CHAPTER SEVEN- Signs On A Beach
“FLYING SAUCER OVER HAIFA”
Yesterday,a flying saucer was seen over the skies of Haifa. It flew high above Mount Carmel. Witnesses described the saucer seeing two ellipsoid objects.The mysterious objects were seen by a group of students and their teachers in Acco. The youths followed the saucers by foot for two minutes.
One colonel claimed the objects flew in a flexible double-formation,one after another and then horizontally. This is the second appearance of flying saucers over the country.The first was also over Haifa.
Given the complexity of other accounts,this is hardly an exciting item.
Except that it was the headline story of the national daily newspaper, Maariv on Dec.25,1952. The two Haifa sightings were Israel’s first and only flap until 1987. Then,as before,the location of a grand wave of sightings was Haifa.
The Haifa sightings were followed in the next six years by the fabulous experiences in Bet Shean,Tiberius,Kadima,Burgata and Fardis.The majority of incidents were within a five hundred square mile triangle of northern Israel with Haifa,Tiberius and Kadima its points.
Pragamatic Israeli ufologists are stumped by the concentration of encounters within such a specific area and have tried to work out the attraction. One possibility is based on reports that Israel’s nuclear arsenal is,in part,stored at a large air base near Bet Shean. The problem with the theory is that the same reports claim that much of the nuclear storage is in the south of the country at Tel Nof Air Base and under the grounds of the Dimona nuclear reactor.
Another possible attraction is the thick radar cover of northern Israel and the resulting concentration of signals. But that doesn’t begin to explain the visitations at Kadima and Burgata.
In short,the pragmatists don’t have the answer while the mystics claim they do. The leading UFO mystics in the country are Ami Achrai and the legendary Hadassah Arbel. The pragmatists view both as an embarassment.
Arbel is described over and over as a pioneer of Israeli ufology and those who followed in her footsteps are deeply grateful for her initial contribution. What they don’t like is her reaction to her decade of UFO research. Hadassah Arbel has become a very religious Jewess who believes the current UFO wave is being led by the very God and his angels of ancient Israel. Her most famous protege,Ami Achrai believes he was chosen by a UFO to be a prophet in modern Israel.
Doron Rotem calls Achrai,”A fraud. Sure,he had a convincing encounter,but he drew all the wrong conclusions from it.” Other ufologists poohpooh Arbel and Achrai but,in fact,they are not easy to write off. And they are not the only mystics that can’t be ignored. Internationally famous Israeli psychics and healers such as Uri Geller and Zeev Kullman claim that they gained their powers after UFO encounters. Both men’s unique gifts have been demonstrated for too long for them to be called simple charlatans.
The same holds true for Arbel and Achrai. Arbel has gathered more data on local encounters than anyone in the country. Achrai was the sole witness of the most legendary of all Israeli UFO incidents. While,the author of this book chose not to document mystical contacts,the opinions of Arbel and Achrai do not fall precisely into that category.
The first sighting of the most recent Haifa wave was at 7:25,September 23,1987.The witnesses were Yaacov Buzhinski and Israel Gal who viewed the object two miles away from each other. They saw a soundless disc-shaped object the size of a 747 flying over the suburb of Neve Yaacov. The next night,the object returned,this time flying only 400 meters above the ground.
It was a saucer-shaped craft,gold and brown in color. Buzhinski saw it dive toward a building and just a few feet before it was set to crash,it turned sharply up.
The encounter was so dramatic that Buzhinski contacted the police,thus alerting local reporters. Initially, he was the object of ridicule but over the next few weeks,there were at least,eight publicized encounters by credible people. But no incident gained such worldwide exposure as that of Ami Achrai.
At 10:25 PM,September 28,1987 an auto Mechanic named Amiel (Ami) Achrai was driving on the coastal road of Israel. On the southern outskirts of Haifa, at a place known as Elijah’s Gate,Ami noticed what he thought was a helicopter about to crash about a hundred feet to his left on the sands of Shikmona Beach.
He stopped his car in the middle of the road and got out.Now he had a chance to stare at his “helicopter.” It was some 25 feet in diameter, disc- shaped with a banana-like profile,and it spun counter- clockwise.The craft sparkled as it flew and emitted occasional flashes.Beneath the object was a round red light.The craft made a loud noise like a compressed-air pump and it kicked up a windstorm that Achrai described as,”a typhoon.”
Ami stared at the craft for fifteen seconds until it dropped a load of,”charcoals,” then disappeared. He looked around him for fellow witnesses and noticed the highway,which is usually a scene of constant traffic, was empty. He decided to run to a nearby service station to seek human contact.
After just a few steps,the object reappeared somewhat to the north. This time it fell to only 20 meters above the beach and an impressive red beam or flash descended from the craft to the sands below. In a few seconds,the ship flew west over the Mediterranean and became a small orange point of light until it disappeared for good.
That was Ami Achrai’s encounter and it lasted less than a minute. What followed would change his life and turn Shikmona Beach into a such a shrine that Shirley Maclain made a pilgrimmage to the spot.
Ami returned home and for the next two days couldn’t sleep. He called the police to report the sighting but they ignored him and suggested he contact Hadassah Arbel. She took his evidence over the phone and turned down a personal meeting.
For the two days following, Ami suffered from devastating headaches in the temples,chills and weakness. Though he hated apples,he ate fifteen at a time to relieve the headaches. For some reason,the system worked. His eyes itched terribly and he couldn’t watch television without crying. His lips dried up and no amount of liquid intake cured the condition. In short,his physiology was altered by the experience with the UFO. On Yom Kippur evening,five days after the encounter,he made a decision to revisit Shikmona Beach.
The next day he began to explore the area. He located the spot where the UFO had dropped the “charcoals,” and found the area strangely burnt. For instance,plastic bottles were melted flat,in nearly perfect circles and only their rims were charred. He saw a strange red rock and picked it up. It changed color immediately to white and then fell apart in his hands,becoming finally,a white powder with the consistency of flour.
He reported his findings to Arbel and the next day at 3:00,they went exploring Shikmona Beach together. Arbel was overwhelmed by the site and spent time gathering evidence and putting it in bags. They were about the depart when according to Ami,”A voice told me,’you’re not finished yet.’I walked,as if guided, north and then found the imprint of the ship.”
What Arbel and Achrai discovered was one of the most enduring proofs of UFO existence ever reported.Standing on a dune overlooking a patch of thorny weeds,Achrai saw a sideview of his UFO burned into the sand.
He called Arbel over and she was astounded. An imprint of a fifteen meter long UFO was scorched into the sand. The overall shape was like a slightly angled boomerang,corresponding with Achrai’s orginal report that the side-view of the UFO he witnessed was banana- shaped.Its size,ten meters by four,also corresponded with Achrai’s original estimate.
As if this sight wasn’t exhilarating enough,Achrai spotted the driver of the UFO. Although most of the weeds were destroyed in the flash, some were still growing in eight patches. They formed dinstict patterns. There were five circles of about a foot’s diameter.Four were found in concentric dips underneath the imprint lined up in twos,while one was in the center on top.
On the right side of the imprint near the tip were three images. Farthest left was spade shape ,near the tip,two rectangles stood upright and in the middle was the seated astronaut,facing the rectangles.
Arbel and Achrai descended to the beach and started initial experiments.
First the ufonaut was measured. He would have stood three and a half feet tall,in line with reports worldwide of a common race of aliens. Arbel threw sand in one of the holes and was amazed to witness the sand being pushed back out by some invisible force. Later,other investigators would fill the holes with sand and only to find the holes in their original form within hours. She filled some nylon bags with the scorched sand and went to work reporting her find.
She notified the police and this time,they investigated.Shortly after the astounded policeman handed in their preliminary report,Arbel was ordered by the station commander to keep mum about the incident. She refused and notified the press and a scientist from the Technion Institute,Israel’s version of MIT,located in Haifa.
He took measurements of the scorched sand and found its level of magnetism to be 6,000 times higher than the surrounding ground. He made a report to Arbel which is still considered one of the strongest arguments for a UFO encounter of a very strange kind at Shikmona Beach. Stronger yet was the visible fact of the imprint.Even the greatest skeptics of Israel’s academic community quoted in the media,could not plausibly explain how the sand was burned to the texture of finely ground charcoal nor why anyone would do it.
The ufologist’s explanation was that the sand was charred with micro-waves.
Arbel’s initial conclusion was that the craft had trouble with its magnetic system and either accidentally took a magnetic picture of itself or deliberately did so to build up power.
Within a day of the discovery,journalists visited the site,some of whom reported chapped lips after. Within two days,Shikmona had become a tourist attraction drawing thousands of people and even an ice-cream truck to refresh the curious. None of the subsequent encounters was ever the national news story that Shikmona became. Overnight,Ami Achrai become a media star.
But life was not easy for the new celebrity. He was undergoing terrifying changes. When he slept,he felt electric charges throughout his body. Two black spots grew under his lower eye-lashes. The strangest physical reaction was a small hard ball that grew on his chest. Ami cut the ball off and,”I gave it to my father. He put it on the floor of his balcony and we,my father,wife,kids,watched it start bouncing on its own.”
Then one evening Ami was enjoying a slice of watermelon when his spoon started wagging from side to side. In time he would bend knives at will,a la Uri Geller.
Most confusing of all was the appearance of letters and shapes before his eyes at most inopportune times,like when he was driving or working. By now Achrai thought he was going insane and he sought answers.
The papers reported his hallucinations and printed his sketches of what he was seeing. Strangers recognized the letters and shapes.Some of the letters were of Sinai script,the earliest form of written Hebrew,and the shapes resembled blood cells.
“I wasn’t an educated person,”Achrai admits.”I never read and I’m not proud of that. But I started reading books about medicine,biology and ancient script to get to the bottom of my visions.”
Life was not simple for his pretty wife,Aviva. She thought her husband went mad,until,as she explains,”We were driving along the coast and it happened to me. The whole windshield was covered with letters and shapes. I told Ami to stop the car. I got out and the sky was full of them. I couldn’t get rid of them.”
Next to be afflicted with visions of letters was his father. Then his daughter started drawing them at nursery school.Achrai came to the logical conclusion that he was emitting some kind of force that affected people near him. He just didn’t understand why.
A ufologist called him and told him to read Ezekiel,Chapter One for some answers. “I read it,”Ami recalls,”and there was my UFO. The same one Ezekiel described.”
Ami turned religious,not fanatically but faithfully.He came to the conclusion after much consideration that he was a prophet,a modern day Ezekiel with a mission. He was to heal the sick and bring morality to the world.To this end he began conducting healing sessions and people reported miracles. Today he conducts four groups a week in front of hundreds of people who claim to see letters and symbols emitted from Ami’s face. A long list of people claim to have been relieved or cured of sundry ailments by Ami’s power.
Arbel was changing too. In 1988,I called her hoping to sell the Shikmona story to,say,the National Enquirer. Even then,her explanation for the encounter was religious. Overlooking Shikmona Beach is Elijah’s Cave. On that spot Elijah is traditionally believed to have challenged the baal worshippers to a duel of the gods. Two bulls were slaughtered and Elijah dared the heathens’god to roast them. After baal failed,Elijah’s God sent a flash from the sky and presto,instant supper.Elijah,of course,was later carried to his final destination in a whirlwind.
None of this was lost on Arbel who told me,”The spot where Ami saw the UFO was known to the crew. Their people had been there 2,500 years before and they were back again.”
After the famous sighting in the Jezreel Valley,Arbel correctly noted that the UFO hovered minutes from Har Meggido,known in English as Armageddon and connected that incident to the war between Gog and Magog. Her conviction is that the wave of encounters will end in Jerusalem.
Ami Achrai is a very sincere,likeable gentleman.He told his story for the umpteenth time with great enthusiasm and I appreciated the time he spent helping me get my facts correct. With him were two workers from his garage,there to install electric wiring in his newly refitted kitchen.
Joining him later was a beautiful middle-aged woman from Nahariya,thirty miles north,who purportedly arrived to see the kitchen.
The workers confirmed what the press had been reporting;UFOs were overflying Ami’s garage with some frequency and fellow workers had seen them. The pretty visitor confirmed that she saw forms emitted from Ami’s face and was a confirmed follower of his.
His philosophy is simple;if mankind does not learn to love and respect each other,we’re all doomed. And he knows when the day of destruction will arrive but has been ordered not to reveal it.
Ami can turn on his power or switch into “neutral”. He used the terminology of a mechanic to describe many of his experiences.He agreed to treat me to a display.
I admit,I was tired. It was the end of a long day of interviews and driving.
But I did allow myself to stare at his temples until my mind was relaxed and I did feel a drug-like stupor and thought I saw a UFO on his right temple.
But I gave no sign of being anything other than the skeptical reporter.
As a parting gift,he gave me a small bag of charred Shikmona Beach UFO sand.
I rubbed it on my hands and I thought I felt an electrical charge. What confused me more was that this was sand,yet it stuck to the skin and couldn’t be removed without considerable effort.The next morning,a film of the material still covered the skin and my hands were puckered.
I left his home and began the long journey back to my family in Bet Shemesh,two and a half hours away. I pushed down the cigarette lighter and it never popped up. Next to go were my lights.They were dimmed to about 10% of normal illumination. Finally,my windshield wipers slowed down to a wipe every ten seconds or so. I had bought a new battery just three months ago and it couldn’t be dying. Nonetheless,I switched the wipers off when the rain lapsed to conserve power and they started to wipe the windshield. When I switched them back on,they stopped.
I was determined to make my way home anyway,and followed the cat’s eyes of the highway to a garage and filled up. I removed the key and after,the car would not start.Two attendants pushed it and it jump- started. By now I was going to ditch the ultra-magnetic sand but I came up with a different strategy. Doron Rotem had to record the phenomenon and I made my way to his home in Kiron,eighty miles away. He would later tell me,”It’s a rainy night.
Cars short out when it’s this wet out. Don’t jump to conclusions so quickly.”
The next morning I took my car into an electric repair shop. The source of my problem was a loose alternator belt.I asked the mechanic if that is a common problem.He answered,”Not really but it happens.”
My conclusion; it was all coincidence.
But Ami’s sighting on Shikmona Beach wasn’t. The events there continued to astound.On June 6,1988, the story of a Haifa teenager,Naveh Navi appeared in Israel’s papers. Two and a half weeks earlier she saw a large UFO hover over the Mediterranean. She rushed to the closest police station and reported her sighting. The policemen ignored her. Like Ami Achrai she felt driven to search for clues. And like Ami Achrai she found the answer on Shikmona Beach. One hundred yards from Ami’s famous imprint, was one of her own.
Naveh’s UFO was scorched into the sand.It was fifteen meters long and six meters high. The bottom half was shaped like the previous imprint but this time a cone shaped roof was clearly visible. The number of holes was reduced from five to three.The large one rested in the middle of the imprint and two smaller holes were located on either side under it.
Naveh turned to Hadassah Arbel to investigate and two weeks later,Arbel released news of the landing to the media. It did not have nearly the impact of the first Shikmona Beach encounter. Nor did Naveh report the same drastic bodily changes as Achrai had experienced.
At about the same time. Arbel made an exploratory trip to Elijah’s Cave,just above the two UFOs embossed into the sand and made a remarkable discovery.
Imprinted into the wall of the cave wasdrawing of the UFO shape recently left on the beach below. The resemblence of the 2,500 year old drawing with the recent imprints was more than uncanny,it was spooky.
Even spookier was the next incident at Shikmona Beach. At 2:30 AM on a warm Satuday morning in late April,1989,two teenagers,Ida Biderman and Alon Eilat,searched for a quiet nook on deserted Shikmona Beach,it is assumed,to make love. Suddenly,a huge glowing object,which they described as,”a pillar of fire,” fell noiselessly on the sands near them. They saw the object falling for six seconds and guessed its length to be twenty meters and its width,six meters. The object burst into flames that reached fifteen meters into the sky.
The couple ran to the crash site but were turned back ten meters away by the heat emitted.The flames died down ten minutes later and what remained of the wreckage were elliptical shaped shards of an unidentifiable material which continued to burn. The couple tried to extinguish one shard by throwing sand on it but this caused flames to shoot up and increased the material’s apparant flammability.
A short time later a police squad car arrived,transporting Hadassah Arbel to the site. She reported that,”The shards were still burning and when we threw rocks at them,they transformed into a flour-like material.Many of the shards fell into the water and though they were glowing,they weren’t hot.
The next day,ten hours after the crash,the private UFO investigators, including Avi Grief, arrived. Though the shards had been immersed in the Mediterranean for almost half a day,their internal fires flared on. Grief photographed the fiery material and the pictures as seen today,are lasting testimony to a UFO crash on Shikmona Beach.
The shards were examined by Professor Shavit of the Technion and found to be magnesium. In 1957,a UFO crashed just offshore from a crowded Brazilian beach leaving hundreds of glowing shards in the water. They were tested and found to be 100% pure magnesium,which could not be produced on Earth with the technology of the time. This was the earliest identification of UFO material and the incident is viewed as a classic of ufology.
On two occasions within nine months,UFOs left their marks,literally,on Shikmonah Beach. On the third occasion,ten months later,either the craft crashed or another spectacular message was left.Now the obvious question, why did the UFOs return three times to Shikmona Beach? The question is as confusing as why the UFOs landed three times in the field behind Tsipora Carmels house.
The practical Israeli ufologists are stumped. Another group think they know the answer;the angels have returned.