57:00):
Okay, all right with that, you know we're going to
close all it after the show. So I want to
thank you so much. It's been a very enjoyable conversation
and just to let the listener, we'll be back on
next a week from tonight, Tuesday, the twenty ninth, with
the James Fox crossing my fingers because James is always tricky,

(57:20):
I'll put it that way. But anyway, I am going
to share the video now. Thank you so much. Len.
It's been a real pleasure.

Speaker 2 (57:28):
Thank you, mar I really enjoyed it tremendously.

Speaker 1 (57:31):
Okay, and here we go. Bear with me, everyone, because
it's always tricky to share these things, and we'll just
try to do what I can to get it going
right now, Here we go.

Speaker 4 (57:43):
The child, I had a reoccurring dream. We're small alien
heads would float into my room, bobbing around my bed.
When is a UFO story no longer to UFO story?

(58:13):
When I was a child, I had a reoccurring dream
where small alien heads would float into my room, bobbing
around my bed. Looking back, it makes sense. I watched
a lot of sci fi in the X Files. And
then there were my parents. Their faith told them that

(58:34):
God had created more life than was just on earth,
so they almost take it as like a matter of fact, like, yeah,
of course there's aliens out there, so what else was
I supposed to believe? Fast forward to today, and I
still can't put it down. I'm obsessed with this idea
that the world is far bigger and stranger than we

(58:55):
could ever imagine. I've dabbled in making films about strange
and mysterious things before, but UFO films always seemed like
a bridge too far. I just couldn't take them seriously.
But I kept coming back to that conversation I had
with my parents, how confident they'd been, so even though

(59:16):
I lacked that kind of faith, or maybe because of it,
I decided to risk ridicule and make a UFO film.
But to take it seriously, I needed a serious subject.
That's what drew me to Lenn.

Speaker 2 (59:32):
Now. I didn't take any of it seriously until maybe
thirteen years old.

Speaker 4 (59:38):
He was speaking at an event for experiencers.

Speaker 2 (59:41):
I didn't know, but I was struck by the UFO
bug at that point.

Speaker 4 (59:45):
His story started out like mine. But in the nineteen sixties.

Speaker 2 (59:49):
There was a magazine called Reader's Digest. Reading these witnesses.
It seemed that they were telling the truth. It was
the first time I really thought, is there life elsewhere
in the universe? And it made complete sense to me
that there would be.

Speaker 1 (01:00:06):
There's so much.

Speaker 4 (01:00:07):
One thing I discovered while talking to Len and others
like him, was that stories of close encounters rarely fit
the mold of what I expected it's just.

Speaker 2 (01:00:17):
Once you see something, it's just it's a transformational, transcendental
kind of experience. This was in the summer of nineteen
sixty seven. My dad was in the living room on
a chair. I put an old World War two sleeping

(01:00:39):
bag over my shoulder and he said, where are you going?
I said, I'm going up to Tims to look for
flying saucers.

Speaker 4 (01:00:49):
Len and some friends had heard about some strange lights
in the sky outside their town. They kempt out one
night and waited.

Speaker 2 (01:01:05):
At about two am, it came bursting like through a
different dimension, a very large orange sphere with flames coming
off the front of it and the side of it,
with a little white star orb following in its trail.

(01:01:27):
It's very being, it's very fact that it's there. Was screaming,
We're from somewhere else. This is not a normal Earth experience.

Speaker 4 (01:01:43):
More than thirty residents from nearby towns and villages reported
sightings that night.

Speaker 2 (01:01:48):
Several workers taking a brain at a factory sawsketjesawst a
troopers son.

Speaker 4 (01:01:54):
Like I said, I consume a lot of UFO content,
So when I encounter stories like this, I inevitably think
of the work of Jacques Vala.

Speaker 3 (01:02:03):
What we know today about the uful phenomenon is considerably
more than twenty years ago or ten years.

Speaker 4 (01:02:09):
Ago, and he's one of the few scientists who believes
there's much more we can learn from these settings other
than just stories of strange lights in the sky.

Speaker 3 (01:02:18):
And we have to understand it at three different levels.
The first level is the physical level.

Speaker 2 (01:02:25):
That thing came right over, right as close as can be,
over our head.

Speaker 4 (01:02:31):
Almost all described it like lendd.

Speaker 2 (01:02:34):
Seeing the little white orb following in the trail. The
articles appeared and they quickly faded away. I don't I
don't think I told very many people that it might
have been somehow personal. It was like a beacon in
the night. It was like a torch, if you will.

(01:02:57):
This feeling came over me, this this thought they were
giving me a hello. That's exactly how I felt. You've
supported us, keep the faith.

Speaker 4 (01:03:12):
When it's a UFO story, no longer just a UFO story.

Speaker 2 (01:03:21):
I have no idea what I saw, but it scared
me to death. It was bigger than my house. It
was just an enormous growing on it.

Speaker 4 (01:03:30):
Not everyone reports a craft, but luminous lights and orbs
that appear and disappear.

Speaker 1 (01:03:36):
It was doing figures of eight.

Speaker 4 (01:03:37):
It was doing loops for a while, it was changing color.
Sometimes there are strange creatures.

Speaker 2 (01:03:45):
He was but seven feet tall.

Speaker 1 (01:03:47):
I'm a silver suited man.

Speaker 3 (01:03:49):
He was there for about two hours.

Speaker 4 (01:03:51):
People encountered psychic phenomena.

Speaker 2 (01:03:53):
I got seemingly a telepathic message while I was meditating.

Speaker 1 (01:04:00):
Voice switched over to Latin.

Speaker 4 (01:04:04):
Dreams and visions would follow.

Speaker 2 (01:04:06):
Oftentimes they would say we are you and you or us.

Speaker 4 (01:04:09):
There are even cases of people being healed from physical ailments.
A lot of experiencers even interpreted their encounter as religiously significant.

Speaker 3 (01:04:18):
Whether they are a cop driving on the lonely road,
or PhD or bank president, whether they are religious or
not religious, their view of themselves, their view of the
world around them, the.

Speaker 2 (01:04:30):
View of the universe has been shattered. You see a UFO,
and that is consciousness expanding. It's like a psychedelic flying
in the sky.

Speaker 3 (01:04:56):
The second level is what happens to witnesses. What could
happen to you and me if we were close to
that source of English with physiological and the psychological correlations
of the close and.

Speaker 4 (01:05:09):
Calor len siding awakened him to a life filled with
deep meaning, and what he describes were a series of
mind boggling experiences spanning several decades. Visions, physical sensations, premonitions,
even a potential poltergeist that started with his first UFO setting.

Speaker 2 (01:05:32):
It's not a belief these things happened to me. It
would be a lot easier for me if I saw
UFO and the next thing was another UFO and it
was all UFO. They don't. It doesn't fit a one
particular mold.

Speaker 4 (01:05:48):
I mean, it's a little bit too much for me. Yeah,
seeing a light or a craft is one thing, but
once you involve any sort of spirituality, consciousness, I don't know,
people run away thinking about it.

Speaker 2 (01:06:06):
It's too much for me. Back in sixty seven.

Speaker 4 (01:06:10):
The same night Len saw his UFO, ten miles away,
there was a report of another siding.

Speaker 2 (01:06:16):
There was a watchman at a nearby town of Churchville,
New York named Sydney Zipkin, who claimed that he pulled
into the park with his headlights on and he saw
a landed craft and two, as he called it, midgets
in shiny black uniforms, and when they saw him, they

(01:06:41):
got into their craft and they took.

Speaker 4 (01:06:43):
Off, And how close was this to your.

Speaker 2 (01:06:46):
Four hours earlier? Even I didn't believe him. I thought
this guy was whacked. But as you as you moved
through the years, maybe it was telling plain the truth.
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (01:07:11):
There is a third level, which is a social level,
the impact on our belief system. At that level, it
really doesn't matter whether UFOs are real or not. If
enough people believe that something is real, then it is
real in its in its effect.

Speaker 4 (01:07:30):
Instead of delivering messages about far away worlds, could UFOs
have more to tell us about ourselves?

Speaker 3 (01:07:44):
Could the UFO phenomenon be manipulating us? It'd be a
teaching system of some CD there is a collective and
gets a challenge to our concept of a series of
images and technology. We are projecting the visions we need
to survive our folklore.

Speaker 4 (01:08:02):
Just as my parents' acceptance of each life was grounded
in their religious beliefs, I realized that my own fascination
might be rooted in a similar impulse for some deep
need for wonder or ah in a world increasingly stripped
of it.

Speaker 2 (01:08:18):
I was an adamant atheism.

Speaker 5 (01:08:21):
One of these experiences over the years were like something
knocking at my door and I finally opened the door
a little bit.

Speaker 2 (01:08:35):
What did that transformation look like? Have you seen anything?
I haven't.

Speaker 1 (01:08:42):
No, I loved to, but I haven't.

Speaker 2 (01:08:45):
Are you you still may handing