Former MUFON state president Kasher felt that decision was appropriate.
“Some people would not like it that people know that they’re saying they saw UFOs and stuff. The stigma of saying something weird happened,” according to Kasher.
Among the UFO investigations reviewed:
Ernest Dahlke called the Hamilton County Sheriff to report a bright white light dropping from the sky outside his bedroom window.In Grand Island, teenager Kevin Aldridge grabbed his camera when he saw an oblong object crossing the sky for almost four minutes. He actually got his photos published in the local newspaper.Farmer L.J. Garrison and his wife in Burwell asked MUFON to investigate their UFO sighting from 1953. On their Sandhills ranch they watched two amazingly bright objects float in the southern sky, connected by a beam of light.
“You can’t say that all that stuff is nonsense,” said Kasher. “Some of them are really strong cases, so it’s good to have those out.”
In one case from 1973, a science teacher in central Nebraska saw a hovering object in his backyard that seemed to rocket away quickly. The teacher took notes and included some decent photos. Kral and the team picked apart every earthly option. They analyzed the photos for evidence of “trickery” and found none. As a result, the team came up with a rare “unexplained” designation. In this community, “unexplained” equals “we don’t know.”
Of the dozens of sightings investigated by MUFON, only three or four of the flying objects were ultimately unidentified. None could be considered extra-terrestrial.
Included with most reports are hand-typed letters from Kral to the Nebraskan requesting the UFO investigation. He lays out in detail why his investigators concluded their sighting was not an alien encounter. Instead, after reviewing weather reports, star charts and aviation records, there was only evidence of bright planets, or a weather balloon or a visiting helicopter.
Kasher considers the follow-up letter “a really good thing to be doing instead of slanting it” in a way the person making the report hoped it would turn out.
“Some people may be overly wanting to have a really good case, and maybe they embellish it a little bit.”
After Kral stepped away from MUFON, he told a reporter with the Omaha World-Herald that investigating UFO sightings had taught him about “the unreliability of eyewitnesses.”
“I’m disappointed (Earl) became somewhat of a skeptic,” Kasher said. His friends’ early enthusiasm for the potential for real alien encounters “somehow… melted away.”
As his interest in UFOs waned, Kral took on a new and equally obtuse interest: paranormal encounters.
In the 1980s, he donated $10,000 of his own money to the University of Nebraska Foundation to establish the Scientific Claims Investigation Hotline. Interesting reports of incidents that initially seemed inexplicable by conventional science were assigned for investigation.
Topics in those reports range from haunted houses to mysterious crop circles.
The material he collected is one of the oddest sets of papers ever shelved in the University of Nebraska archives, said Ducey, the special collections librarian.
“That’s what we do, is we collect research materials that may be of interest to other people,” Ducey said. “This is a fascinating area to think about for many people. We don’t understand it. Let’s see what we can learn from somebody who tried to understand it.”
She said it will be fascinating to see how writers and researchers will make use of such a unique collection.
Anyone interested in viewing collection can contact the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s library department.