Reality Checking—Alternate Perceptions Magazine, September 2022
The alleged Cardondale UFO crash, MIB, poltergeist activity, and much more!
by: Brent Raynes
In the summer of 1975, I spent a good deal of time wandering around Ohio meeting dozens of UFO witnesses, contactees, and fellow researchers. It was on the evening of September 4th, while visiting Larry Moyers at his home in Akron, an investigator with MUFON (Mutual UFO Network), that he shared a taped interview he had done with a deputy sheriff over in Honesdale, Pennsylvania, who described how he responded to a report on how several people claimed to have seen a UFO disappear into a silt mine pond over in nearby Carbondale (about 15 miles distance from Honesdale) on November 9, 1974, around 7:10 p.m.
Ed, the deputy, learned about the alleged crash the following day, a Sunday morning, while on desk duty, when a fellow officer on patrol called to ask him if he had heard about the Carbondale incident. Having seen a UFO himself in 1964, Ed told Moyers that he was interested in personally looking into the matter. Ed immediately phoned the Carbondale police department who confirmed the story, got the location of the pond, and asked if they’d have any objection if the Sheriff’s Office in Honesdale became involved. When Ed got the reply that it would be fine with them, he then called his Sheriff, Henry W. Kalinowski, who approved for him to get a relief and head over to Carbondale to investigate the incident. Quickly relieved of desk duty Ed brought along on his investigation a friend of his who was also interested in UFOs and was a former airplane pilot.
Ed described how upon their arrival there were a couple hundred or more people present at the pond, including some National Guardsmen and Civil Air Patrolmen. As he asked around about the UFO, he was told how four young boys said they had seen a white glowing object come down out of the sky and go right into the pond. As he conversed with bystanders, he noticed a young girl with a small transistor radio trying to listen to a local radio station (WCDL-AM, 5,000 watts), located only about a mile and a half away (“as the crow flies”). Ed said it should have been coming in “crystal clear” but there was a “sparking noise” coming from the speaker. She would even take one of her hands and slap it trying to get it to work better.
Ed explained that he had spent over two decades working in electronics, and radio was something he had worked with a lot. He also noticed a “low humming tone in the background” and thought that maybe the radio wasn’t working properly. He decided to walk around the pond. A group of people followed him, as well as the young girl with the radio. “I walked around the edge of the pond purposely to listen to that radio because already I was thinking that if it was something in the pond causing the condition on the radio, as we walked away from it it should diminish,” Ed said. “As a matter of fact, I had to walk a good 150 feet away from the pond and then it started to diminish on the radio. Taking another course back to the pond, as we approached again it started on the radio.” He still wasn’t sure that the unusual radio noise was related to the pond.
Ed noticed however a cloud hanging over the pond. He said it appeared to be the approximate diameter of the pond and oddly stayed over the pond about 30 feet above ground. He even threw a rock up into it and it passed through landing on the ground a short distance away. He at least knew at that point he said that there was nothing solid inside the cloud.
While talking to a Sergeant with the National Guard Ed said he noticed on the water’s surface what looked to him like “sympathetic vibrations” all the way across the pond. This struck him as odd. “It’s almost as if somebody put a transducer in one end of the pond and fed a low frequency signal to it,” he stated, as a possible explanation for the “ripples evenly across the pond.” He pointed this out to his pilot friend who noted that there was no wind to account for it and they saw no one throwing rocks in the water or anything. In fact, looking around they noticed people seemed to be afraid to get too close to the pond’s edge. “They were quite far back from it,” Ed said.
Ed took Geiger counter readings over the entire pond, even out in the water in a small wooden boat where he noticed he was getting steady readings, no fluctuations, holding between .1 and .2 reading. “After thinking about it, I don’t think it was ever on the pond because it was later that I realized that when the cloud went away so did the reading drop. The cloud itself is what was causing this funny reading.” Ed volunteered to go out on the pond in a boat that the National Guard provided him. He said that nobody else wanted to accompany him out onto the water. So he had to struggle rowing the boat with one hand and the other to operate equipment he had. He rowed over to a spot where the object was believed to be submerged at one end of the pond, where the water was murky (“You couldn’t see anything”) while the rest of the pond was clear. He said he even found a submerged car in the middle of the pond. “I used the car under the water to calibrate the equipment I took with me for the purpose of going back to this spot and seeing if there was anything there. Well there was something there! I never did see it with my eyes, but I measured it and I felt it and it wasn’t a flashlight or a lantern. (See newspaper photo – Brent Raynes) I dropped a string with a piece of rock into the water and the string went way down.” It seemed to be about 15 feet off the shore, next to what Ed believed was the object, which seemed to be about 2 ½ to 2 ¾ feet below the water’s surface. “I had an oar resting on the top of the object. When I held the oar on the object and finally managed to steady the boat enough then I think I found out what was causing the vibration along the pond. I could feel the vibration in the oar.”
“I felt with the oar. Moved it. Sled it on the object. It felt cylindrical and it was smooth. I couldn’t feel any gaps or openings.” He wondered if it might be the nose of a rocket. “The headphone that accompanied the Geiger counter I still had on my head and while I was trying to feel with the oar, I became aware of a humming tone in the headphone. At first it didn’t dawn on me that it was practically the same tone I heard on the transistor radio. I said to myself, ‘The stinking Geiger counter is going to break down on me now.’ So I unhooked the earphone from the Geiger counter and I thought the tone went away, but of course my type of mind is one, as my Sheriff will attest, is one that doesn’t let go of things easy.”
At that point, his Sheriff, Henry W. Kalinowski, present during this interview, remarked: “They refer to them as having tunnel vision and being tunnel minded.”
Ed next described how he speculated that if something was making this tone in the headphone then it might be what he called induction and that it would increase if he shorted the connector. He did that and the tone did increase. “I moved the boat away and as I moved away the tone decreased. That’s when I really realized that there was something down there that I couldn’t let out to anybody because with all of those people around, with kids and everything, there could have been mass hysteria.”
Ed mentioned how a Carbondale patrolman claimed that he observed the submerged object producing a glow the evening of the crash and how he emptied six rounds into it.
“I had no idea how big the thing was down there,” Ed said. “I did know that it must have gone to the (bottom because of the air bubbles when I had the oar on top when I was pushing on it. It was the only thing that could have released air from the bottom by moving it.” He further added that the odd cloud hanging over the pond began to dissipate when he began pushing down on the object with his oar. Ed also had a metal detector and a compass with him in the boat. Going back and forth over whatever was presumably submerged there he came to estimate that it was roughly 7 to 8 feet in diameter. “I couldn’t be exact because you couldn’t hold the boat steady enough,” he said. “I don’t know what that was under there for sure, but I know it wasn’t a hand lantern.”
As Larry’s interview with Ed and the Sheriff was winding down, he mentioned a flurry of UFOs in the area around this time. “That particular Sunday evening these things were all heading in the Carbondale direction,” he said. “There were white lights – balls – whatever you want to call them going across the sky. One of them was flying parallel with the ground and suddenly turned perpendicular, shot up towards one of those other craft and seemed to disappear. I think it went inside.”
Larry shared that he had been hearing stories, from three different sources (but none firsthand) that around 3 a.m. (the following Monday morning?) two helicopters paid a visit to the pond, along with an armored truck, and how something was removed from the water there and placed in the armored truck, and how as the truck left the area it was escorted by the two copters. Hearing this Ed said, “That may be true. I know it wasn’t a lantern.”
Larry pointed out to me how just the weekend before my visit with him he had made a second trip over to meet Ed. Larry said Ed was describing a series of very unusual paranormal experiences. With that I was determined that I would also visit Ed as well.
In April 1976, from the 18th to part of the 20th, I paid Ed a visit. According to him, psychic phenomena went way back to his childhood. Born in 1936, he said that he and his mother had been having spirit visits and communications with his paternal grandmother (who passed in 1945) and paternal grandfather (died 1947). Their spirits would, Ed told me, first appear as a small dot that would appear in what resembled a bluish-white smoke, getting larger and larger until “just like in life,” with “natural colors.” The spirits would notify them when anyone in the family was about to pass. “It’s not a dream or a feeling,” Ed explained. “It’s an actual contact. They talk to us.”
Back around 1967 to 1968, Ed and his family lived in Carbondale. They moved to Honesdale in 1972. He said that their home in Carbondale was probably about 1,000 feet from the pond where the UFO presumably crashed. While living there, on two separate occasions, Ed awoke to discover what he thought was a prowler in the home. In one instance, he swung at the stranger, only to have his fist go right through him. Another night he said he chased the phantom prowler down a circular stairway into the basement. Ed thought he had him cornered until the figure disappeared out a closed door!
About a year and a half prior to my visit, Ed said the phantom prowler returned. He was now living in Honesdale and serving as a Deputy sheriff. The figure bent over Ed while he was in bed, a struggle occurred, and Ed was dragged out onto the floor. The figure allegedly broke free of Ed and ran into the bedroom of one of his four daughters (who when age 7 or 8 saw one of these figures back when they lived in Carbondale) and disappeared through a closed window. Ed said he was right behind the being and ended up smacking his face into the window, hurting his nose. Ed described the mysterious prowler in each instance as standing about six feet tall, being of medium build, wearing a long black coat and what looked like a turtleneck sweater. Hair combed back.
One evening Ed introduced me to Jaye, a 25-year-old blond haired lady who was on a spiritual quest for answers and it seemed Ed was, in her mind at least, someone who could help her with that quest. She had been reading a manuscript that Ed had been writing on ideas that since March 1975 had been downloading into his mind. It was about something Ed called Circle Nine Math, or Math of Universal Harmony. He expressed that UFO intelligences had been putting these concepts and insights into his mind. “Everything is relative to circle,” Ed said. “Circle is relative to nothing. Circle is relative to itself.” Huh?
Somehow because of this concept he figured out things like how there are 725 galaxies, but according to the latest information I could find online there are a good two trillion galaxies known today. I never did get to read this manuscript which he hoped to get printed up by some book publisher.
I rode off into the darkness with Ed and Jaye hoping we’d see a UFO or two one night. Though none showed up, the two shared some strange experiences that they claimed to have had together. They said that one night back in the summer of 1975 they were out in a field skywatching when it came a downpour. Ed complained aloud his irritation with this whereupon the windshield suddenly cleared up. Yet it was still raining all around them! Ed said he reached his hand out the window and it was getting wet. Looking up into the sky at the dark and menacing clouds overhead, they were surprised and puzzled to see one rectangular opening in the dark clouds where they could see stars! Even more unbelievable they claimed that they next drove back to their homes in the rain, still with no rain touching the car! Another story they told me was how back around Christmas 1975 Ed was playing guitar with a local band at some club when three Men In Black type characters showed up. “It looked funny,” Jaye claimed. “Everybody was really casually dressed and then you see these three men, like MIB type men, in the middle of this joint. They didn’t fit in. They were looking at us.” Ed said they had long black coats on and that the tallest one was 6 foot, maybe 2 or 3 inches. He added he was thin, had a pointed nose, salt and pepper hair, a high forehead, and hair combed back. He claimed that he had spoken with the taller MIB for approximately 30 minutes. Asked Ed how the book was coming along. Also, Ed added, the man allegedly claimed his name was Ashtar (a name that has been common in contactee circles since the 1950s). “Outside of that he looks as normal as anybody else I guess,” Ed noted.
Ed claimed too that he had run into this same man a few years earlier, back when he was investigating the case of a nurse at Pleasant Mount who described being taken onboard a UFO. Ed said he’d been out in a field looking around where the nurse’s encounter allegedly happened when the man appeared. “I met him on the road. I didn’t know at the time who he was.”
Ed added how shortly before meeting Jaye back in 1975, he was out in a field one night with his telescope when another tall slender man approached him and engaged in about a 30-minute chat. While the content of their conversation didn’t seem to consist of anything particularly unusual or noteworthy, it was as the stranger was leaving and Ed asked the fella what his name was, the man yelled back, “Valiant Thor.” Yet another name popular within the contactee circles going back again to the 1950s!
Ed and Jaye took me to South Canaan. We visited a young married couple named Louis and Patty who also were local followers of Ed. Together they had formed a group called the Investigative Circle for Planetary Enlightenment.
Soon after entering their home a framed photograph of a robed figure caught my eye. I was told that Ed had taken it one night himself back around January 1976. The story was that an odd white dot of light was moving across the sky. It went into a cloud and when it reappeared on the other side he snapped a picture with his Polaroid Land Camera. However, instead of the light there was, in the upper righthand corner of the photo, a robed looking figure (head was cut off though in the picture). Quite unusual looking. I tried to do some psychometry on it, a psychic process of reading objects and people that I was experimenting with back then. Patty began opening up to me about her life-long paranormal experiences as she felt sure that my psychometry reading was relating things about her. She described to me how from around kindergarten till about the sixth grade she had been undergoing a series of out-of-body experiences. She claimed that in an OBE she had met her grandfather on the spirit plane who introduced her to Abraham Lincoln no less. She said as a child she had had dreams of her future husband Louie, and it was years later, at college in Mansfield, Pa., at an art festival, that she met him, her soul mate, and she said they both were overcome with a sense of recognition – a feeling that they belonged together.
That night, for several hours, Ed exhibited odd behavior, even channeling some messages from some alien personality. Nothing he said though contained any detectable psychic contents that I could pin down like John Keel had described happening with him in his interactions with contactees.
The following year, I received an invitation from Ed and his followers to participate in a UFO conference they were putting together. They were going to have it at the Marywood College in Scranton, Pennsylvania on September 10, 1977. They wanted me to do a presentation. There would be several other speakers, including the Rev. Barry Downing, the author of The Bible and Flying Saucers, and Richard Lee of the Cleveland UFOlogy Project, who was a good friend and colleague of Larry Moyers back there in Akron, Ohio. I happily accepted the invitation and headed out from Maine, this time with my parents along for the road trip. My mom was always happy so long as there were places to go shopping and my dad always enjoyed traveling (guess that’s where I got it).
While attending I heard some interesting stories. Robert Reynolds of Scranton’s WBAX radio, described to me how earlier in the year, back around June or July, he was helping Ed to do a UFO spot that was designed mainly to give the public an outlet to report activity. He said he gave the program two full weeks of free publicity, something which required a great deal of preparation on his part. What was really unusual and intriguing to me however, is his claim that during that very period his home erupted with some very bizarre poltergeist activity that centered upon his wife and one year old son. “She’s not the type of person who gets upset too easy,” he said. “The fear was there and the thing was real.” On several occasions, his wife described hearing footsteps coming up to their apartment door. Thinking it was her husband coming home from work early, upon hearing the footsteps reach the top step she’d swing the door open, but there would be no one there. He said that this would shake her up. Also there was a strange laughing sound, which Reynolds said his wife described as like the laughing boxes that could be purchased from the Five and Dime back then, coming from a closet. She would open the door to investigate, but could find nothing to explain what she had heard. Then she’d shut the closet door and move away whereupon the door would just pop back open and again there would be the laughter. After each of these episodes, I was told his wife would be terrified and call him at work, asking him to pick her up at her father’s home. One time she claimed she felt like a hand on her shoulder, but when she turned around there was no one there. Their young son would exhibit great agitation in only one room, which was the living room. On occasions he even screamed. He wouldn’t stay alone there, even with his mother present.
This activity stopped as suddenly as it began as soon as the radio series ended, and at that time nothing like it had happened since or before. Mr. Reynolds did not witness any of this activity himself. I also got to interview a couple of housewives from Lakewood who were good friends and had some interesting experiences. Their names were Marilyn and Ruby. They had a UFO encounter back on the night of November 11, 1974. The Carbondale incident was in the local news at the time, and they were even talking about the subject that very night. They recalled that there was “a lot of scoffing” about it but they believed UFOs were a reality. In fact, Ruby said that her mother-in-law and husband had both had their own separate sightings in the past.
Marilyn jokingly referred to her and Ruby’s sighting as a “dual hallucination.” She began, “We saw something up in the sky like a bright star through the corner of the windshield. We didn’t know if it was an airplane coming in for a landing or what. I stopped the car as soon as there was a clearing and it continued to get brighter and just pulsed.” Soon the one light became two. “We both watched both, but I was more interested in one and she was more interested in the other. The original white light turned into like a hazy mass. It seemed to pulse, and you could see the air around it, like I would say like heavy air, in and out, and then it came down close enough, like over the trees, on an angle. The slower it went the more upright it got. Like two saucers on their edge, and on its closest point to us I’d say that it was no more than 100 feet away and about 40 feet up in the air, maybe even less than that because it was just over the trees without touching them. I counted five lights that were going on and off alternately. The haze was no longer visible. As it left us you could see the haze, and then you could just see light. There was no sound whatsoever. I’d say the thing had to be a little bit bigger than a big car.”
After this both women began to have a series of sightings and strange dreams. Ruby recalled how one night around the early spring of the following year, she and her daughter were riding somewhere when a strange light appeared. “I thought it was going to land in front of me,” Ruby recalled. “I got very scared that night. I came up with the idea that there was good and evil. I started having dreams and the thing is, which it all came true, I had my oldest sister die and then my mother died within a month. The dreams had already told me. Somewhere along in that time I had also that dream which Barry (Downing) says possibly was an angel. [Rev. Downing was present as I interviewed the ladies] He wanted me to go someplace.” But Ruby refused the offer. She said in the dream she found herself repeating “My children, my children,” explaining she knew that she would be separated from them. “He was a good-looking man,” she said. “He looked like an earthman except for his uniform.” She also said he had kind eyes and light blond hair. “When my dream came I don’t remember if it was before hers or not, but I had a very short dream one night where all of a sudden there was a man standing on a corner of my front yard,” Marilyn stated. “He was blond, and he was very suave, continental looking. As I looked at him I could feel so many things. I could feel my whole life. I was conscious all at once of everything that I had ever done that I was a little bit ashamed of. He was standing there smiling, very understandingly, and he knew me. I mean there was no pulling the wool over this guy’s eyes. He knew everything at all about me that I had ever done, either right or wrong. He was sad about the bad but he was trying to tell me don’t think about this. He seemed to be telling me something like do more good. ‘Go out and do more good,’ he said mentally, no verbal communications. He said, ‘Do you understand?’”
“It was really a real dream that you felt meant something, but for a long time just a dream. As the years go by I can understand more and more this feeling that he conveyed to me. This trustworthiness. His acceptance. This is love. This is what the Christian love concept means. This is what we should all feel about each other. I never liked people so much in my life.”
Marilyn explained she next went through a period of questioning about ‘is it good or bad?’ and it was then that “the most strange things happened.”
“I experienced the smells in my house. I experienced sounds, presences if you will, and not really turning to religion because of it but not knowing I didn’t want to be bad bothering with it, but this seemed not related at all with my concepts of God. Then all of a sudden it gets so bad or so scary, so frustrating, that I just stood there with this cold presence that just enveloped me when I was in the kitchen one day and it was just ‘I have had enough of you. I don’t know what you are or even if you’re there, but there is not enough bad in you to overcome the good that’s in this house. Leave me alone and stay over in the corner if you want to,’ and since that day I have never experienced anything that I would call evil in my house again.”
Before my arrival in Honesdale, Ed had been discharged from his job as a deputy for failure to obey the orders of a superior officer. He had been employed for about a year. I was informed by the sheriff that he had a “very vivid imagination” and “sees things others do not,” and that the last thing he had heard about Ed was that “he was trying to convince his followers that ‘Bigfoot’ was roaming here in Wayne County.” Another official in the criminal justice system said of Ed, “His reputation in the community is that he’s nuts. He’s credibly believable at times but if you listen closely, you get a thirteenth chime, and it makes you wonder about everything else.”
The contactee syndrome is a very challenging conundrum. The responsible ufologists often find themselves carefully weighing incredible claims against experiencer credibility. While the sheriff saw Bigfoot in Pennsylvania as something incredulous, Pennsylvania researchers and authors like Stan Gordon and Timothy Renner would point out that there have been hundreds of seemingly reliable Bigfoot reports in the Keystone state.
While some will dismiss the contactee/abductee claims outright as simply originating from fantasy prone personalities, I’ve heard another possibility suggested, and that was how perhaps some people become fantasy prone after experiencing genuine anomalous phenomena, after which they lose their faculties of critical judgement and become strong, uncritical believers in a wide range of anomalies and unproven conspiracy beliefs.
While the researcher often comes away unable to conclusively prove or disprove a single experiencer’s anomalous claims, as you meet more and more of them, look them in the eyes and listen to their stories, you hear over and again similar details and life altering changes and reactions that these events have on their lives.
And they do report seeing things others don’t.
From the chariots of the gods to our modern stories and beliefs in extraterrestrial visitors, it’s an ongoing and ageless scenario with slight alterations and revised frames of reference. But to the discerning and competent eye it’s a repeat performance.
Today the Carbondale incident is considered to have likely been a meteorite. A few suspected that it was a hoax. To others and to ET believers it was an alien probe. Was deputy Ed right, ET or military, or was there a “thirteenth chime” to his account? It seems to depend on who you ask.
Here’s a link to an article that presents a good overview of the matter, also mentions a variety of different sightings in the area around that time also, as well as other years:
https://www.ufoinsight.com/ufos/cover-ups/carbondale-case-downed-ufo-pennsylvania
