The Night FLYING SAUCERS Buzzed Kittanning, Pennsylvania
By Dr. Raymond A. Keller, author of The Real Resident Aliens is available on Amazon.com while supplies last.
Final Countdown: Rockets to Venus
Cosmic Ray's Excellent Venus Adventure
Kittanning is a borough in Armstrong County, Pennsylvania, and also that county’s administrative seat, situated some 36 miles (58 kilometers) northeast of Pittsburgh, along the east bank of the Allegheny River. People from around this area will tell you that not much excitement is generated in Kittanning and its environs, with the exception of Kittanning High School Wildcats football home games on Friday nights. Kittanning’s population has held steady at around 4,000 inhabitants since the mid-1960s.
A Blast from the Past
The biggest event in Kittanning’s long history took place before there was even a United States when Pennsylvania was still a fledging British colony on that far-flung empire’s North American frontier. In 1756, the French-occupied village was destroyed by John Armstrong, Sr., at the Battle of Kittanning during the French and Indian War. Armstrong was a Pennsylvania volunteer helping the British Red Coats to burn down a French garrison in Kittanning and ultimately push the French back across Lake Erie and up into Canada, where their base of operations was. According to legend, it was during this attack that a blast from the explosion of gunpowder stored in Captain Jacobs’ old house that had been procured by the French, was heard all the way over at Fort Duquesne in Pittsburgh.
Sometimes UFOs are camouflaged by the extraterrestrials to make their spaceships look like meteors or “shooting stars,” as is the case with this Kittanning, Pennsylvania, UFO report and this snippet from a film taken by the United States Air Force Maui Island Tracking Facility in Hawaii time-stamped 11:37 p.m. on 16 July 1996. To watch the complete film, see Rumble Viral at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95bB3SRtH6A.
Kittanning Encounters
Moving our time machine up to the night of Wednesday, 12 April in the Year of Our Lord, 1967, we discover that the pleasant centuries-long interlude from the hustle and bustle of the world that had been so cherished by the residents of Kittanning was about to change forever. It all started at about 8:24 p.m. when Gary Stoops, a senior at Kittanning High School living out in the Country Club Estates on Kittanning Road 7, stepped out into his backyard and caught a glimpse of an unusual “shooting star,” or at least a celestial object that he initially took to be one, i.e., perhaps a comet or meteor. As Stoops continued watching the object, however, he noticed that it kept getting larger in size, as if it were slowly approaching his location and not just whizzing across the night sky. And as it got closer to him and larger, other star-like bodies emerged from the darkness, in an X-formation around the initial UFO, and these, too, began to assume a bigger size as they continued in their seeming approach pattern.
In describing the UFO formation to a correspondent for the Kittanning, Pennsylvania, Leader-Times newspaper, Stoops affirmed that “There were four or five of them (UFOs), and they were flying from the northwest in a formation similar to an X. Then they seemed to separate into a formation like a T and then back to the original formation and continued across the sky in a northeasterly direction. In about 10 or 11 seconds, they traveled completely across the sky and disappeared from sight.”
Gary Stoops was attentive to these types of aerial phenomena. He had long been fascinated with astronomy and, having read of many UFO reports from around the world was convinced that if he just kept checking the skies, that he was bound to one day add his name to the roster of millions of others who have seen such unusual objects. Sometimes his mathematics and science teacher at the high school, J. Mitchell Blose, would talk about UFOs and the possibility that some of these objects were crewed interplanetary spaceships, in the course of presenting regular classroom lessons. Blose also sponsored the Kittanning High School UFO Club, which met after school hours to go over recent UFO reports and speculations that abounded about them and/or their extraterrestrial occupants. Naturally, Gary Stoops was elected as the UFO Club’s first president.
The Leader-Times reporter also asked high school teacher Blose if he would share any of his own UFO experiences, and he replied that yes, he had seen some UFOs out on his farm in the Yalesboro area, adding that, “It’s not hard to believe Gary’s sighting, because I have seen UFOs myself, and they travel as fast as Gary indicated. On one of the sightings I had on my farm, a UFO traveled from the eastern horizon to the western horizon in six or seven seconds, indicating that it was moving at approximately 300,000 miles an hour. Since Earth-made satellites travel from west to east, I was convinced that the UFO I had seen was from another planet, since it was traveling in the other direction.”
But Blose’s most significant UFO sighting took place back in May 1966. As he described it, “One evening, in the earlier part of the month, I saw a huge black cloud in a cloudless sky; and inside the cloud was a huge spaceship resting still about one-fourth of a mile from the ground and about a half-mile away. The spaceship measured about 100 to 150 feet across and about 30 feet high. It stayed for a short time, then went straight and leveled off and went into the northwest.” This sighting is much like the one shared by myself, Omnec Onec, and many others at our residence in southwest Germany, just a few miles north of the famous Hohenfels Castle. Omnec explained that it was her “Uncle Odin’s mothership paying us a visit.” See my article, “Magic and Power: Lessons from the High Lamas of Tibet,” published earlier this year on the Phantoms and Monsters website posted on Friday, 27 September 2024 at https://www.phantomsandmonsters.com/2024/09/magic-power-lessons-from-high-lamas-of.html for a complete account of the incident.
Blose, being of a technical mindset, opined that, “Whoever operates these spaceships are much superior intellectually to Earth people.” When the Leader-Times interviewer asked Blose why the extraterrestrials were coming to our world, the teacher responded, “I don’t why they are here; but it is my considered opinion that perhaps they are just visiting us out of curiosity.”
There is another Kittanning connection to the paranormal in that the original bridge over the Allegheny River here was torn down and replaced with the Kittanning Citizens Bridge, which was built higher above ground level to avoid flooding; and scenes with the town and bridge were subsequently used in the epic thriller, The Mothman Prophecies (Sony Picture Studios, Culver City, California, 2002) starring Richard Gere and Laura Linney, which was filmed mostly in the Kittanning area.
Meet “Cosmic Ray” in person: Salem, Ohio, Public Library, 821 E State St, Salem, OH 44460, After-Hours UFO Event with Cosmic Ray, in the Reading Room, Friday, 25 October 2024, 6:30-8:00 p.m.
Aliens and UFOs: An After-Hours Event In-Person
Raymond Andrew Keller, II, was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and is a retired professor of History / Literature and lecturer of Greek and Roman Culture and Civilization and Greco-Roman Mythology at West Virginia University in Morgantown, West Virginia. Keller has been involved in active UFO research since 1967 when he was a reporter for the Bedford Times Register in his hometown of Bedford, Ohio, and a research associate with Earl J. Neff, the founder and director of the Cleveland Ufology Project (CUP).
“I’ve always been fascinated by tales of UFO contact especially with the planet Venus,” Keller said. “I spent most of my time in the United States in California, as director of OSIRIS, Outer Space International, and Research and Investigations Society. So, I had the opportunity to meet many of the contactees from the 1950s, Gabriel Green among them. I’ve always wanted to write a book about the contactees and life and varied aspects on the planet Venus.”
Keller has conducted numerous excursions to UFO hot spots throughout the world and has communicated directly with extraterrestrials on many occasions. Venus Rising is his second book; the first being Emergence of the Afro-Zulians in the Transatlantic World, 1722-1811 (Lewiston, NY: Mellen Press, 2013).
Join us for an exciting and educational evening! This program is free of cost and open to the public. Advanced registration is required, so please fill out the registration form at the bottom of this page on the library’s website, https://salem-lib-oh.libcal.com/event/12529422. If you require registration assistance, please call the library's main number 330.332.0042.
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