LaVere Pisut is well aware that some people out there think she is crazy. If they’re right—if she really has hooped the loop, so to speak—she at least people think she’s nuts. Her story is so bizarre, in fact, that sometimes Pisut herself can barely believe it.
It happened one cozy spring night, about a year ago last April. Pisut and her husband were sitting in the living room watching a David Copperfield special in their rural home about 10 miles outside Baxter, a small town near Cookeville.
Pisut was excited that Copperfield, the magician, was performing some new tricks. Because the Copperfield program is one of her favorites, she was glued to the screen. Nevertheless, for no apparent reason, Pisut says, she abruptly got up from her seat and walked outside to her front porch. Soon, she says, her husband followed her outside as well.
“For him to follow me out—we’ve been married almost 30 years—that was kind of unusual too,” she remembers.
While walking out the door, Pisut recalls, she craned her neck toward the sky, trying to see from under the eave of the porch. She felt a “strange vibration” through her shoulders, and she heard a low rumbling noise.
Her husband asked her what she was looking at, and for a moment, there was nothing to see. Until...
“Until all of a sudden, there were these lights up above the house, either square or triangular in formation,” Pisut says, pointing up to a barren spot just off her porch—a rare window of sky among acres of canopied trees. “It was very dark that night, no moon, and I couldn’t see stars through it. That’s how I know it was solid.”
Pisut doesn’t know how long she and her husband sat on the porch watching the object—which was as big as her house—hover in the air. But she guesses they stood there for about 20 minutes. And now, thinking back on it, all she can do is despair over the things she wishes she had done.
“Why didn’t we turn out the porch light to see it better? Or grab a flashlight and shine it up, because that’s how low it was. Or we could have run off the porch to get a better look. I don’t know why we didn’t do these things!”
Once the object flew away across the trees, Pisut says, there was a great flash of white light and then total silence. It was a queer stillness that blanketed the countryside.
“This was spring, and spring is not quiet,” she says. “We had 150 chickens and roosters, 11 geese, five dogs, and there was no sound. I don’t even know where the dogs were—and they always come up when we’re outside. No frogs, no peep from the goat yard next to my house. We’re next to a pond but no noise from the crickets. Absolute, dead silence.”
When it was all over, and Pisut had regained some of her senses, she ran inside and called her sister, who lives next door on the other side of the wooded thicket.
“LaVere called me at about 10 till 10,” says Gaylene Fields, sitting on a step on her sister’s front porch, staring at the blank spot in the sky where stars are now twinkling, the same spot where all this bizarreness started. “I asked her where it was headed, and my son and I got in the car and drove west toward Granville. We could see an orangey glow at the horizon, so brilliant that we thought it had crashed. Halfway there, we smelled this acrid, chemical smell we had never smelled before.”
But they say they lost sight of the object. Once they had arrived in Granville, Fields and her son found some Jackson County police and a sheriff who followed them back to her sister’s house. An hour later, two Putnam County cops arrived and, with Fields’ son, retraced the route to Granville.
But that was the last of it. Nothing else was found, and finally, by about 3 a.m., the last of the cops left Pisut’s property. The cops’ best guess: Glow from the city lights of Carthage, which is some 22 miles away. However, the Pisuts and the Fields aren’t entirely comfortable with that explanation. They insist that in the nine years they have lived in Baxter, they have never, ever, recalled being able to see the city lights from Carthage.
Lacking any other explanation, Pisut credits the UFO with having cured her 6-year problem with a hiatal hernia, her 15-year problem with sleep apnea and her more recent problem with a tilted bladder. Since the incident, her astigmatism, which she has had since birth, has also started to clear up.
“I know!” Pisut says, her eyes growing wide. “It doesn’t make any sense! I know I sound ridiculous. But then, nothing that happened can be explained. If I heard it, I would think someone was either crazy or making it up too. All I know is, I had these physical conditions that have improved since that night. And I don’t know that it’s related, but I don’t know what else it is. It’s been a total spontaneous recovery.”
Her doctor, who is her brother-in-law, agrees. Richard Fields, a practicing emergency-room surgeon in nearby Livingston, says there is “no logical explanation” for any of Pisut’s recoveries, which would normally require surgery.
As a physical phenomenon, UFOs are normally granted a status somewhere between New Age religion and outright quackery. Few astronomers take the existence of alien-manned UFOs seriously; official military investigators associated with the U.S. government have never claimed verification of any unidentified flying objects.
As a cultural phenomenon, UFOs first soared to notoriety shortly after World War II, as postwar tensions worsened from a mild chill into the Cold War. While the nuclear specter of an evil Communist regime haunted the consciousness of America—just as the United States was preparing to launch spacecrafts into the unexplored atmosphere—movies, novels and comic books began to exploit the issue of extraterrestrial life. Most of that life was hell-bent on destroying us.
In 1938’s War of the Worlds, Orson Welles broadcast a gruesome image of interplanetary life: bloodthirsty Martians who vaporized humans with rayguns and laser beams. But today’s UFO world is a kinder, gentler place. By 1982, E.T., the most popular film ever made about UFOs, depicted aliens as lovable extraterrestrials who descend to Earth, muttering sounds as pleasant as a baby’s gurgles. Indeed, the beings that many people describe encountering these days—such as the alien visitors known as “The Greens” or “The Browns”—come here in peace.
UFO encounters appear to be gaining popularity this year, fostered in part by the recent nonfiction account of UFO sightings written by revered author C.D.B. Bryan. The Internet has also brought thousands of UFO buffs in contact with one another. Fox Television’s The X-Files, which features a running alien-abduction storyline, has become a cult phenomenon. And the recent Fox show called ’s Jonathan Frakes, showed an alleged autopsy of an alien that had been salvaged from the notorious Roswell, N.M., UFO crash-site. Because of that broadcast, Larry King rebroadcast one of his former shows discussing the UFO phenomenon.
In addition, the former Soviet Union has recently declassified all of its government UFO files, creating a rush of interest and investigations. It is said that Japan, in 1996, also plans to declassify its files, a possibility that has the UFO world abuzz.
The Pisuts and the Fields aren’t the only ones in Tennessee, or in the seeming hot spot of UFO activity that runs east of Nashville toward Lebanon and Cookeville, who have UFO stories to tell. Others have witnessed UFOs of all shapes and sizes. Whether they are perceived as alien, interdimensional, time-traveled or government-conspired, these sightings are part of a heightened awareness of airborne activity here:
♦ A continuing education class at Cumberland University in Lebanon has been meeting for the last eight weeks to talk about famous area UFO sightings and other spooky phenomena. Many of the class members have stories of their own.
♦ In Cookeville, a local chapter of MUFON, the national Texas-based Mutual UFO Network, sprang up after Pisut’s experience. Its monthly meetings have drawn as many as 30 people from the Nashville area, at least five of whom believe they have been abducted.
♦ In Nashville, several area churches and civic groups have called the Cookeville MUFON group to give talks to members.
All of this brouhaha doesn’t surprise Frank Burns, a retired English/journalism professor at Tennessee Tech. Burns, who taught the latest UFO class at Cumberland, says sightings go way back. In effect, Burns “wrote the book” on the earliest reported Tennessee sightings back in the 1950s when he penned the “strange phenomenon” section of the 1961 edition of the . There, Burns outlined nearly a dozen encounters from 1950 to 1957.
According to Burns, who spent much of his adult life in Cookeville, rashes of unexplained flying objects frequently occur in four major regions of the United States, one of which is Tennessee. We are, he says, in a UFO hot spot.
“The most sightings usually take place around some nuclear or testing facility, such as the New Mexico area, with the infamous Roswell UFO crash in the late ’40s, the incident in Socorro, N.M., in the ’50s, and the Lubbock lights of Texas in 1951,” Burns says. “White Sands has been an experimental testing ground for years. We have Oak Ridge 100 miles from here.”
The sightings also tend to clump together in certain years. But of all those years, it was 1973 when things really got hot. For a two-month period, UFOs filled the skies from Memphis to Ohio to Louisiana. Why 1973? Burns has an answer for that. “That’s the year they were proposing a nuclear power station near Hartsville, only 15 miles from here,” he suggests. “They even built a few projects before public uproar made them quit.”
That year, Southern skies saw “star-like objects and a glowing red triangle” that crept across Nashville one night in early September, according to the Tennessean’s account of a sighting by the Harrington family of 245 Willow Ln., near Harding Mall. The police were flooded with calls, all with similar descriptions, to which they replied: “It is really out of our jurisdiction.”
In Lebanon that same September, a “cigar-shaped, quiet” object was spotted by Mrs. Fred Singleton, whom absolutely everyone regarded as a down-to-earth woman not prone to hallucination of any kind.
In Ohio that same day, another “oblong object” that seemed to be poorly piloted reportedly landed on and killed a couple of cows. Alien myopia?
If the Nashville skies had seemed active in September, the number of sightings in October was positively astronomical. On Oct. 1, Nashville papers reported sightings of a UFO with “bright white lights in the center, with red, green and blue-looking lights around it,” according to Obion County Sheriff Nathan Cunningham. The report said that “a red light illuminated a field beside the road, then disappeared suddenly,” according to George and Vicki Rogers, two more eyewitnesses that same night.
On the night of Oct. 18, police dispatchers were swamped with dozens of calls from around Nashville. Dispatcher Tommy Parker reported 40 calls within one 10-minute period.
One man reported a big blue mass coming down on his house. Others had the usual strange-lighted-shiny-object-thingy-in-the-sky reports. Over in Robertson County, objects ranged from “silent pancakes” to “a banana that roared,” and in Montgomery County, police switchboards went haywire with calls about “jumping objects” and objects “like a house all lit up.”
But without question, the most famous sighting of that year, and possibly in recent history, took place Oct. 20 in Lebanon, where Dennis Sircy, a school bus driver, and all the kids in the bus saw an object while traveling on Leeville Pike and Tuckers Gap Road. Reporters described it, based on interviews, as “shiny, silver-looking, round in shape, and larger than the school bus.”
Jerald Phillips, chief of rescue for the local Civil Defense, reported that the object left “three large circles in the broom sage, with four large places in each where something...had blown the grass off the ground, exposing the dirt. It was not an animal that could have caused it.”
Meanwhile, that same day in Palacios, Texas, Mayor Bill Jackson announced the first-ever UFO Fly-In at the city’s municipal airport for Sunday that week. He said he had never heard of anyone welcoming aliens, so he thought he’d give it a try and see what happened.
But the quiet, modestly publicized gatherings took a sharp turn in 1989 when then Metro Council member George Darden launched a campaign to build a UFO landing pad in North Nashville. It was to be funded by public money, he suggested.
In what accurately mirrored the public’s response, The Tennessean opened its article about his proposal by suggesting, “E.T. phone Metro.”
Darden argued that aliens needed to know that they were welcome here. With all the “Welcome to Music City USA” signs around town, he feared creatures would arrive one day, find nowhere to land, “and they’d go back and say we lied,” The Tennessean reported.
The bill was defeated 27-1, Darden being the 1. Before the vote, Council members chuckled out loud. Council member Tom Sharp offered an amendment that the pad could only be constructed in Darden’s district. Council member Tom Alexander argued that the pad couldn’t be in Antioch because “we’ve got too much traffic there already.” Mayor Bill Boner promised that if the bill passed, he would support a contract on a leaseback basis to the aliens—although the currency exchange might be something of a problem.
Nashvillians weren’t the only folks who didn’t take Darden seriously. Comedian David Letterman invited him to appear on his show. Darden, smelling a spoof in the air, declined. Instead, he accepted an invitation by Joan Rivers to her show, which he considered “more serious.” On Dec. 7, 1989, seven months after his bill was defeated, Darden told the nation of his dream to “welcome them down.”
Reactions were not positive.
Council member at-large Jay West told the Banner, “I am personally embarrassed for the people of Nashville.”
That same month, the Metro Board of Zoning Appeals denied Darden’s request to put signs in his backyard to welcome space ships, which proved to be the final defeat to Darden’s UFO plans. So, too, were Darden’s days on the Council nearing an end. He lost his re-election bid in 1989.
That was six years ago, and today, Darden says that, if he had to do it all over again, he would. Does he think the UFO business had something to do with his political defeat?
“Well, yes,” he sighs, without hesitation. “It had a lot to do with it.”
“People thought it was ridiculous,” he continues. “They just didn’t understand at the time.”
Darden says he has never personally seen or experienced anything alien. He says his efforts were on behalf of “folks who came to me and told me experiences they had. Lots of these people didn’t want to tell people. They were worried people would think their elevators weren’t going all the way to the top.
“There are a lot of folks who want to know answers, and I want to know myself. We’ve got a problem to solve, and so we’ve got to get folks talking about it. Somebody, somewhere has got to know what’s going on.”
Darden hasn’t given up the fight. Not only does he believe a landing pad is good public relations, he still believes it can be a moneymaker. Pointing to the Kennedy Space Center, which charges $6 a car, Darden says a landing pad could also generate tourism dollars—even if a UFO never lands there.
“I’m going to retire in December,” he says. “And I intend to work full-time on my UFO landing pad. Perhaps I’ll raise money privately, I don’t know. I’ll have to talk to my consultants. But I do know that this time, I’ll try to have it built out of town.”
And how will the public response be this time?
“I think now, there are a lot more theories that have been coming on TV, and people are more open,” he says.
Sightings of UFOs are common. But a surprising number of Middle Tennesseans say they have experienced something rarer and far more terrifying. They say they have actually been abducted by alien visitors.
MUFON members know of numerous people in the area who believe they have been abducted. Few of them, however, are willing to speak out.
They include “a woman in Murfreesboro,” along with “a mother and daughter” who never explain their story at meetings—they only cry when the discussion turns to abductions. They include “a person in Putnam County” and a “Metro police detective who, with another guy, disappeared for six hours.” Naturally, they say the policeman believes he would be fired if he went public with his story.
Fear of public ridicule isn’t the only reason people are afraid to come forward. They say the abductions have been a source of major trauma and are painful to discuss. Jane Maddox, a private counselor in Cookeville who has counseled five abductees, says her patients “are very much victims. I do not feel these people’s lives have been enriched.”
Maddox says abductions almost always begin in childhood but aren’t recalled until adulthood through flashbacks, dreams and hypnosis. Once these “memories” are recalled, she says, fear and paranoia often become major obstacles in their lives.
“It’s actually quite a normal reaction,” she says. “Just try to imagine what it would be like.”
Fear is something one Ashland City abductee, Nora Donnally, encountered when, several years ago, she attended some meetings in Nashville of the no-longer-active UFO group known as Phoenix. The meetings she attended usually drew about 10 to 15 abductees.
“For me, it’s been different,” she says. “We all go through initial fear, and then the next stage is questioning our own sanity, but finally we get around to accepting this as part of reality. I guess for me, my curiosity overrode my fear.”
Donnally, who has lived her whole life in the Ashland City area, believes she has been abducted from the time she was 5 years old by two groups: the Zeta Recticuli (or “The Grays,” the most commonly reported group) and the Essassné (or “The Browns,” which Donnally believes is a separate group). She says 90 percent of her contact is with “The Browns.”
Donnally says she was aware of the contact as a child, but because no one else appeared to talk of such things, she discounted the memories as childhood fantasy. But in 1989, as an adult, she had contact while fully conscious, and then started remembering all the other incidents. She believes the aliens’ purpose here is “beneficial for all races,” adding, “From my understanding, there is a genetic upgrading taking place.”
Interplanetary reproduction?
“Absolutely,” she answers. “They are making a hybrid race; there’s no doubt about that. There’s just too much evidence to support it.”
Donnally says she is not comfortable disclosing whether she knows any children who are the offspring of interplanetary couplings, but she will say these offspring are of remarkably higher intelligence and seem to have an understanding of physics and the sciences at a very early age.
Does she realize how crazy this sounds to some people?
“Of course!” she answers, chuckling. “Some people think I’m a real nut case. But it doesn’t concern me. I don’t make a habit of going around trying to convince people. Whether people believe it or not is their problem, not mine.”
Douglas Hall is a very patient man. As a professor of astronomy and director of Arthur J. Dyer Observatory at Vanderbilt University, he gets an awful lot of phone calls from what, at times, is a UFO-crazed public.
He doesn’t complain about it and admits he even “rather enjoys” the discussions. But for a man whose work time is spent pioneering research in “double stars” and “variable stars”—stars with variable brightness, which account for only 1 percent of all stars—it is easy to imagine what it must be like hearing the same refrain: “Can you tell me what I just saw?”
It would be an overstatement to say that professional astronomers pay little attention to the discussion of alien-guided UFOs. They don’t pay any attention at all. As Hall says, it is not because astronomers don’t believe life is not out there. Discussions of other life forms are a big part of university-level astronomy classes. Instead, he explains, it’s because, if aliens do exist, “We just don’t think they’d be dropping by and zipping off again.”
“There’s a logical reason for this,” Hall says. “If there were aliens out there, and they had located us, they would be doing one of two things: They would be observing us surreptitiously so as not to disturb our culture, or they would completely establish contact and land the flying saucer in front of the White House, like they did in The Day the Earth Stood Still. You know, ‘Take me to your leader.’ But not something awkwardly halfway between those two extremes.”
“Do UFOs exist?” he continues. “Yes, astronomers do agree that UFOs exist. The typical UFO is, in fact, an object, as opposed to a mirage or a hallucination. They’re usually flying, not crawling around on the ground. And people don’t know what they are, so, in that sense, they do exist. But there’s almost no chance aliens are dropping in out of the sky.”
The observatory usually gets several calls a week, asking what he calls the “UFO/Venus question.” More often than not, a UFO sighting is Venus, or sometimes Jupiter, or some other planet that has appeared in the sky. And with the right weather conditions, a planet, usually easily identifiable by being brighter than a star, can actually appear to twinkle or even change colors—and then be mistaken for some sort of craft.
As for the frequent reports of lights that take sharp turns and make jerky motions, Hall offers an explanation for that too. “The only thing I can say for large, sudden swoops,” he says, “is that, if the object is being viewed through a window of some sort, like a window in a house, or a plane’s pane, like pilots often report, then there are many things that can make a reflected jerk of light. But in an open field, I could not invoke that explanation.”
Another factor to consider is the immense capacity for visual misperception. The eye has “blind spots,” and the mind also tends to complete pictures—even when actual visual information is available.
“Keep in mind, I saw a UFO once,” Hall says. “It was a formation of four or five lights of different colors, some were flashing, and of course I thought, ‘It’s an airplane.’ But as it neared, I thought I would have heard the engine. When I didn’t, I got very excited and I remember the hair actually stood up on my arms.
“Moments later, I did hear an engine, but for those five seconds when I didn’t know, my mind connected the dots, so to speak, and I imagined a spherical object with five antennas sticking out. I actually visualized this craft and believed I saw it.”
