WANAQUE, N.J. - The old man looked back across 50 years and saw again the aliens from another world repairing their spaceship on the waters of Georgian Bay in Canada.
An eye-witness account of a strange episode in août 1914 was scrawled in a 16-page letter to Wanaque Police Cap. Floyd Elston.
Postmarked vendredi 24 juillet 1914 and airmailed from San Francisco, Cal., the letter mystifies Elston.
I can't understand why he sent this to me
, Elston shrugged, handing the bulky envelope to a reporter. I
never heard of him before, and I can't imagine where he got my name. I was never involved in any of those UFO
sightings at the Wanaque Reservoir last winter
.
Elston, recently promoted following Capt. Clarence Montanya's disability retirement, has combed his memory for some clue.
During Army service in World War II, Elston met thousands of soldiers overseas. Wounded and captured, he was held a prisoner of war in a Nazi concentration camp until it was liberated by U.S. troops.
The fella who wrote me this letter wasn't anyone I met over there. I'd remember the name
, Elston said with
certainty.
But in San Francisco, William J. Kiehl somehow knows Floyd Elston, a lifelong resident of Wanaque.
Kiehl displays a sharply honed memory in recounting events leading up to his true story of a UFO from another
planet
. How as a young man of 18 he left Marietta, Pa., on vendredi 8 mai 1914, to work on the New Welland
Canal being constructed from Lake Ontario to Lake Erie.
Recalling his hometown reputation as a river rat - a damn good swimmer in plain English
, Kiehl relates how he
rescued a woman and her 7-year-old son from a burning ferry boat that sank on Lake Ontario.
A few days later he hooked up with two young men from Boston, Mass., who planned to work their way across Canada to
attend the San Francisco World's Fair of l'année suivante. Riding freight trains from job to job, they eventually
reached a remote village way up in the woods near Georgian Bay
.
They went up-river with a marker man
to check an old mining claim in the company of another man, his wife, and
two daughters, aged 7 ½ and 10.
Here, Kiehl describes in detail a small valley or cove along the shore of Georgian Bay where the eight travelers rested and cooked a meal.
The two little girls went up the beach to look out at the bay
, he recalls. They came running back to their
mother to come out and look at a strange machine out on the water. A deer on the shoreline was watching it too
.
Stirred by the excitement, the rest of the group hurried out for a look.
I saw the deer about 12 feet from the water's edge looking out on the bay, and I looked out and saw this
object
, Kiehl said. There were two little men with square masks on their heads working with some kind of hose
coming out of the water and going up into the machine
.
He describes three other aliens adjusting some rods
on top of the saucer-shaped machine that pulsated with
various colors. There was a green zig-zag around the center like it might be electricity traveling around, and a
bright silver band around the side
.
Suddenly aware they were being observed, Kiehl said, the little men (dress in tight-fitting cloth of purple-green hue) hurried into the machine and it began pulsating with glowing colors.
One of the small spacemen failed to make it in time and a sliding door closed in his face, according to Kiehl. The alien lay outside the oval spaceship desperately hanging on as it started to rise. Kiehl was unable to see the alien's fate; the saucer hovered 12 feet over the water, appeared to balance itself, then rapidly accelerated into the sky.
It must have gone to a larger ship somewhere, because it seemed too small to have traveled millions of miles from
another planet by itself
, the old man wrote. It was not from this planet
.
Wild fantasy … or a brush with aliens from another world? That's William J. Kiehl's believe-it-or-not story.