- 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 company 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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