Encounters with UFO Occupants

About the Author

This site's own Jim Lorenzen key-figures entry documents him as an electronics technician (born Leslie James Lorenzen, 1922-1986) who co-founded APRO with Coral in January 1952 and brought the organization's technical, cross-checking investigative style, personally leading the field investigation into Sgt. Charles Moody's 1975 sighting and later playing a central role in the public rivalry with Ground Saucer Watch over the Travis Walton case's polygraph result.

Coral E. Lorenzen (1925-1988) was born near Barron, Wisconsin, reported her own first UFO sighting at age nine in 1934, and worked in U.S. defense plants during World War II before becoming a reporter and feature writer for Wisconsin newspapers, including the Green Bay Press-Gazette. She created a civilian UFO ground-observer corps in Wisconsin in 1952, the same year she and Jim founded APRO, and went on to serve as the organization's international director and editor of its membership publication, The A.P.R.O. Bulletin -- the more public-facing, vocal half of the partnership, complementing Jim's technical field-investigation role. Every book credited to her was co-authored with Jim, including UFOs: The Whole Story (1960), Flying Saucer Occupants (1967), this book, and 1977's Abducted!: Confrontations with Beings from Outer Space.

Astronomer J. Allen Hynek, cited on this site's own APRO-related pages, identified APRO and NICAP as the two leading civilian UFO research organizations of their era -- context that frames this book's authority as coming from one of ufology's two most established investigative bodies rather than from independent freelance researchers.

Historical Context & Origins

The book arrived in 1976, a year after Jim Lorenzen's own field investigation of the Moody case and roughly midway through APRO's decades-long operation, drawing on the organization's accumulated case files to produce both detailed individual case narratives and a broader chronological appendix of occupant reports. This site's own Cussac Close Encounter case file identifies this book's 1976 English-language treatment as part of a lengthening series of French and international UFO literature that cemented Cussac's status as a landmark humanoid case even as no further original fieldwork occurred on it after the 1970s.

This site's own Charles Moody Abduction case file treats the book as the primary published source for APRO's own contemporary findings on that case -- not a secondhand retelling, but the organization's own investigator publishing his own documented contradictions in Moody's successive accounts, giving the book unusual first-hand evidentiary standing for that specific case relative to most UFO-occupant survey literature.

Core Arguments & Key Concepts

The book's organizing approach is casebook-driven rather than argumentative: rather than proposing a single unifying theory of occupant encounters, it presents discrete case narratives -- reportedly including chapters such as "Landing Traces," "The Contactee Conundrum," and "UFO-Car Encounters" -- alongside a closing appendix cataloging Close Encounter of the Third Kind reports from 1947 through 1975, treating the sheer volume and geographic spread of occupant reports as itself significant.

That casebook approach cuts both ways on individual cases: for Moody, the same organization publishing the book is the one that documented the account's specific internal contradictions, while for Cisco Grove and Cussac the book functions more as an inclusion in a broader international catalog than as fresh original investigation -- a distinction worth keeping in mind when weighing what this book actually adds to each case beyond visibility.

Key Cases & Evidence Discussed

This site's own Charles Moody Abduction case file documents the fullest and most consequential connection to this book: Jim Lorenzen's own 1975-76 APRO investigation, which found a fifteenfold discrepancy in Moody's stated mother-ship distance across retellings and incompatible "frail" versus six-foot being descriptions -- documented contradictions this site's own case file treats as a serious reason for caution, alongside Charles McQuiston's separate Psychological Stress Evaluator analysis finding no indicators of deception.

This site's own Cisco Grove and Cussac Close Encounter case files each document their respective cases -- a 1964 California bow hunter's overnight standoff with reported entities, and a 1967 French sighting involving two child witnesses -- in far greater depth than this survey book's inclusion of each. Readers wanting the complete, independently sourced record for either case should consult those case files directly.

Critical Reception & Controversies

As of this article's research (August 2026), the book's modern aggregate reception is thin: Goodreads shows only 6 ratings averaging 2.83/5 with 3 written reviews, too small a sample to treat as meaningful. Reader sentiment split: one review called it "an essential classic of the UFO lore written by the APRO head team," valuable for its coverage of some of the earliest documented abduction and humanoid encounters, while another was critical, calling it dull and questioning the rigor of some cited sourcing.

This article could not locate any contemporary 1976 press or academic ufology-journal review, which may reflect the limits of what is indexed for a 1970s mass-market paperback rather than a genuine absence of period critical attention. A 2017 print-on-demand reprint under the retitled Close Encounters With UFO Occupants exists, though this article could not confirm its relationship to the original publisher or the Lorenzen estate.

Influence & Legacy

The book's legacy is bound up with APRO's own institutional standing as one of ufology's two most established civilian research organizations of its era, alongside NICAP -- a standing this site's own key-figures pages on both Lorenzens document through their decades of field investigation, publication, and public advocacy work.

Set alongside this site's own case files on Cisco Grove, the Charles Moody Abduction, and the Cussac Close Encounter, this book is best read as a direct extension of APRO's own field files into published form -- most valuable exactly where, as with Moody, it represents the investigating organization's own firsthand findings rather than a secondhand compilation of other researchers' work.

The Book

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