Piotr Cielebias’s book underlines that UFO sightings and high strangeness encounters are global. He puts Polish sightings in a folklore context; Ognik (flame) or Swietlik (firefly) phenomena are similar to our will-of-the-wisp. (Lights dancing over a field near Czestochowa in the 1980s were explained as Swietlik.) Another folkloric theme was of sky people blown down to Earth, who manifested as small, sexless monsters or old, linen-clad men, much like today’s ‘space’ aliens. Even after WWII, older witnesses often interpreted sightings in such terms rather than as UFO phenomena.
For Cielebias, the first ‘modern era’ report was in 1922, when hundreds of people in Warsaw saw an enormous flying object “like two plates connected together”. Among other historical and WWII accounts is one of a hat-like object that landed at Nowiny, eastern Poland; eight or nine small humanoids in uniforms spoke what sounded like Japanese before flying off. Such incidents show that UFOs were not just a product of the Cold War. In the flying saucer era, the earliest abduction story in Poland occurred in 1954. There is even a UFO crash report in 1959. This was probably a meteorite impact or satellite re-entry, though it became associated with a story of a male humanoid found not long afterwards (perhaps seeded by US intelligence to discredit the story). Cielebias details many equally bizarre cases: flying humanoids, telepathic encounters, sightings, landing reports and even little green men. He sides with Jacques Vallee: the UFO phenomenon is real, but remains a mystery because it presents itself in a chaotic and baffling manner.
For Cielebias, the first ‘modern era’ report was in 1922, when hundreds of people in Warsaw saw an enormous flying object “like two plates connected together”. Among other historical and WWII accounts is one of a hat-like object that landed at Nowiny, eastern Poland; eight or nine small humanoids in uniforms spoke what sounded like Japanese before flying off. Such incidents show that UFOs were not just a product of the Cold War. In the flying saucer era, the earliest abduction story in Poland occurred in 1954. There is even a UFO crash report in 1959. This was probably a meteorite impact or satellite re-entry, though it became associated with a story of a male humanoid found not long afterwards (perhaps seeded by US intelligence to discredit the story). Cielebias details many equally bizarre cases: flying humanoids, telepathic encounters, sightings, landing reports and even little green men. He sides with Jacques Vallee: the UFO phenomenon is real, but remains a mystery because it presents itself in a chaotic and baffling manner.
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Buy "UFOs over Poland" on Amazon
Buy "UFOs over Poland" on Amazon
