The Carpet-Sweeper of Uden
Or; Dwarven Klansmen on the Streets of Brabant.
Have you ever been lying there, cozy and snug in your bed, perhaps warm beneath a plush, luxurious duvet, your somnolent mind flush with phantasmagorical scenes of buxom ladies (or perhaps handsome gentlemen, if that’s your thing) frolicking about in various states of undress when, all of the sudden - it hits you. Your eyes snap open, the fair maidens vanish back into the nebulous ether of your imagination, and you sit up, propelled by the sensation of what can only be described as the entire volume of the Mediterranean Sea churning in your bladder.
Of course you have. We’ve all been there, at one time or another. It’s never fun to be forced from the comfort of your bed and into the dark depths of your house to shamble across the cold linoleum so you might make a pilgrimage to the porcelain throne.
But, when nature calls, one cannot afford to let it go to voicemail.
Inconvenient yet mundane as this ritual is, what should have been an innocuous, nocturnal trip to hit head ended up changing the life of a certain resident of Unden, Brabant.
Not the Brabant in Belgium. The Brabant in the Netherlands. Northern Brabant. There’s a difference.
Today, Uden boasts a modest population of 35,000 residents. A quick Google search tells me that it’s a town with a rich history, robust Brabant…ian? Yeah, Brabantian culture, and abundant green spaces… and still one of the best places to check out should you find yourself in the area is this billiards lounge.
So, you know this place has to be great.
There’s also this statue of a lime-green dog in town. It was important enough to make it on Uden’s Wikipedia page, so it feels substantial enough to include here.
Da Groene Hund, however, is only the second strangest and dubious claim to fame that Uden has.
Perhaps the most infamous footnote in Uden’s long and storied history began in the wee hours of the morning - roundabouts 2:15 AM, to be exact - on November 10th, 1973.
This was the night that one fifty-five year old Ann Delphijn’s blissful slumber would be rudely interrupted by the demands of her kidneys. While I can’t imagine that she was dreaming of minxy blonde meisje in colorful klederdracht dresses and klompers, drinking Heinekien in a tulip field like I might, were I in the Netherlands, I still don’t think she was happy to be roused all the same.
As Miss Dolphijn1 made her way from her bedroom to the bathroom in the dark of her home, she ambled through the front area of the house, because I guess the concept of a bathroom attached to a bedroom was one then foreign to the Dutch mind2. Or perhaps she had the intention of stopping to hydrate in the kitchen on the return trip to Club Bed with DJ Pillow. Who’s to say?
Either way, as Ann passed a window that looked out onto the street, she saw something outside that she said was… something white. Not the most helpful description, no, but I’ll extend some grace and say that she was probably more concerned with keeping her bloomers dry than some smudge of white outside. Besides, she was probably still half-asleep, and I know when I’m still waking up, it’s a miracle if I can remember where my toilet even is.
Ann ignored the white something and did her business without incident. However, as she shuffled back to her bedroom, most likely more awake than when she’d first passed by the window, she noticed that something white was still out there. So, she took a closer look.
This time, there was no ignoring what was on the other side of the glass.
Outside, moseying down the road as if they had every right to be there, were three figures. The moon was close to full and its light bright, illuminating the three strangers and dispelling any delusion that Ann might have first had that they were anything other than bizarre.
For one, each of them wore a white robe that Ann likened to those that a monk might wear. These robes seemed unfit for their frames, with the hems falling to the ground and dragging behind them. Underneath these robes, Ann could see the strange interloper’s feet, covered in shoes that, like their robes, were disproportionately large for their size.
Did I mention that she estimated they were three feet tall, too? Because, apparently, they were, with the third trailing behind the first two being slightly taller.
She noticed their feet because, even though they appeared to have them… they weren’t leaving the ground. The strangers certainly were moving - and they were heading in the direction of her house - but they didn’t seem to walk so as shuffle along without moving their knees, as if they had none to bend at all.
Stranger still, each of these bizarre, shuffling entities had their heads covered with a white hood.
Now, at this point, it should be abundantly clear what Ann was looking at.
Klansmen. Dwarf klansmen, to be precise.
Except that’s not what they were. Not because I don’t think there’s was a Ku Klux Klan chapter active in the Netherlands at the time… I think. But more because the hoods were not tall and pointy. Rather, the hoods split off into two points that hung down from the back on either side - a disturbing detail that reveals the true identity of these diminutive night-walkers.
I always knew those fuckers were up to no good. Now? I have evidence that they’re scaring the hoes over in Netherlands.
In all actuality, though, I do envision a kind of… y’know. Jester’s hat. Like this little jester thing’s hat, from that one YouTube series that blew the fuck up and overtook the Among Us crewman the biggest source of brainrot in 2024.
Kind of an odd detail, but at the very least we can cross off midget klansmen on our board of potential suspects.
Now, these strangers’ odd sense of style, their awkward waddle, nor even their height were the most bizarre aspect of their appearances. Even more puzzling were the belts cinched around their waists, on which Ann could see a variety of tools and instruments which she did not recognize hanging from them, the metal glinting in the moonlight.
Again, the answer may seem clear at first…
But, of course, there’s just another detail that completely derails any theory I might have had.
What is perhaps the most defining element to this incident is the instrument which one of the two mystery beings walking in front possessed. Ann described it as resembling a roller sweeper, which, if you’re in a certain tax bracket, you’ve probably never seen. It’s a cheap, plastic device that you run along the carpet to, naturally, sweep up debris and detritus. Like an analog vacuum cleaner, only worse in every way. These days, you usually only find them at workplaces where the boss is too parsimonious to spring for a vacuum cleaner.
But this hooded stranger was not performing a public service pro bono, sweeping up crumbs and litter and what not from the street with a chincy plastic gizmo. Rather, it moved the device back and forth, left and right and back again, as it meandered down the road. To Ann, it looked as if the thing was using a metal detector rather than any kind of vacuuming device.
Ann, as one might expect, not exactly comfortable with what she was seeing. Her first thought was to wake her sleeping husband, perhaps to gather another witness to vouch for her bizarre sighting, or maybe because she was hoping he’d go outside and plug the little bastards with a twelve-gauge. However, Ann reported that her husband’s heart was not in the best condition, and she feared that if he were to see such an extraordinary, inexplicable sight, his ticker might give out right then and there from sheer shock. So, she remained by the window, watching the three short kings continue their leisurely midnight stroll.
By Ann’s estimation, she watched the trio for about five minutes before one of them must have gotten that uneasy feeling that they were being watched. One of the two in the front, she said, looked right at her. At that point, I bet she was grateful that she’d just used the bathroom, because if I’d been standing there in her house slippers at that moment?
I would have had some laundry to do.
Fortunately, rather than bum-rush her house, leap through the window, and show her what those sharp, metal tools on their belts were for, the one that spotted her turned to the others and seemed to say something to them. The three then promptly hauled ass across the street and disappeared behind a school building.
For reference, here’s a rough approximation of the route the three took, according to Ann.
Ann kept her post for a few moment’s longer, half-expecting the entities to reappear. When they didn’t, she decided that she’d had enough excitement for one night and returned to her bedroom. The strange sight had left Ann shaken, stirred, and hopped up on adrenaline; naturally, her first inclination was to wake up her husband and tell her what she’d just seen.
One must assume that she entered the room with all the grace of a spooked horse as, apparently, her husband was already waking up as she entered the room - probably looking something like this.
Before Ann could get a word out, she noticed that the window she’d been looking out of before wasn’t the only window in her house with some bizarro shit unfolding on the other side.
There, through the window looking out into her backyard, Ann saw what was described as a red hot ball of light. Where exactly it was - in her backyard, or in the adjacent street behind it - I’m not sure, as the auto-translation of the Dutch sources I found is a bit wonky, and I don’t exactly trust English sources drawing on these same autotranslation. What is consistently described, however, is that Ann estimated that the red ball of light was seven feet across and 130 feet away, hovering in the air. Between its spherical shape and the deep red glow of the thing, she said that it reminded her of a setting sun, right down to the fact that she couldn’t even look directly at it for more than a moment before turning away.
Her husband, stirring in the bed, asked her what time it was. She answered him - too damn early for this shit - and when she looked back towards the window… the light was gone.
Apparently, Ann’s husband did not see the ball nor the light it cast shining through the window, as she recounted the entire story to him then and there. Some sources I’ve seen say that her husband believed she was telling the truth, but I can’t help but imagine he probably yawned and gave her a, Oh, that’s nice, honey. It’s three in the morning. Can we get back to bed?
Ann did, by some stroke of miraculous luck, manage to get back to sleep, but the next morning she booked it to the local police station to report the incident. She didn’t expect the police to believe her, but she did hope that someone else might have seen something similar. If they did, she wanted to hear about it.
So, she waited. And waited. And waited some more.
A full year passed, and Ann heard nothing from the police, who probably wrote off the report as the ravings of an unstable older woman. Unable to put the incident out of her mind, Ann decided to speak to a friend named Bob Muyen about what she’d seen. Whether or not Muyen was a UFO buff, I’m not sure, but his son Edmund certainly was. Muyen related the story to Edmund, who in turn wrote a letter detailing Ann’s experience to the Center for UFO Studies - known better by the acronym CUFOS - based out of Illinois.
We’ll return to CUFOS later, but for now, what’s pertinent is that the story of Ann’s encounter made it into the hands of two important people with the organization.
One was David Webb. What capacity Webb served with CUFOS and what exactly he did outside of it is information I have been unable to track down, but he was certainly an active member of the organization; he and another member, Ted Bloecher, are responsible for CUFOS’s Humanoid Catalogue (abbreviated to HUMCAT), which is a very expansive and thorough library of documented encounters with humanoid entities between 1790 - yes, really - and 1977. Why the catalogue stopped in 1977, I’m uncertain, as CUFOS is still operational as of present. Regardless, encounters such as Ann’s - that is, those who report sightings or interactions with humanoid entities rather than unidentified flying phenomenon - were something of Webb’s personal obsession. He included the case in his book, 1973: Year of the Humanoids, published in 1976.
The other, perhaps more important individual to catch wind of Ann’s encounter was a man named Douwe Bosga. Bosga was from the Netherlands himself and spent a year working for CUFOS in Illinois, during which he read Year of the Humanoid. Upon his return to his homeland in 1978, Bosga was granted with the opportunity to do some hard, on-the-ground investigation into the case.
Between March and July of that year, Bosga conducted multiple interviews with Ann. During these conversations, he came to the conclusion that she was a credible, reliable witness. Outside of her report to the police and sharing the incident with some close acquaintances, she’d kept the story close to her chest during the five years between its occurrence and Bosga’s interviews. Bosga himself felt confident that she had no impetus to fabricate the story, and it seemed as if she had no interest in fame or attention from the media.
Yet, whether she wanted it or not, the media would come to her. After Bosga brought the incident to the public’s attention by spreading it among colleagues in a Dutch UFO research organization, NOBOVA, the Uden Incident would take the Dutch media by storm. Though it might be hyperbole to say that Ann became a celebrity in the Netherlands, her story attracted a significant amount of attention from the public. Ann conducted several more interviews with a number of Dutch publications - none of which I could find, but screencaps from sources do prove exist.
If it speaks to the quality of her character, and the fact that she very much did not want this incident to define her as a person or garner notoriety from it, she conducted all of these interviews under the pseudonym Saskia Vermeulen. Her true identity would only be revealed after her death, which, unfortunately, I cannot find a date for.
Many of the journalists (so my sources say) that interviewed Ann came away with the same impression as Bosga; she didn’t seem to be making anything up. She was serious, she was sober, and even after five years and multiple retellings, her story remained the same each time she told it.
Most were convinced that Ann did, indeed, see something.
But seeing something does not equate to seeing the fantastical.
In 1984, a letter was published in the UFO journal, Journal of Study Group for Foreign Air Phenomena, which had been sent by someone only identified as Mr. Maas. Maas, it seems, had taken a keen interest in the case, and wrote that he did not believe such an account should have ever been published, since such stories had a tendency to take on a life of their own and dilute proper research into the phenomenon of UFOs. Interestingly, this was a sentiment shared by the founder of CUFOS, J. Allen Hynek, who didn’t seem to be much of a fan of Webb’s fixation on humanoids.
In his letter, Maas presents his theory as to what Ann saw that night in 1973, framed by a story of his own. Maas relates that he once moved into a house along a road that, like Ann’s, had yet to be paved and was still covered in stone, as was not uncommon in Europe at the time. One night, he recounts, he saw a van park along the street, and a number of men exit the vehicle. Though he did not describe what kind of uniforms they were wearing, he did say that they were uniformed, and all of them had belts from which hung a variety of tools. More importantly, one of them held a device remarkably similar to what Ann had seen in the hands of one of the hooded strangers. He was using it in much the same way.
Curious, Maas went outside (and politely) asked the men what kind of silliness they were engaged in. As it turns out, they were with the local energy company, and searching for gas leaks that might spring from the newly laid pipes under the road.
As it turns out, portable gas leak detectors, even today, do have a resemblance to carpet sweeps. When Maas asked why the fuck they were doing it at night, of all times, the reply was simple - less gas was being used at night, which meant that the pressure in the pipes was lower, and therefor, a potential problematic gas leak could be detected easier.
To confirm if this may or may not have been the case, NOBOVA reached out to the utility company ObraGas, which was the regional gas provider to the Uden area. While this was a good attempt at serious investigation, it was ultimately for naught; ObraGas relayed that they destroyed internal documents over ten years old, presumably because this was the era of filing cabinets with limited space. As the year was, by then, 1985, and the incident had taken place in 1973… no dice.
Now, Maas’s theory is… plausible. If, of course, you discount the robes, the hoods, the fact the strangers were three feet fucking tall, the fact they skadoodled the moment they were seen, and also, oh, I dunno - the giant red ball of light. None of which Maas addressed.
One might supposed it was perhaps a passing ambulance with the siren lights on but the noise on mute. They are pretty bright. Or maybe it was a byproduct of whatever gas leak the trio were out hunting for.
I dunno.
Interestingly, Dutch UFO researcher Bram Roza, who’s article on this incident is proving to be an invaluable resource, said that, after publishing his article on the case, he happened to have a fortuitous meeting with a man from his own energy company doing - what else? - sweeping the street for gas leaks. According to this fellow, however, the sweep-style detectors were not in use in 1973. He also said that, to his knowledge, most gas leak searches were not done at night.
Curious.
Another potential explanation was posited by one Hans van Kampen in 1980. This was not the first time van Kampen had taken a stab at the Uden case; in his 19783 book, UFOs Over the Low Countries, van Kampen wrote that Ann had seen a flying saucer in her backyard, crewed by a brigade of little green assholes who were rooting up her turnips to take soil samples before popping back into their flying dish and fucking off. Needless to say, Ann never reported anything of the sort, which begs the question of why van Kampen - who seems to be a serious UFO investigator, not a skeptic - would fabricate such hyperbolic claims. As Roza contemplates, For me [sic]4 pure ridicule, or at least severe exaggeration
But, in van Kampen’s 1980 book, Ghostlight, he seems to take a more serious look at the Uden case, now basing his study of it directly from Douwe Bosga’s interviews with Ann rather than sensational exaggerations he might have read in a magazine.
Now, Ann’s encounter took place on November 10th, right? Well, as it turns out, November 11th - 11/11 - and specifically around 11:11 AM, is when Dutch Carnival season begins.
Didn’t know the Dutch had their own Carnival? Yeah, neither did I. Much like the much bigger, much flashier, and much more famous Carnivals of Brazil, Italy, Spain, and pretty much anywhere else, it’s a big, raucous, noisy-ass party where everyone dresses up in goofy costumes and gets unconscionably nackered. Unlike Brazil, though, there seems to be less cinnamon-skinned baddies in next to no clothing and a lot of tropical feathers… and a lot more cross-dressing.
Something about inverting societal roles, or some such. I don’t get it, but I’m also not European. Or Catholic. Because Carnival is, at it’s roots, a Catholic thing that’s intended to close out the Lenten season. Now, the Netherlands is not a Catholic country. In fact, it’s pretty infamous for being one of the most staunch Protestant strongholds in Continental Europe, back when they were slaughtering each other wholesale over that sort of thing…
Except for the southeastern regions of the country. Those were Catholic holdouts. And it’s also where the Carnival tradition is the strongest in the Netherlands. Now… what region of the Netherlands is Northern Brabant in?
For being Northern Brabant, it looks like it’s in the southern part of the country, to me5.
Now, you might be wondering why the fuck any of this matters. Okay, so, there’s a big ass party that took place where people get drunk. So what? Well, there’s a certain tradition among the Brabant…ese? Yeah, Brabantese have this specific tradition in their Carnival called the Carnival Prince, who is accompanied by an Elf Council. The Prince and his comrade elves are denoted by wearing grand, ostentatious headwear, but Roza notes that, at smaller Carnival celebrations in Brabant, where things are a little more toned down… well, those hats might be a bit more simple. And a bit more white.
It is entirely reasonable to posit that what Ann saw were not invaders from beyond the stars up to no good, but rather a trio of drunken revelers - perhaps the Carnival Prince of Uden and his elven chums - staggering back to their homes after a long night of drinking. The Carnival Prince usually carries a scepter; maybe he, drunk as he was, had begun to use it as an ad hoc walking stick? Likewise, it could have been a group of costumed children who were out after their bedtime and fled for fear of being caught. It would explain their diminutive heights. It stands to reason that Ann might have misidentified what she saw on the street, what with being groggy, bleary-eyed, and still waking up.
Yet, it’s still not a perfect explanation. After all, the Dutch Carnival season begins on November 11th - not the 10th. One would also think that, with the celebration being as big as it is, Ann Dolphijn would have known it was about that time that people started dressing up and going bonkers.
Oh, and did we forget?
Right - big ball of red light.
Still not getting any good explanations for that one.
Now, for the moment, let’s just humor that idea that, yeah - it was drunken assholes dressed like elven jesters or gas company employees burning the midnight oil, and the whole light thing? Pure hallucination. Just a fifty-five year old woman’s imagination playing tricks on her or a passing car or whatever. Case closed.
But that still wouldn’t explain what happened in Vilvoorde, Belgium, only a month later. Now, Vilvoorde is also in Brabant. Flemish Brabant, that is. In Belgium. There’s a couple Brabants, okay?
Anyways, across the border, only 153 kilometers from Uden, a twenty-eight year old man was, like Ann, up at the very same time - roughly two AM - to heed the call of nature. Unlike Ann, however, he didn’t even make it to the pisser before his midnight call to action was interrupted by a sickly green glow creeping through the curtains of his window, accompanied by odd, metallic sounds.
Drawing back the curtains, this Belgian man most likely had the fortitude of his bladder tested as he saw a little asshole - again, no more than three feet tall - strolling through his backyard. And wouldn’t you know it? It even had a little carpet sweeper device.
Now, this is where the similarities with the Uden sighting end, as unlike the hooded figures Ann saw, this Belgian guy reported that this particularly interloper was wearing a metallic suit with a clear helmet, and when realized it had been spotted, looked at him with luminous, yellow eyes. Like the Uden strangers, this space-dick fled from sight by walking up and over the garden wall.
And I do mean walking up the wall. Here’s an illustration provided by he researchers who investigated the case.
Oh, and the witness also saw a little buzzing saucer rise above the wall moments later and jet off into parts unknown. As one does.
As best I understand it, what with the limited sources I have to work with, it appears that the investigator into this case, one Franck Boitte, was less than convinced of this story. The witness, apparently, was a former employee or associate of the Société Belge d’étude des Phénoménes Spatiaux - a Belgian UFO research group - and had previously claimed to see rather… fantastical things in the past. While it doesn’t seem if Boitte completely wrote off the story, he didn’t put much stock in it, either, and just left the case as a kind of…
I understand Boitte’s hesitancy to vouch for this story, given that the witness appears to be less reliable and prone to fancy than Ann Dolphijn, but, at the same time… kinda strange how the whole little guy with a carpet sweeper thing turned up twice, in less than a month, and so close together, even before Dolphijn’s account was made public.
And if you can believe it - that wasn’t the only report of what I’m now going to refer to as an interesting sweeper type character.
Oh, no.
In fact, there was another seen that very same month - November, 1973. And this time, it wasn’t just seen by one person. As the account goes, four young women were driving along a highway one night, y’know, going into the city to presumably do some #hotgirlshit when their merriment was brought to an abrupt halt by a ball of light, hovering in the sky. The color was not specified, but these women did report that, as they drove under the light, it began to hover over them, following them for miles as they drove. Personally, I’m not sure what I would have done in this situation, since stopping the car and getting out seems equally as questionable as simply driving with a giant, unidentified ball of light hovering over your car. There’s no good option, there.
At some point as they drove, the women reported that the road became flooded with a pink mist, which seemingly materialized out of nothing and engulfed both their car, the highway, and all the other cars on it. How many that was, they don’t say, but driving blind through a pink alien fart cloud sounds… dangerous, to say the least.
Again, how long this mist persisted, and if any of the other motorists collided with one another is not stated, but, at some point - hopefully not long - they did manage to escape the Cloud of Unknowing. And who’s waiting for them on the other side?
Well, if you guessed a strange little guy, shuffling slowly, with a street-sweeping device, congratulations! You get nothing but the satisfaction of knowing that you’re pattern recognition capabilities are still intact. You’d be surprised how many folks aren’t, these days.
Now, the women did not describe how this interesting sweeper type character was dressed, but they did say he was alone, and that he was following the white-lines painted on the road to divide the lanes. Obviously, one might be predisposed to say that this was some kind of highway worker, but… well, unless he had his airpods in and head down as he moseyed down a busy highway with cars speeding by - which they were - I just don’t think that’s a good answer. Especially because airpods were about fifty years away from being invented. Give or take.
As if this story wasn’t weird enough, the women reported that, just beyond the mist, they saw a car parked along the side of the road, surrounded by three seemingly human men that appeared to just be… watching the scene unfold. Men that were conspicuously wearing… well, you probably already know.
This account was first popularized in a book by one Claude MacDuff in his 1975 book, Le Procés de Soucoupes Volantes - or The Process of Flying Saucers. Now, if you know the first thing about foreign languages, that title sounds awful French, doesn’t it? Well, it is. But this story comes to us from the Great White North, where a not-insignificant amount of people just so happen to speak French. This women were not driving from Calais to Gay Paris, but rather, Sorel-Tracy to Montreal - a city that’s a whole 5,571 kilometers as the crow flies from Uden.
Now, if I had a nickel for every time a little asshole with a street-sweeping device was seen along with UFOlogical phenomenon… I’d only have three nickels, but it’s really, really bizarre that it happened three times. Regardless of the reliability of the latter two cases, the striking similarities between them and the Uden sighting can’t be dismissed - especially when both occurred well before Ann Dolphijn’s account was ever widely publicized.
Ann Dolphijn’s encounter with the hooded figures in Uden is one that, as I say about every paranormal incident I write about, fascinated me from the moment I first heard about it. I chose to study it further because the first exposure I had to it was a short, AI-Generated YouTube video I didn’t mean to watch. It sounded more than anything like a Creepypasta, so, I had to find out if it was real. Upon further research, I found that the case has been largely neglected and overlooked by the usual peanut gallery of paranormal content creators. Most likely because sources in English are almost nonexistent6.
But, like so many other obscure figures in the annals of UFO history, the carpet-sweep-carrying dwarf is Big in Japan. The mystery man turned up as a character named Soujiki7 in a series of collectible figures called Chocovaders in 2002. The basic gimmick is kind of like Kinderegg; buy a chocolate egg, eat it, and there’s a little plastic ghoulie or goblin inside, each of them based off a famous figure in UFO lore. Later, the series would spawn a card game, video games, so on and so forth, keeping the legacy of Ann’s encounter alive… in Japan.
But it’s not just the story’s relative obscurity in the Anglosphere that piqued my curiosity.
In previous articles I’ve written about the paranormal, like All-Colors, Sam, and the Vanishing Boy of Manila, as well as my conversation with
(which can be found here), I made a point to state that there’s a certain threshold of weird that lend a report of high strangeness an air of greater authenticity. For example, if someone gives a report that they were walking down the street and, Oh my God, this giant flying saucer appeared overhead! And grey aliens came out! And they - and they used a ray-gun to blast a trashcan into atoms, and then - then bigfoot showed up and knocked beat them to a pulp - but they killed bigfoot right in front of me.Yeah, I’m not buying it. It’s just too much. And while the above example is a bit hyperbolic, there are many, many accounts of, say, alien encounters that read not too dissimilar. They’re just too… grandiose to take seriously. And, usually in those cases, the witnesses are wringing every bit of clout out of their stories as they can manage.
Conversely, what grabbed my attention in the two aforementioned cases is the accounts possess such granular detail of seemingly important things that one can’t help but believe that someone would just make them up. It seems odd to me that if Ann was a hoaxster, she would have decided the hooded figure’s instrument of choice was, of all things, a carpet sweeper. That’s just one of the many little details that paint a very stark picture of what occurred that night.
Obviously, it’s impossible to say whether Ann or any of the other witnesses really saw what they saw, or if they did see something, it was, as most assume, extraterrestrial in origin. One of the more fascinating aspects of cases from around this time is that almost all of them are chalked up to alien activity without consideration of any other alternative. Even though the Uden incident was largely seen as an extension of the UFOlogical phenomenon and handled by UFO researchers, viewing it through such a lens is to do so with a narrow mind; given the nature of such encounters and sightings, it could have very well been demonic, spiritual, ultraterrestrial, cryptozoological, or, as I always like to say… say it with me now.
Fairies. Look, you guys know me by now, I’m always gonna bring that up as a possibility when it comes to these things.
Let’s briefly touch back on CUFOS founder, J. Allen Hynek. In an interview with People Magazine, he stated the following when speaking about his distaste for reports of humanoid encounters and alien abductions:
Yet, later that very same month, he said this in another interview.
I stated before, Hynek did not like that so many of his colleagues found themselves preoccupied with incredible accounts of those who had encountered humanoids or claimed to be abducted by aliens - what he classified as Close Encounters of the Third Kind. As a dedicated man of hard science, he saw it as wasted time and effort to scrutinize reports that could never truly be substantiated in any meaningful way. While I don’t necessarily agree, I do understand why a man who was, first and foremost, a serious scientist would become frustrated with his colleague’s preoccupation with chalking up every unexplainable phenomenon they encountered to aliens. As he told the attendees of the first International UFO Conference in Chicago, 1977 -
“I do believe that the UFO phenomenon as a whole is real, but I do not mean necessarily that it's just one thing.”
What I’m saying is that, when it comes to studying the paranormal in whatever form it may take, we should always keep an open mind about whatever’s behind the hood, holding the carpet sweeper might be... if it’s even anything at all. We do ourselves a disservice to always jump to one conclusion or another. I’d reckon that, if there is actually something behind these incidents, sightings, and encounters… well, keeping us blinded, locked within ideological ghettos of presupposition is probably what it wants us.
Maybe keeping us confused and quarreling is the entire point.
Or, maybe a Dutch woman simply woke up one morning to use the bathroom, and, through her bleary eyes, saw a team of utility workers searching for a gas leak on an unpaved road.
We’ll probably never know.
I don’t know how this is actually pronounced in Dutch but I’m reading it as Delphine, which is giving me an awful image in my head of a certain infamous e-girl.
I know it sure as shit is in Japan, even in this day.
Roza cites the book as being published in 1973, but I’m fairly confident this is a typo, as not only did every edition of the book I found for sale state the year of publication as 1978, but also, the case itself occured in 1973 and, by all accounts, was not made public in any capacity until Edmund Muyer wrote to CUFOS in 1974.
Keep in mind that Google’s Auto-Translate is not perfect, and I’m pretty sure that Roza meant something like, To me it seems to be.
Yes, yes, I know it’s Northern Brabant because it’s north of Flemish Brabant in Belgium.
Japanese for vacuum cleaner.
I mean this sincerely and as someone who very much enjoyed early X-Files: you should adopt Fox Mulder as an avatar.
I watched about 30 seconds of The Amazing Digital Circus and blocked it on every app and device in the house. I’d rather watch 12 hours of Italian Brainrot. Actually, no. I’d rather be decapitated with a shovel.