CHAPTER THREE: Meetings With The Visitors
Four miles southeast of Kadima is the small moshav of Burgata. If the full story of Burgata was released, Kadima would become a minor episode in recent Israeli UFO history.
But the moshav has put a clamp-down on its citizens.In order to put together the events of the town I had to depend on notes taken by Doron Rotem while people were still willing to talk to outsiders, a videotape of Hanna Samech recorded by Doron and a videotape of a resident named Dorit recorded by a policeman named Yosef Sari, who filmed a short history of the area’s encounters,purportedly for private purposes.
According to the sources available,in 1991 an eleven year old boy of Yemenite origin disappeared for half a day while walking home from school.
When he finally returned to his hysterical parents late at night,he forgot why he was late and had no recollection of his previous hours.
Two weeks later, it all came back. He was abducted by giants and taken into their lair. There he was medically examined and finally a small device was surgically inserted into his left arm near the wrist.
The boy told his parents the story and he was taken to a clinic where a small device was removed from his arm. His parents,at first,were not reluctant to relate this strange tale to neighbors and family. But after a spate of conversations with ufologists and curious friends, the father ordered the family to,thereafter, forget the episode ever occurred.
But the aura of mystery would not abandon the moshav. The story of the interrupted tape is well-known to local investigators. Dorit details the tale on Sari’s videotape.It begins with a middle-aged housewife driving home with her cassette player blaring music.
“Suddenly the music stops and a voice tells her not to worry,they are coming but not to be afraid when they do. Then the voice says it knows Burgata is a troubled place and recites the difficulties of various people.
“The driver didn’t understand what happened to her tape,so she shut it off and turned on her radio. The same voice was now on the radio telling her not to be afraid.
“The woman took out the tape and played it at home for friends. We heard the voice and the calming messages,the litany of town woes and then the tape stopped working altogether and for good.”
These are intriguing yarns and generally believed by the country’s UFO investigators. But without solid evidence,none are willing to report the stories or their feeling that Burgata is of great interest to extraterrestrials.
The story of Hanna Samech is a different matter. Her visitation is backed by physical evidence. Doron Rotem,Avi Grief and others investigated the 4.5 meter circle in her yard and found the red oil collected in Kadima. Avi Grief took photos of the Samech circle and when they were developed,a fluorescent looking triangle ruined the shots. The phenomenon is hard to explain. One sees the usual grasses dessicated and spinning clockwise yet in the midst of them is a bright triangular light,white in the middle,pink at the edge and surrounded by a blue glow. Grief was told this had to be a laboratory error,yet the lab denied it and the other pictures on the roll which were not of the circle came out unaffected.
Doron Rotem considers Hanna’s story totally believable. He is currently making a film about the recent UFO wave and recorded Hanna before the clampdown at the moshav. Now she wants to rerecord the whole thing,with her face covered.
Hanna Samech was visited after the Kadima wave passed. She is a middle-aged woman,perhaps in her late forties,who speaks in the Hebrew dialect known as Yekke, after the German Jews who brought their inflections to Israel two generations ago.
She talks about being woken at 3:AM (the preferred hour of visitations in
Israel) by the furious barking of her white poodle.She got up,walked to the kitchen,arriving just in time to see her dog flying several feet into the air before being smashed into the wall,landing hurt.
She walked outside and saw a being examining her pickup truck. He was over seven feet tall,had very pale skin,a round head,large round eyes and was wearing overalls of some silvery,metallic material. She was apparently too angry about her dog to be afraid,as she relates.
“I asked him,’What did you do to my dog?,” and he answered telepathically,”Go away,I’m busy.” I persisted asking him about the dog and must have made an expression that confused him because he answered,”Wipe that smirk off your face. I could hurt you too but I don’t want to. Just leave and let me work.”
Hanna walked inside and woke her husband. He phoned a friend, informed him there were intruders outside his house and asked him to rush over. The two of them drove throughout the moshav but by that time the visit was over. In the morning,they saw the circle and finally understood what must have happened the night before.
Doron is always amused by this tape.”He talked to her like a low- life greaser,”he notes. “It was a very natural encounter. The dog bothered him so he let him have it. That’s the kind of alien he was. Then Hanna interrupted him and he threatened the same thing but,in the end,didn’t hurt her.It’s a hint that the aliens respect us and have little regard for animals.”
The subject of animals is a source of some debate among Israeli ufologists.
At Kadima,one of Israel’s early UFO investigators,David Kornitz,found a dead rabbit emptied of blood but without any sign of bodily harm. He considered this one of Kadima’s strongest finds but the silicone and oil overshadowed it totally.
The theme of animals reoccurs in what both Rotem and Grief consider Israel’s most enticing encounter. The incident was discovered because of a number of encounters that occurred a hundred miles away in the Galilee region of northern Israel.
From January to May, hundreds of people were eye-witnesses to UFOs that not only flew over cities and towns but also into them.
In January, large UFO hovered over the Sea of Galilee at a height of two kilometers for two hours and was watched by hundreds of the city’s citizens including their police. But this was a minor prelude to the drama which would unfold less two months later later at an Arab village located halfway between Kadima and Haifa called Fardis.
The story is so fantastic that it is best related from a newspaper account that appeared in the country’s biggest daily,Yediot Ahronot;
Citizens of Fardis claim that in the past two weeks a UFO has taken control of their town. The craft looks like a cloud with a plate above it.
Accompanying it are powerful winds which have uprooted trees and blown the roofs off greenhouses. It appears out of nowhere and disappears within seconds.
According to a number of residents,the worst incident occurred two weeks ago and during it,a local fisherman was badly hurt.
Odeh Abu-Abd (25),a gardener says,”I left my house early in the morning and I saw a cloud moving quickly towards the town from the sea. Then it turned sharply and fell to the ground. As it did I heard all kinds of strange sounds.It was like an earthquake. Above the cloud was a huge dish.It suddenly flew at me full speed and I watched my neighbor’s large fruit trees fly in the air. Women and children nearby me rushed into their houses.
Mahmud Abu-Salakh added,”At five in the morning I left with my brother and friend to go fishing. Everything started normal. The weather was calm. When the boat was well offshore we saw a cloud dive at us from the sky. It circled us and we saw above it a huge dish. Quickly, we were in the midst of a windstorm and gigantic waves surrounded us. One wave,twenty four feet high swamped our boat. In my life I’ve never seen a wave that big on the Mediterranean. The wave swept me into the water with such force I felt my back break. My brother and friend pulled me out of the water just in time.
Elders of the town say that never has such a phenomenon been seen in the region.
A journalist from Fardis,Amash Basam,was driving just outside the town when the UFO swooped down toward his car.As he recalls,”The craft just missed me and flew directly in the direction of a barn. It seemed to crash into the barn and the building was smashed as it passed over.”
The residents of the town are Israeli Arabs,largely blue collar and hardly given to seeking national publicity,which is what they received, understandable in light of the heavy damage inflicted on the town.
This is the only known Israeli incident in which a UFO attacked people and property. Hadassah Arbel did not think the damage was deliberate. According to her theory,”The craft was having trouble building the power to switch from matter to anti-matter.”
On May 25, another UFO appeared in Tiberius and this time in full daylight.
The incident began when a young man returned to the town after visiting family in the nearby Golan Heights.It may be worth noting that on the Golan Heights is a 5,000 year old version of Stonehenge. It is a huge complex of circles made of thick rock walls. Its ancient purpose has befuddled Israeli archaeologists since its discovery in 1968,but the possibility of its having been an astronomical observatory is not discounted.
While the young man was travelling along the southern shore of the Sea of Galilee,a UFO dropped from the sky and followed him for almost half an hour.
Terrified,he stopped at a public phone and called the police. He told them,”I’m being followed by a light and it’s not a star. Hurry here.”
A squad car was rushed to the scene and saw a shiny,colorful object flying slowly above the car about a mile overhead. A policeman reported back to headquarters,”It’s moving slowly from north to south. It’s really a UFO.”
The UFO remained in the sky an additional twenty minutes before disappearing over the southern horizon. A policeman interviewed by the media recalled the January sighting,smirked and said,”I guess they like us here.”
As if the police admission that what they investigated was,in fact,a UFO and would be reported as such was not enough proof,a Tiberius man, Baruch Zvulun filmed the UFO on his video camera for a quarter of an hour. The next day his camera ceased operating and could not be repaired but the film of the UFO remained a clear and unarguable piece of evidence that a craft of unknown origin had visited the Galilee.
A mere five days later,the, or an object,was filmed twenty miles to the south by the Nazareth police department.At six in the morning of May 30, a Nazareth policeman relayed the following message from his squadcar to headquarters,”I see a shimmering body about two kilometer in the sky. It’s mostly staying still but occasionally it moves. I swear to you it’s a UFO.”
The message was passed directly to the northern command of the Israeli army and air force. At the crack of dawn,military personnel arrived at the scene and reported an unidentifiable body in the sky above Nazareth. At the same moment, photographers from two sections of the Nazareth police department,filmed the UFO. According to a report in Yediot Ahronot,”The film was was transferred to the army for inspection. The Israel Defence Forces has not yet released its findings.” Nor,as we shall see,will it ever.
By early June,1993,Israel was in the midst of an impressive and confusing UFO wave. In less than three months, UFOs were filmed in Tiberius and Nazareth,they had swooped down on the Arab town of Fardis,they had landed at least four times in Kadima and these were only the most publicized episodes.
The public was getting a bit edgy and it wanted answers.Israeli television host,Manny Peer tried to offer a few on his show in early June.
The guests included Doron Rotem,Avi Grief,Amash Basam,Baruch Zvulun,Shosh Yahud and Tsiporet Carmel. The audience was filled with UFO witnesses,most of whose evidence does not appear in this book,which concentrates only on the most powerful or publicized incidents.
As previously mentioned,the highlight of the program was Peer’s reading of the report by the government’s Geological Survey Institute on the composition of material found at Kadima. This was a rare instance in recent UFO history that a government agency has publicized findings and admitted there was no earthly explanation for them.
At the close of the show Peer requested that other UFO witnesses call the studio to speak with the gathered experts on the subject. Many did,but no story was so affecting as that of a bank teller from Rishon LeTzion, Batya Shimon.
In mid-May,the same race of aliens reported in Kadima and Burgata visited Rishon LeTzion,seventy miles south,on the Mediterranean coast.
3 A.M. is the preferred time of visitation in Israel. The visitors must have calculated the sleep patterns of the people of the planet and learned they were least likely to encounter opposition at that hour.
At three in the morning, Batya Shimon was awoken by strange lights outside her bedroom window. Unlike Tsipora Carmel,Shosh Yahud or Hanna Samech,Batya lives in a crowded neighborhood. Up til now,visitations had been restricted to isolated homes. Now the visitors, chose to see how people live in a city.
What may not be coincidental,is that the visitors chose as a witness another middle-aged housewife. Batya rose from her bed in fright at the sound of powerful banging coming from her living room. She walked into the room and saw twenty beings standing opposite her. She let out a scream but no sound was emitted.
In the morning she awoke to find every door of both closets and rooms opened but nothing was taken.A yellow sand that smelled like,”phosphorous” was spread on the kitchen and bathroom shelves. She then recalled what she had seen the night before. The visitors were over seven feet tall,wore clothing that shone like neon,had round faces,large round eyes,their noses were not pronounced,their mouths were small and circular,their heads were bald but they had black eyebrows.
Her husband had also seen the strange lights in the house but he thought,”he was dreaming that he was in my dream.”
For the third time in two months,the husband slept through a visitation while his wife was permitted to meet the travellers from another solar system. And as usual,the wife was put into a mild trance similar to a dream-state. By doing so,the witnesses believing they were dreaming,did not panic and went back to sleep when the guests departed. Why women were chosen over their husbands must remain a matter for speculation. Perhaps,they are less prone to violent reaction.
The next morning at three o’clock Batya was awoken by a strong light from the kitchen window. She rose and walked to the window. Looking out she saw a large “mushroom-shaped object with a clear door,” approach her from the sky.
A light was directed at her shoulder and it felt like a strong punch.
The next thing she knew she was back in her bed watching a tall visitor wave his hand slowly above her husband’s head. He telepathically told her to calm down and,”I had the feeling he was friendly to me.” Her feeling was reinforced when he told her,”We’re not here to harm you.”
While the visitor was in the bedroom,another was touring the rest of the house,not so much on foot,as floating upright.His legs did not move.His face was covered in a thin haze that obscured the details somewhat but Batya recognized both as the same race of guests that she had seen the previous night. This time,however,she noted more details.She looked at their hands and saw they were human but their skin was as light as an albino’s. Their clothes were also white but they,”shone like neon and were skin-fitting.”
Suddenly,the second visitor appeared opposite her bedroom door,just inside her son’s bedroom. He gestured his comrade to come and have a look at what he had found. The first being floated to the son’s room and both stared transfixed at the boy’s aquarium.
The visit lasted just a couple of minutes,when a beam of light shone through the kitchen window and they disappeared into it.
The next morning all the doors were again opened and the same sand,this time described as smelling like “sulphur” was spread over the shelves.
“What was so convincing,”recalls Grief,”was Batya herself. Like Shosh,she is a Sephardic housewife with no interest in the supernatural. Her main concern in life is her family and getting the bills paid. Then this happens and she doesn’t understand what is happening to her mind. That’s why she called after seeing the Peer show. She finally realized who her strange guests were and that she wasn’t alone.”
Grief thinks that the connection to animals may be part of the reason the beings chose to visit Batya.
“Once they found the fish,they became very excited and immediately after,left. That might have been their mission. Don’t forget about Hanna’s flying dog,Mara’s neighbor’s dog or the fact that Tsiporet raises Great Danes.And then there is the rabbit David Kornitz found that was bled white without any signs of wounds or incisions.Animals play too much of a role in the visitations to be ignored.”
By June,1993,reports of visitations ceased,however UFO sightings were a constant feature of the summer in Israel.The author wishes to offer two people as an example;his wife and friends.
In mid-August,on a hot evening at 9:30, I was driving to my friend Joel Bainerman’s house two minutes away. When I arrived,he rushed to me and said,”You won’t believe it but I just saw a UFO.” I ran to a clearing in his orchard and saw the small red object,no bigger than a large star,high in the sky moving,then stopping,then moving again to the north.
What Joel had seen was a red ball, not half a mile distant and no more than a few hundreds meters above the ground that made a loud humming noise,streak across the sky,stop cold,then seemingly disappear.
Joel is a skeptic but my British wife doesn’t believe in anything that isn’t reported by the BBC and confirmed by the Queen. The next morning I told her Joel had seen a UFO.She asked if it was glowing red,stopped in the sky and disappeared. She had seen the same thing from our yard a minute after I had left.That day the papers reported that dozens of people had phoned the police in the central part of the country to report a mysterious red ball of light that flew low in the sky the night before.
A little later on, my friend,Mitchell Herczeg,an Orthodox rabbi who thinks my interest in UFOs borders blasphemy, called me to report a slow moving,orange object that he had seen flying just outside Jerusalem.
“It wasn’t a plane or flares, “he insisted.”It hovered,then moved and turned on its axis.”
This is a small sample group to illustrate a point that should be obvious by now; so many UFOs are flying over Israel currently that everyone knows at least one recent witness.
But that doesn’t mean the preceding years were empty of incidents.Israel’s wave of UFOs began in 1987 with a legendary encounter in Haifa and continued with a series of convincing, befuddling and spectacular encounters that prove the country is of great interest to civilizations beyond our solar system.