- This text is an edited transcript of
an interview between Mr. Francis P. Wall, a private first class (PFC) in
the U.S. Army during the Korean War, and John Timmerman, an associate of
the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) in Chicago, Illinois.
The interview took place in January, 1987. Noted UFO researcher Richard
F. Haines checked military records and found Mr. Wall listed as a Korean
combatant in the infantry unit he names below. Haines also requested and
received from Mr. Wall a drawing of the aerial object he claims to have
seen. The drawing depicts a very typical "flying saucer." CNI
News thanks John Timmerman for permission to reprint this text. Mr. Wall
recounts his experience as follows:
-
- "This event that I am about to relate
to you is the truth, so help me God. It happened in the early Spring of
1951 in Korea. We were in the Army infantry, 25th Division, 27th Regiment,
2nd Battalion, 'Easy' Company. We were in what is known on the military
maps as the Iron Triangle, near Chorwon.
-
- "It is night. We are located on
the slopes of a mountain, below [which] there is a Korean village. Previously
we have sent our men into this village to warn the populace that we are
going to bombard it with artillery. On this night, we were doing just that.
We had aerial artillery bursts coming in.
-
- "We suddenly noticed on our right-hand
side what appeared to be a jack-o-lantern come wafting down across the
mountain. And at first no one thought anything about it. So we noticed
that this thing continued on down to the village to where, indeed, the
artillery air bursts were exploding. It had an orange glow in the beginning.
We further noticed that this object was [so] quick that it could get into
the center of an airburst of artillery and yet remain unharmed.
-
- "[The] time element on this, I would
say, [was] anywhere from, oh, forty-five minutes to an hour all told.
-
- "But then this object approached
us. And it turned a blue-green brilliant light. It's hard to distinguish
the size of it; there's no way to compare it. The light was pulsating.
This object approached us.
-
- "I asked for and received permission
from Lt. Evans, our campany commander at that time, to fire upon this object,
which I did with an M-1 rifle with armor-piercing bullets. And I did hit
it. It must have been metallic because you could hear when the projectile
slammed into it.
-
- "Now why would that bullet damage
this craft if the artillery rounds didn't? I don't know, unless they had
dropped their protective field around them, or whatever. But the object
went wild, and the light was going on and off. It went off completely once,
briefly. And it was moving erratically from side to side as though it might
crash to the ground. Then, a sound -- we had heard no sound previous to
this -- the sound of, like, diesel locomotives revving up. That's the way
this thing sounded.
-
- "And then, we were attacked. We
were swept by some form of a ray that was emitted in pulses, in waves that
you could visually see only when it was aiming directly at you. That is
to say, like a searchlight sweeps around and... you would see it coming
at you. Now you would feel a burning, tingling sensation all over your
body, as though something were penetrating you.
-
- "So the company commander, Lt. Evans,
hauled us into our bunkers. We didn't know what was going to happen. We
were scared. These are underground dugouts where you have peep holes to
look out to fire at the enemy. So, I'm in my bunker with another man. We're
peeping out at this thing. It hovered over us for a while, lit up the whole
area with its light, and then I saw it shoot off at a 45 degree angle,
that quick, just there and gone. That quick. And it was as though that
was the end of it.
-
- "But, three days later the entire
company of men had to be evacuated by ambulance. They had to cut roads
in there and haul them out. They were too weak to walk. They had dysentery.
Then subsequently, when the doctors did see them, they had an extremely
high white blood cell count which the doctors could not account for.
-
- "Now in the military, especially
the Army, each day you file a company report. We had a confab about that.
Do we file it in the report or not? And the consensus was 'No.' Because
they'd lock every one of us up and think we were crazy. At that time, no
such thing as a UFO had ever been heard of, and we didn't know what it
was.
-
- "I still don't know what it was.
But I do know that since that time I have periods of disorientation, memory
loss, and I dropped from 180 pounds to 138 pounds after I got back to this
country. And I've had great difficulty keeping my weight up. Indeed, I'm
retired and disabled today."
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