“UFOs Over Topanga: The Sixth Encounter”
by Colin Penno
They Came Once More
Sometime between midnight and dawn’s early light Sunday, June 14 strange things happened in the night sky over Topanga.
We can’t account for it, we can’t explain it—and those who
could just aren’t talking.
Here’s what we think we know....
From somewhere in West Hollywood, a couple of weeks ago a
shaken man called the Lost Hills/Malibu Sheriff’s station to ask a question and
tell a tale.
They’d eaten dinner down on the beach at Gladstones, and
then he and his girlfriend took off for a spin up the Coast, turning north into
the Santa Monica Mountains at Highway 27 for a peaceful night drive through
Topanga Canyon and home to the bright lights of LA.
“Did anyone report anything strange tonight in Topanga
Canyon?” came the call
“Wanna be more specific?” responded a dubious deputy.
“Strange like what?”
“Ah... lights.”
“Not that I know of.”
With his question answered, the caller stumbled into an
incredible story.
“You’ll think I'm crazy, but I don’t know who to tell,” he
began.
“Officer, we were driving through the Canyon, where the
Canyon gets deep, and we noticed a bright light in the sky.” The couple became
uneasy because they felt it was following them—whatever it was.
“Suddenly it was over us, we lost control of the car and it
lifted us up in the sky, lifted us up off the ground.
“I’m telling you, I’ve never been more frightened in my
life," he said, assuring the cop that “we don’t drink, don’t take drugs
and have no history of psychological problems.”
What happened next was vague, according to the driver, who
reckons they both lost memory for “I don’t know, maybe a couple of minutes and
then we were put down.
“Suddenly it (the light, the craft, the tractor beam) wasn’t
there anymore.”
Responding to a distraught but cogent caller, the listening
officer stepped in from the cold of incredulity and asked were they both okay?
“Well we got home by the grace of God. My girlfriend was
near-hysterical, we feel nauseous and weak, I don’t know what to do.
“I’m telling you I’m a normal human being,” the caller
pleaded in a quaking voice.
“I have a job, a good job, and my girlfriend too. Should I
report this...? They’ll think we’re out of our minds!”
“I don’t believe that something like this would fall under
our jurisdiction,” the cop said—and wrapped it up by advising the couple to
sleep on it and maybe check in with a doctor in the morning.
Second Fishy Couple
Soon a second call about the state of cosmic stability in
Topanga came in to the station.
“My girlfriend and I saw three very strange... ah, God...
who does one report UFOs to?
“We saw three UFOs, flying discs high up in the Canyon, past
Sassafras Nursery, where the Canyon gets deep.”
“What did they look like?” inquired the voice of the law....
“They were saucers, they were following us above the car and
we stopped and got out. We saw them, we watched them and within maybe three
seconds—poof—they were gone straight up into the air like a bat out of hell.”
This second caller was quite calm, we’re told, and asked the
listening deputy if he happened to have a number for the U.S. Air Force?
Disappointed, the second caller said, “Well I dunno... we
saw what we saw, maybe Gladstones spiked our wine...?’’
The Odd Englishman
Next comes a call from a guy asking if the cops had
helicopters flying over the Canyon that night—choppers with unusually bright
lights?
“My wife and I were woken up by a very bright light above
our home coming in through the windows,” he says. “We went outside to look
at... an extremely bright light... but there was hardly any sound,” just a sort
of “high-pitched hum.”
His home and the “encounter” were about a mile north of
Sassafras, the caller answered in response to a deputy’s questions, but
declined to give an address explaining that he really didn’t want to report a
UFO and because his wife was “a bit shaken up right now.”
“Have you eaten at Gladstones recently?” asked the
deputy—still pushing for a location and explaining that maybe something illegal
was going on.
"Deputy,” the caller replied, “let me tell you this—if
someone is doing something illegal around here they have a hell of a lot of
wattage.
“Damnedest thing I ever saw in my life” he concluded, and
hung up.
Last Call from Texas
Lastly that night came a call from a guy with a soft Texas
accent—a guy who gave his name right up front “Did y’all have helicopters up in
Topanga Canyon tonight?”
“What did you see sir?” inquired a deputy long-since
accustomed to curious calls from a quixotic Canyon.
“I was going down through Topanga Canyon and I think they
were helicopters ’cause they were shining damn bright lights on me, but they
kinda chased me down the road a bit.
“It sure did put out a powerful beam, a very bright light,”
the cowboy went on, “I’d say they tailgated me from above, but I couldn’t see
anything ’cause it was so damned bright... it sure seemed strange to me.”
What the Doctor Saw...
For readers skeptical about outrageous stories from odd outsiders—here
is testimony from a true Topangan with the guts to stand up and say what he
saw!
Dr. Murray Clarke lives on Callon, a T-junction street at
the termination of Cheney Drive, itself an eastward artery off Topanga Canyon
Boulevard. Clarke was at home and up and about after midnight that Sunday
morning June 14, when a powerful point of light zoomed over his house heading
north.
“I looked through my view window which faces the ridgeline
and the Valley,” Clarke
told the Messenger
last week. “It was traveling south-to-north very fast in a horizontal path, an
intense white/yellow light. As it sped away from me—about over the last ridge,
it just vanished.”
Clarke, a homeopathic specialist in private practice in
Santa Monica, estimated the entire incident to have lasted “just two or three
seconds.”
He went outside, naturally, but the night sky was “as it was
before.”
A burning meteor perhaps? A helicopter searchlight?
No says Clarke: “meteorites do not travel on a path parallel
with the planet, and the intensity of light was something no helicopter could
have brought about.”
The Hillside Observation
Around that time and a mile or so south of Clarke’s house
another Topanga resident remembers something she’d never seen before that night.
She too lives east of the Boulevard, and at an elevation
similar to Clarke’s—two or three hundred feet up from the Canyon floor.
“I saw a brilliant ray of light outside through my window,”
says the witness, who prefers to be unidentified.
“I saw it and I’ll never forget it,” she told the Messenger last week. “I’m telling you
this now but, well, I’m a professional person and I can’t afford the risk of
ridicule.”
The beam from a car on its way home in the neighborhood?
No way she says.
“I’ve lived right here for years and because of the hills
around I can tell you no headlights can pass by around the house.”
A Sheriff’s chopper looking for who-knows-what in the night?
“I’ve seen those lights over and over,” she shot back. “This
light was so focused, so intense—like nothing I’d ever seen.”
So What's New?
None of this comes as much of a surprise to Preston Dennett,
who wrote “UFOs Over Topanga,” a Messenger cover story in volume 12, No. 25,
our terminal edition of 1988.
Dennett says of last month’s strange events: “This would be
at least the sixth encounter in the Canyon.”
