This case was first reported by Jerome Clark in Flying Saucer Review, and it happened to two of his friends, Wendel Meyer and Nancy Jensen, and Nancy’s son Aaron, from a previous marriage. Clark describes them as “pleasant young people whose lifestyle would cause some to label them as ‘hippies,’ whatever that much-abused expression means.” They were slightly interested in the occult, but had no interest in UFOs whatsoever.
In June of 1969, Wendel, Nancy and Aaron were traveling from Moorhead, Minnesota on vacation to California. They traveled through the day, passing through the Dakota Badlands, Yellowstone National Park, making it to Salt Lake City, Utah by midnight.
Southwest of the city, sometime between midnight and 1:00 A.M. Wendel “regained consciousness.” I know what you’re thinking… ummm, what. Clark just drops you in there. Wendel stated, “All of a sudden it was like I woke up. I saw a white post in front of me, and I couldn’t turn the steering wheel. So I ploughed (sic) right into it and knocked four over in all. At 90 mph there should have been more damage.”
Odd that no one else in the car said anything when it was suddenly going 90 mph. But, there was no real damage other than a flat tire, a broken shock absorber, a bumper that was barely dented, and their turn signals were messed up. No one was harmed, and assuming no harm no foul, Wendel changed the tire and proceeded to leave the scene of an accident…
Nancy took over the driving and a short distance into their continued journey she started to feel “very uncomfortable.” A type of paranoia began to set in, the kind you hear about in these stories again and again. The rearview mirror became flooded with yellow and white light. Initially, she was not concerned about it, assuming that it must be another driver on the road. Then the lights moved in from the opposite side of the highway heading in a direction they shouldn’t be. The lights made an abrupt left hand turn onto a road that didn’t exist.
They continued on through the salt flats and the mountains… and the lights appeared again over the mountains. They moved in on them from behind, closing the distance, moving a little faster than the car. “That is when we started getting paranoid,” said Nancy. When it got close a sound started to permeated the air, “like an electronic wail in a flying saucer movie.” The UFO moved in so close that it nearly blinded them, and caused all of their bodies to vibrate.
Nancy’s son, Aaron, started to cry at that moment. In response, the car window closest to him opened slightly and then closed. Aaron stopped crying after that.
Now, Nancy, from what I can tell had been driving, though according to the narrative, Wendel was behind the wheel, and it was he who stepped on the gas only to find the vehicle slowing down. “Oh Christ,” he called out, “it’s going to get us!” In response, the UFO drifted back a distance from the car again.
Wendel pulled into a rest stop. It’s important to note here that the car was now facing the two lane highway. The object, too, came to a stop, hovering just across the highway from where the car was parked. It was then that the family noticed a camper parked at the rest stop. The lights were on inside, and Nancy suggested to Wendel that he go over there and tell them about the UFO, but like a normal sane person, said, hell nah, I ain’t doing that. (I’m probably paraphrasing here?)
Still, the strangeness continued. Shortly after his refusal the pair described seeing a “ghostly face” peering out one of the camper windows at them. “Ghostly faces” would be a theme for this family in the weeks to come.
Wendel’s attention was drawn across the divided highway again. He was terrified by the sight a large hulking figure “…that resembled a ‘big snowman’ – with round head and body – [that] was moving toward them slowly.” This figure had no face, their legs and arms were large and round.
For some reason, they decided to turn off the car’s headlights, as if it would make this creature go away… and when they did the creature disappeared. It must have been a sign on the highway, they thought, but when they turned them on again, the snowman reappeared, half the distance it had been. With the creature even closer they piled back in, squealed the tires and got the hell out of there.
They caught up to some traffic, but that didn’t seem to deter the UFO. It kept up with them rather easily, but as daylight approached, the UFO fell behind until it disappeared. Feeling safer now, they pulled onto the side of the road and fell asleep. At 8:30 AM, they resumed their journey.
An hour down the road, the couple spotted a camper similar to the one they had seen at the rest stop. She looked at the occupants of said camper and exclaimed, “Wendel, those people don’t have any heads!” He wasn’t able to see them for himself, as they were rounding a curve, but decided to slow down and let them pass… only, the camper was never seen again and there was nowhere on that road for it to pulled off.
While this was the last strange thing to happen to this family on this trip, the phenomena would follow them home. One night, a month later, and 15 miles outside of Morehead, Minnesota, the car broke down. Wendel got under the hood to see what was wrong and noticed a group of red, green and blue lights in the sky. The lights maneuvered behind that vehicle, pulling closer and closer, until they vanished.
To quote Clark’s write up, “Since then Wendel and Nancy have been ‘haunted’ by a hooded man without facial features. When Wendel first saw it it lunged at him and disappeared. Nancy was scrubbing the bathroom floor one day when she got a ‘trembling feeling.’ Turning around, she glimpsed a hooded, faceless figure – ‘a little bit more than an outline, but nothing distinct’ – that jumped at her.”
Wendel would suffer from paranoia from a fear that he was being followed. There was one incident during a lunch break at work when he claimed to see a figure walking by him. “At home, each new time he saw it, the entity had grown larger.” One time when he was driving home, that familiar feeling came over him. He looked back to catch a glint of light coming from a mysterious source.
“The next February, while resting in a hospital from a minor ailment, Wendel suffered from recurring thoughts of someone ‘cold and lifeless, like a part of me, like a premonition.’ At the side of his bed appeared a form without distinct facial features. ‘I could have seen the face if I’d wanted to. It was a man with long, thin fingers. I could tell it was trying to communicate with me, but I wouldn’t let it. It kept coming back, though I couldn’t shut it off.’
“Wendel concluded, ‘For a long time I felt as if I were fighting evil forces inside me. But I feel cleansed now.’”
It’s unclear if the phenomenon continued after this incident. Further research failed to uncover follow up writings about this case, which doesn’t surprise me. Nearly every article written about UFOs or humanoid encounters is like being ghosted by that ex whom you still can’t stand.
Clark ends with some curious observations about the technological guise of UFOs, and the youth’s (at least in 1970) rejection of technology: “Perhaps it is because the whole idea of the UFO is basically a technological one and part of the ethic of the young is, to some considerable degree, a rejection of technology. Just as in the past the ‘ultraterrestrials’ (to borrow John Keel’s phrase) have appeared to us in forms most suited to the temperament of the times (everything from ‘angels’ to ‘airships’ to ‘spaceships’), now they are assuming new forms for new times.
“Could it be (God forbid!) that in the years ahead, as the human race alters its perception of the universe, the UFO will be phased pretty much out of existence? I, for one, would not be much surprised. It may well be that in the future we shall be seein the influx into our time-space continuum of phenomena even stranger, even weirder, even more mysterious than Unidentified Flying Object.”
Clark is wrong here. As a society, we have become more and more dependent on technology. It’s rare to find someone who doesn’t have a smartphone in their pocket. Laptops and tablets are as popular in some respects. As a society we are overdependent on technology. But it does make me wonder: what if the phenomena has changed, and we just don’t recognize it yet? What if, instead of becoming stranger, it has become more mundane, expressed as barely perceptible strange moments that we experience in daily life and then seemingly forget? What if the phenomena covers its tracks better? That would mean it’s not aliens or interdimensional beings at all, but something more mysterious to ponder.
I hope you enjoy living with the question. Hehe.
Source:
Clark, Jerome. “A Weird Encounter in Utah”. Flying Saucer Review, Oct/Nov 1970, V 16, N 5.