When Dozens of Korean War GIs Claimed a UFO Made Them Sick

During the Korean War, many UFO sightings were reported.

By Natasha Frost

Theories range from high-tech Soviet death rays to extraterrestrials studying human combat to combat-stress-induced hallucinations.

In May 1951, one year into the Korean War, PFC Francis P. Wall and his regiment found themselves stationed near Chorwon, about 60 miles north of Seoul. As they were preparing to bombard a nearby village with artillery, all of a sudden, the soldiers saw a strange sight up in the hills—like “a jack-o-lantern come wafting down across the mountain.”

What happened after—the pulsing, “attacking” light, the lingering debilitating symptoms—would mystify many for decades to come.

As the GIs watched, the craft made its way down into the village, where the artillery air bursts were starting to explode. “We further noticed that this object would get right into...the center of an airburst of artillery and yet remain unharmed,” Wall later told John P. Timmerman of the Center for UFO Studies in a 1987 interview. Suddenly, the object turned, Wall said. And whereas at first, it had glowed orange, now it was a pulsating blue-green brilliant light. He asked his company commander for permission to fire at the object with armor-piercing bullets from an M-I rifle. As the bullets hit the body of the craft, he recalled, they made a metallic “ding.” The object started behaving still more erratically, shunting from side to side as its lights flashed on and off.

Wall’s recollections of what happened next are stranger still. “We were attacked,” he said, “swept by some form of a ray that was emitted in pulses, in waves that you could visually see only when it was aiming directly at you. That is to say, like a searchlight sweeps around and the segments of light...you would see it coming at you.”

He remembered a burning, tingling sensation sweeping over his body, as if he were being penetrated. The men rushed into underground bunkers and peeped through the windows, watching as the craft hovered above them and then shot off, at a 45-degree angle. “It's that quick,” he said. “It was there and was gone.”

Three days after the incident, the entire company of men was evacuated by ambulance, with special roads cut to haul out those too weak to walk. When they finally received medical treatment, they were found to have dysentery and an extremely high white- blood- cell count. “To me,” says Richard F. Haines, a UFO researcher and former NASA scientist, “they had symptoms that sounded like the effects of radiation.”

Was it an experimental new Soviet weapon?

In the wake of the Korean War, which ended in July 1953, dozens of men have reported seeing similar unidentified flying objects over the course of the 37-month conflict. The craft often resembled flying saucers. According to unofficial reports, as many as 42 were corroborated by additional witness reports—an average of more than one a month in just over three years.

At first, according to Korean war historian Paul M. Edwards, many researchers believed that the sightings were Soviet experiments, based on German technology and foreign research in anti-gravity. “These were supposedly so large they could carry 50 tons of weight and were powered by electromagnetic propulsion,” he writes in Unusual Footnotes to the Korean War. “What was being sighted, it was suggested, were discs the Russians were testing over the Korean skies.” But in the years since the fall of the Soviet UnionIron Curtain came down, a number of Soviet reports of sighting UFOs over Korea have trickled in, discrediting these theories.

Why were there so many UFO sightings throughout the Korean war? Were they the product of thousands of exhausted men under incredible stress—or a sign of something more mysterious? From 1952 until 1986, the United States Air Force ran Project Blue Book, a systematic study into unidentified flying objects and their potential threat to national security. When it was shuttered, in December 1969, the Air Force announced they had found nothing of note, and terminated all activity under the auspices of the study.

But many believe that the project ended abortively, and that there was more work to be done—leading to similar interviews with witnesses and other investigations being done by dozens of volunteers for decades after the project ended. Haines is one of them. He describes himself as a scientist with an open mind, rather than someone with something to prove. “I don't believe in them, I don't not believe in them,” he says. “I'm trying to let the data convince me one way or the other, which is the scientific approach.” But, he says, it’s striking how many accounts there are of similar sightings in the Korean War and other conflicts. 

An aerial view of the Korean DMZ in the Chorwon District, where Francis P. Wall saw the UFO.

Other explanations?

In the early years of the Cold War, it was often theorized that these crafts might be Soviet or Chinese vessels, with technology unknown to American troops. Haines believes this theory has been conclusively disproved.

“If they were,” he says, “they would have been building those crafts for use in later wars like the Vietnam War, for instance.” The Soviet UFO sightings Edwards describes make it similarly unlikely—as do the impossibly high-tech specifications of some of the sightings. In Wall’s case, for instance, he described a kind of force field taking effect a while after he began shooting, where his bullets simply ricocheted away from the craft.

Haines, for his part, believes the rash of sightings across the Korean war might suggest that something in the universe is especially interested in how human beings behave in the throng of military action. “We tend to be very creative to fight a war,” Haines says, listing off the various sciences and technologies that might come into play in military action. “If you were interested in how another country or another race of people fought their wars, you’d want to collect information on that, wouldn’t you?” He trails off. “That’s one possible explanation. There may be others.”

But the vast majority of UFO sightings—as much as 80 percent—are later found to be totally ordinary phenomena, like clouds or human crafts, rather than anything otherworldly. In Wall’s case, precisely what he saw that day has never been conclusively proven or disproven. Without the testimony of other men in Wall’s regiment, it’s hard to ascertain whether they too had the same strange experience—, even if it can be corroborated that many did get very ill.

Why such long-lasting after-effects?

In the years following the war, Wall lost contact with many of the men in his regiment. After the experience, he remembered his company agreeing that they would not file a report, “because they'd lock every one of us up, and think we were crazy,” he told Timmerman. What made him choose to make a testimony, however, was the lasting after-effects of his illness, including permanent weight loss from 180 pounds to 138, stomach problems and periods of disorientation and memory loss after returning to the United States.

He retired in 1969, at the age of just 42, his daughter Renae Denny says, and spent 30 years out of work, struggling with the after-effects of the war. “Back then they didn’t know the name of it, but I guess you could say it was a form of PTSD,” she says. Over the years, he would tell and retell the tale of his strange UFO sighting. “The story was always the same,” says Denny. “It never changed through the years.” But there was other fallout: He was especially affected by the sounds of airplanes and once knocked his mother and sister to the ground after mistaking them for enemy troops. “I guess he would have flashbacks,” she says.

Wall’s recollections of the UFO sighting were consistent and acute. But whether what he remembered actually happened is harder to prove. Fighting conditions were almost intolerably stressful, and it’s entirely possible that he may have experienced some kind of hallucination, brought on by the terror of the situation, where he regularly feared for his life. It might also have been a moment of feverish delirium: Even the raised white-blood cell count that surprised army doctors, and Haines, is consistent with many of the bacterial infections which might also cause severe dysentery—as are hallucinations. In a later interview with Haines, Wall described how he had discussed what he saw with some 25 other men—but none ever came forward or could later be traced.

In 2002, British researchers demonstrated a link between UFO sightings and Cold War hysteria—and pointed out how the number of sightings had nosedived as radar improved. “That cannot be a coincidence,” David Clarke told the Guardian. “Those early confirmations were just a product of a primitive radar system.” The flurry of UFO sightings Haines describes may have been the dual effect of these two threats: a potentially world-destroying war on the horizon, and the incredible pressure of being in the military.

Wall had experiences in those years in Korea that would scar him until his death in 1999. One night, Denny says, he managed to make his way through a pitch-dark minefield, praying for his life as he went. Others who made the same journey were not so fortunate. “When he went in [to the war],” she says, “he was happy-go-lucky, just a totally different person to when he came out.”

Whether the UFO sightings that Wall and so many other men reported were a product of this personality-altering trauma, or the effects of something requiring much greater investigation, remains a mystery.

Diversity in UFO Statistics: The Truth is in the Shapes

By Cheryl Costa

32.8 percent of 17 years’ worth of UFO sighting reports featured exotic UFO shapes — shapes that have a high probability of not being man-made.

It’s funny how publishing UFO sightings numbers scares the hell out of some people. Many have written to me, “They (UFOs) can’t all be real!” They reassure themselves with the notion that UFO reports are largely misidentifications, and the product of kooks and crackpots.

A number of other people who have purchased my book UFO Sightings Desk Reference seem to go out of their way to twist my words and suggest that I think only 7 percent of UFO sightings are real. Then there are the debunkers who fail to accept good research and data. These are the folks who have their own opinion, and, by gosh, they’re right!

An important step in the scientific process is gathering data for analysis. My co-author Linda Miller Costa had an opinion she arrived at after editing and assembling the first draft of the publication. In 2018 she said, “The Truth is in the Shapes!” More recently she stated, “The diversity of exotic UFO shapes suggests a wide variety of species and builders.”

Let’s take a look at a recent analysis I did that is ruthless in its removal of questionable UFO shapes. For the purpose of this study I have eliminated any UFO shapes that either could not be clearly described or shapes that might easily be viewed as man-made. I caution my readers to not be emotionally attached to a favorite shape I’ve excluded. I eliminated all undefined shapes as well as triangles; yes, I know they are as big as a football field, and they could be an experimental TR-3B, I’m told regularly. Boomerang and Chevrons must also be removed because they reasonably could be some advanced bomber or fighter aircraft. I took out cigar, cylinder, bullet and bullet/missile shapes because most reasonable people would agree that these shapes might be an airliner seen from the side. I think you get my point.

Remember the objective: What we wanted was only exotic shapes, UFO shapes that have high probability for not being man-made. The numbers in the chart reflect the combined NUFORC (National UFO Reporting Center) and MUFON (Mutual UFO Network) sighting reports from 2001 through 2017. The total is 139,876 and the exotic shapes’ sum is 45,894, a whopping 32.8 percent of 17 years’ worth of UFO sighting reports. Spread evenly over 17 years, that would be about 2,699 per year and approximately 224 per month. In my estimation, those kinds of numbers are still something significant to talk and write about. I’m not saying that the other 67.2 percent of the UFO sightings are noise, either, only that 32.8 percent of UFO sightings stick out as not made on earth.

An eyewitness account can get you convicted in any court in this country, in the absence of forensic evidence to the contrary. Here we have 45,894 eyewitness accounts of something bizarre flying in the sky. These eyewitness reports represent a body of evidence; a preponderance of this evidence should give a skeptic pause.

‘Hunt for the Skinwalker’ Is the First Video Released From UFO-Obsessed Billionaire’s Haunted Ranch

The latest film in Jeremy Corbell’s ‘Extraordinary Beliefs’ series digs into the history of Skinwalker Ranch, an alleged hotbed of UFO activity formerly owned by Robert Bigelow. 



There’s something strange happening in northeastern Utah. Over the last four decades, residents of Uintah county have reported hundreds of UFO sightings, dozens of bizarre and inexplicable cattle mutilations, encounters with otherworldly beings, and other paranormal activities. Although these sightings are reported throughout the county, they are especially prevalent on a 500-acre plot of land known as Skinwalker Ranch. 

This remote stretch of high desert is the backdrop to Hunt for the Skinwalker, the latest addition to the “Extraordinary Beliefs” documentary series produced by Jeremy Corbell. With a runtime of just over two hours, the film is a visually stunning deep dive into the history of one of the strangest and most high-profile UFO investigations ever undertaken. The film features hours of never-before-seen footage collected by the reporter George Knapp during his seminal investigation into the bizarre occurrences at the ranch, which he collected in the 2005 book, Hunt for the Skinwalker. Corbell’s film is nominally a documentary, but it has the heart of a horror flick—a unique thematic combination that perfectly suits its deeply unsettling subject matter.

Corbell has been working on Hunt for the Skinwalker for years, but he told me that the publication of the New York Times story last year about the US Department of Defense “Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program” (AATIP) put his documentary team into “overdrive.” According to the Times, the program was created at the behest of Nevada senator Harry Reid and most of its $22 million budget was funneled to Bigelow Aerospace, a company founded in 1999 by the billionaire hotelier Robert Bigelow, a close friend of Reid. Among the many events studied as part of the secretive program was the now infamous “tic tac” UFO spotted by Navy pilots off the coast of San Diego in 2004. 

The premise of Corbell’s documentary is that AATIP is only half the story. Long before the Times revealed the Pentagon’s secret UFO program, Bigelow was bankrolling the National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS), a “living laboratory” on Skinwalker Ranch that represents the largest ever scientific study of unidentified aerial phenomena in history. Bigelow’s UFO lab was founded shortly before he purchased Skinwalker Ranch in the mid-90s and employed several physicists until its operations were shuttered in 2004. These scientists were tasked with studying the multitude of anomalous phenomena reported by the ranch’s previous owners and locals in the surrounding area. 

The ridge on the ranch known as the “path of the Skinwalker” for the frequent reports of paranormal activity in the area. Image courtesy of Jeremy Corbell

Skinwalker Ranch first came to Bigelow’s attention in 1996 after a journalist for the Deseret News wrote about the strange phenomena reported by the Sherman family, who had lived on the ranch for years. The Shermans reported dozens of odd events—such as being approached by wolves that wouldn’t die after repeatedly being shot at close range with high powered rifles and brutal cow mutilations that left no trace of blood beside the carcass—but strange phenomena had been reported in the region for years. 

In 1974, the plant physiologist Frank Salisbury collected hundreds of UFO reports from residents in the Uintah basin region of Utah, which includes Skinwalker Ranch and a Ute reservation. According to Corbell’s documentary, Ute tribal members have recognized the otherworldly phenomena occurring in the area for centuries. They characterize these events as the work of malevolent tricksters, similar to the ghostly “skinwalkers” of Navajo folklore.

George Knapp on the eve of the New York Times story. Image: Jeremy Corbell

After Bigelow established NIDS at Skinwalker Ranch, he hired the biochemist Colm Kelleher as the project’s deputy administrator. Bigelow’s collection of scientists studying “anomalies” in a secluded desert research lab quickly garnered the attention of the local press, including Knapp. In a series of articles written in the late 90s for the weekly Las Vegas Mercury, Knapp tagged along with the investigators as they tried to get to the bottom of the strange happenings at Skinwalker Ranch. 

Knapp kept his video camera running all during his visits to the ranch and much of this footage is shown for the first time in Corbell’s film. Hunt for the Skinwalker pivots between Corbell’s visits to the ranch last year and Knapp’s old footage to create a detailed portrait of Bigelow’s obsessive, two-decade hunt for extraterrestrials. 

“There seem to be more restrictions to accessing the ranch than even our government’s most secret military bases,” Corbell told me in an email. “No footage has been allowed off the ranch—ever. There was a veil of secrecy for two decades, but that veil has been officially lifted by my film.”

One of the many mutilated carcasses discovered on the ranch. Noticeably missing: any sign of blood. Image courtesy of Jeremy Corbell

In Skinwalker, Corbell places a premium on the testaments of local residents who claim to have seen UFOs or experienced paranormal phenomena in the region. Although the film also features a short interview with Bigelow conducted by Knapp, this plays a surprisingly small role in the film. 

“Robert Bigelow has moved on from what he was doing at the Skinwalker Ranch,” Corbell said. “He has never gone on camera publicly about Skinwalker Ranch, so this is the first and likely only time you will ever see that.” 

Notably absent are updated interviews with Kelleher and the other scientists who were involved with NIDS. This isn’t all that surprising, given the eye-roll effect the phrase “UFOs” tends to evoke from other scientists and the fact that NIDS turned up next to no scientific evidence of paranormal phenomena occurring at Skinwalker Ranch. Nevertheless, there are documented incidents of bizarre cattle mutilations that are detailed in Corbell’s film that seem to defy all explanation. 

At one point in the film, when Corbell is sitting around a campfire with several of Skinwalker investigators and locals, he says he “no longer has the luxury of disbelief.” Although Corbell’s deep knowledge of UFO history makes him the perfect filmmaker to tackle a documentary on Skinwalker Ranch, I couldn’t help but wish he had leaned into his skepticism a little bit more. Generally speaking, Hunt for the Skinwalker can be described as enthusiastically credulous—no belief is challenged and Corbell never entertains alternative explanations for the otherworldly phenomena experienced by his subjects.

For example, there are a number of prominent military and air force installations in northern Utah, which could account for many of the strange bright lights reported by locals. Indeed, a 2002 report by NIDS suggested that the black triangles seen by many residents were likely military blimps, although this was never officially confirmed by the government. 

One of the hardest aspects to account for is how widespread accounts of paranormal activity are in the Uintah region. Over the decades there have been thousands of reports of unidentified aerial phenomena and confrontations with otherworldly entities. While the sheer scope of these reports lends them some credibility, mass hysterias are also deeply American. One need only consider the witch scares among puritans, when hundreds of people claimed to have seen evidence of witchcraft, to see how such ideas can run rampant among isolated populations. 

Corbell (left) discusses a local’s experience with a unidentified aerial object. Image courtesy of Jeremy Corbell

Corbell disagreed that his film was wanting in skepticism, but he acknowledged that his approach to filmmaking precludes him from trying to fit the experiences from others into a neat narrative. Tackling fringe subjects required Corbell to seriously consider the nature of what constitutes evidence of an event. For him, eyewitness testimony is a powerful sort of evidence, as are the mutilated carcasses, photographs, and video evidence collected by scientists at NIDS. 

“This was frustrating for the scientists who studied it and I understand that,” Corbell said. “However, it’s the job of science and journalism to investigate the unexplained, not to explain the uninvestigated. By refusing to immediately explain away the uninvestigated with the prosaic does not indicate a lack of skepticism—quite the opposite, really. I’m skeptical of skeptics, too.”

The anonymous new owner of Skinwalker Ranch, who is continuing investigations into paranormal occurrences at the site. Image courtesy of Jeremy Corbell

If anything is certain, it’s that there is something deeply weird about Skinwalker Ranch and Corbell’s documentary does a fantastic job of capturing the paranoia, fear, and wonder of those who claim to have experienced the inexplicable. Although Bigelow sold the ranch in 2016, this is a mystery that is far from solved. To wrap the film, Corbell sat down with the anonymous business magnate who has since taken up the mantle of investigating paranormal activity in the region. As the anonymous source acknowledged, the hunt for the skinwalker is far from over—if anything, this is just the beginning. 

“We still don’t know what we’re dealing with and that’s the bottom line,” Corbell told me. “The events and phenomena experienced and studied at Skinwalker Ranch appear like a performance by a discriminating, precognitive sentient intelligence."

Extras needed for Mt. Pleasant filming of 'Kecksburg' UFO movie

By Shirley Mcmarlin

Extras are needed in Mt. Pleasant on Oct. 6 for filming of “Kecksburg,” a fiction-based-on-fact account of the 1965 UFO incident.

The movie is a project of Cody Knotts, a native of Taylorstown, Washington County, currently living in New York, whose film production company, Principalities of Darkness, is producing “Kecksburg.” It was written and is being directed by Knotts.

Key scenes were filmed April 10-12 in southwestern Pennsylvania and Morgantown, W.Va., using more than 70 local background actors.

South African actor Scot Cooper is portraying local radio reporter John Murphy, one of the first to arrive on the scene of the purported UFO landing, while Knott’s wife Emily Lapisardi has a role as First Lady Lady Bird Johnson.

Cooper’s film roles include “Maze Runner: The Death Cure,” while his television credits include “American Monster” and “Homeland.”

The movie is tentatively set for a September 2019 premiere in The Palace Theatre in Greensburg.

Anyone interested in being an extra for the Oct. 6 filming should email kecksburgufo@gmail.com.