Strangers from the Skies

About the Author

Brad Steiger was born Eugene E. Olson on February 19, 1936, and grew up on a farm at Bode, Iowa. He graduated from Luther College in 1957 and the University of Iowa in 1963, taught high school English, and then taught literature and creative writing at Luther College from 1963 to 1967 before becoming a full-time writer. He died on May 6, 2018.

The scale of his output is the central fact about him. Steiger wrote or co-wrote almost 170 books, which sold in the region of seventeen million copies, across UFOs, ghosts, reincarnation, true crime, biography, cryptozoology and spirituality. His first book, Ghosts, Ghouls and Other Peculiar People, appeared in 1965; Strangers from the Skies followed in 1966 and was his first UFO title. He later married Sherry Hansen Steiger, herself the author or co-author of more than twenty books, and they collaborated extensively.

That productivity is inseparable from the criticism. Steiger's books sold enormously well and were consistently faulted by academics and sceptics for advancing far-reaching claims without scientific support. A writer producing several books a year across a dozen paranormal subjects is not conducting original investigation, and Steiger did not generally claim to be. He was a synthesiser and a populariser, working from press reports, wire stories, published accounts and correspondence.

It matters, though, that in 1966 he was a working English professor rather than a career paranormalist. The prose in this book is clean, the pacing is professional, and the reporting is closer to newspaper practice than to the breathless register his later work sometimes fell into. Read chronologically, his UFO titles get looser as they go; this is the tightest of them.

He returned to the subject repeatedly, most notably with Project Blue Book (1976), his edited presentation of Air Force case material. Any reader working through his UFO output should treat the 1966 and 1976 books as the serious ones and approach the rest with the caution that his critics have earned on the reader's behalf.

Historical Context & Origins

1965 and 1966 produced the largest American UFO wave since 1952 and the one that finally broke Project Blue Book's credibility. Reports ran into the thousands across the summer and autumn of 1965, and the two events that defined the wave for the public arrived within six months of each other: Exeter in September and Michigan in March.

The Exeter incident of September 3, 1965 is in the book at chapter 28, reported essentially as it was then understood. Officer Eugene Bertrand of the Exeter police stopped beside a car on Route 101 occupied by two women who said a bright red flashing object had followed them for twelve miles; Bertrand was sceptical until he saw it himself later that night. It became the best-attested police-witness case of the decade.

The Michigan wave is chapter 29 and it is the book's most historically loaded material, because Steiger was writing about it within weeks. On March 21, 1966 the farmer Frank Mannor and his nineteen-year-old son Ronald watched a triangular object with flashing red and green lights hover over a swamp near Dexter. Steiger quotes Mannor from the Associated Press wire: it was flat on the bottom, high and peaked on top, wrapped in a halo of light, shimmering 'like watching something across the desert.'

What happened next is why Michigan mattered. J. Allen Hynek, Blue Book's scientific consultant, offered marsh gas as a possible explanation for some of the reports at a press conference; the press reduced it to a blanket verdict; the ridicule was immediate and enormous; and the resulting congressional pressure led directly to the Condon Committee. Steiger's chapter title — 'Swamp Gas or Spacecraft in Michigan?' — is a fair summary of where the question stood at the moment he wrote it and before the answer had hardened.

Chapter 4 is the one that will surprise most readers. 'The Fiery UFO That Crashed Near Pittsburgh' describes the December 9, 1965 event that later became the Kecksburg case: a brilliant orange object crossing from Michigan over Lake Erie and northeastern Ohio and coming down in woods thirty miles south of Pittsburgh, with the official meteor attribution arriving within the hour from Dr. Paul Annear of Baldwin-Wallace College and the Pentagon promptly agreeing. This is one of the earliest published book accounts of Kecksburg, written three months after it happened and decades before the case acquired its Roswell-adjacent mythology.

The international material is drawn from the same wave and the years just before it. Chapter 9 covers the Reverend William Booth Gill, thirteen years with the Anglican Mission in Papua New Guinea, whose eight-page report described sightings at Boianai on four nights in June 1959 — including thirty-seven other witnesses watching four figures on top of a craft for four hours on the 26th. Chapter 11 covers the July 13, 1959 Blenheim, New Zealand sighting by Mrs. Frederick Moreland on Old Renwick Road, whose husband worked at the RNZAF's Woodbourne station.

The South American chapters reflect a genuine internationalism that most American paperbacks of the period lacked. Steiger covers the October 1963 Argentine cases around Colonia and Buenos Aires, quotes Father Benito Reyna S.J. — a Jesuit priest-astronomer and professor of mathematics at Salvador University in Buenos Aires with thirty years' observing experience — and devotes a chapter to the October 31, 1963 report from São Paulo province in which a girl named Ruth watched an object plunge into a river that then boiled violently, with her uncle and fishermen on the far bank describing the same thing.

Core Arguments & Key Concepts

The witnesses are ordinary, numerous and occupationally varied, and that is the argument. Steiger's back-cover pitch is his thesis: an Iowa schoolteacher, an Oklahoma truck driver, a Portuguese kindergarten teacher, a Russian physicist, a Virginia minister, a Seattle physician, an American Air Force captain, more than fifty airline pilots. The book's method is accumulation, and its implied conclusion is that a phenomenon reported by that spread of people, in that many countries, is not a delusion of any single culture or profession.

The Air Force's explanations arrive faster than its investigations. This is the book's sharpest recurring observation and the one that has aged best. The Pittsburgh chapter is the model: an academic offered a meteor attribution within an hour of the event and the Pentagon endorsed it immediately. Steiger's point is not that the explanation was necessarily wrong but that the speed with which it was produced tells you the institution was managing a story rather than investigating an event.

Professional and scientific witnesses are being ignored because they are inconvenient. The Father Reyna material makes the case as well as anything in the book: a Jesuit astronomer with three decades of telescope work describing objects he observed and characterised by shape and colour is not a man likely to be confused about what is supposed to be in the sky, and his testimony went essentially nowhere. The same applies to the astronaut chapter.

The Gemini 4 episode is a legitimate anomaly and Steiger reports its resolution honestly. James McDivitt described an object with 'big arms sticking out' on his second full day in orbit and exposed both movie and Hasselblad film. Steiger notes that the developed film showed nothing resembling either the described object or any known satellite, and reports the space agency's own attribution attempt. He does not claim more than the record supports, which is more restraint than the chapter's placement implies.

The phenomenon has a history longer than the modern era. Chapter 5, 'Flying Saucers in Ancient Times,' is an early instance of the argument that would be industrialised by the ancient-astronaut writers within five years. In 1966 it was still a marginal observation rather than a commercial genre, and its presence here shows how early the idea was circulating in popular UFO writing.

The book's weakest feature is that it has no method at all. There is no sourcing apparatus, no distinction drawn between a wire-service report and a second-hand anecdote, no assessment of witness reliability, and no attempt to weigh competing explanations except rhetorically. Chapters on radar-visual pilot cases sit beside chapters on 'terrible flying jelly bags' with no signal that these are different classes of claim. A reader has to supply the entire critical apparatus.

It is also, unavoidably, a commercial product. Award Books was a mass-market paperback house, the cover shouts, the price was sixty cents, and the chapters are short because the format demanded short chapters. That is not a scandal — it is how the subject reached a mass audience at all — but it does mean the selection favours the vivid over the well-documented, and readers should assume the strongest cases in the book are not necessarily the ones given the most space.

Key Cases & Evidence Discussed

Exeter, New Hampshire, September 3, 1965 (ch. 28). Officer Eugene Bertrand, the two women on Route 101 pursued for twelve miles by a bright red flashing object, and Bertrand's own subsequent sighting. Covered in this site's case file.

The Pittsburgh crash, December 9, 1965 (ch. 4). The orange object tracked across Michigan, Lake Erie and northeastern Ohio, its descent into woods thirty miles south of Pittsburgh, and the meteor attribution issued within the hour by Dr. Paul Annear of Baldwin-Wallace College and endorsed by the Pentagon. Now known as Kecksburg, and this is among its earliest book-length treatments.

The Michigan swamp gas wave, March 21, 1966 (ch. 29). Frank Mannor and his son Ronald near Dexter, the triangular object over the swamp, Mannor's Associated Press description, and the marsh-gas controversy that followed. This site's case file covers the aftermath.

Boianai, Papua New Guinea, June 1959 (ch. 9). The Reverend William Booth Gill's eight-page report of sightings on June 21, 26, 27 and 28, and the four-hour observation on the 26th by Gill and thirty-seven other witnesses, including figures visible on top of the object — the sighting from which the chapter title, 'The Clergyman Who Waved Hello,' derives.

Blenheim, New Zealand, July 13, 1959 (ch. 11). Mrs. Frederick Moreland's early-morning sighting from the family's nine-acre farm on Old Renwick Road, Marlborough, and the helmeted figures she described. One of the two best-known New Zealand cases of the pre-Kaikōura era.

The Argentine and Uruguayan reports of October 1963 (ch. 1 and following). The Antonio Moreno ranch case of October 21, 1963, the objects over the Río de la Plata near Colonia, the simultaneous formation over Buenos Aires, and the testimony of the Jesuit astronomer Father Benito Reyna of Salvador University.

The São Paulo river case, October 31, 1963 (ch. 17). A girl named Ruth watching a disc-shaped object plunge into a river at 2:30 in the afternoon; her mother finding the water boiling and churning up mud; her uncle Raul Alves Souza arriving at the sound of the roar; and fishermen on the opposite bank describing the same thing.

Gemini 4, June 1965 (ch. 3 area). James McDivitt's report of an object 'with big arms sticking out,' the movie and Hasselblad exposures, and the film that showed nothing matching either his description or any known orbital object.

White Sands (ch. 13). Steiger's claim that the White Sands Proving Ground generated more UFO reports than anywhere else on earth, and the discomfort of unconventional craft appearing over one of the most thoroughly instrumented ranges in the United States.

Critical Reception & Controversies

The book was a commercial paperback and received the reception commercial paperbacks receive: no reviews of record, substantial sales, and rapid disappearance into second-hand boxes. It has since been reissued as part of a MUFON classics reprint series and is frequently listed among the hundred titles a serious student of the subject should have seen, which is an assessment from within the field rather than outside it.

The scholarly and sceptical judgement of Steiger generally has been consistent and unflattering: his books sold widely and were criticised for advancing far-reaching claims without scientific evidence. That criticism applies to this book, though with a qualification — the 1966 volume is more restrained than most of what followed, and the McDivitt chapter in particular reports an unfavourable outcome that a less careful writer would have omitted.

The most substantial internal criticism is the absence of any evidential hierarchy. A police officer's radar-corroborated sighting, a Jesuit astronomer's telescopic observation, and an anecdote about flying jelly bags all get a chapter each, at similar length, in the same register. This is not a defect of accuracy so much as of architecture, and it is the reason the book cannot be used as a reference: nothing in it tells you which chapters would survive investigation.

There is also a sourcing problem that matters more now than it did in 1966. Steiger works from press reports and correspondence and rarely names his sources beyond a wire service or a newspaper. Where his accounts can be checked against the later literature they generally hold up on the basic facts — the Mannor quotation, the Exeter sequence, the Pittsburgh chronology and the Gill dates are all substantially correct — but a reader cannot verify anything from the book itself.

Against that, the contemporaneity is a real and unrepeatable virtue. Almost every other account of the 1965–66 wave was written after the Condon Report, after Blue Book's closure, and after the field had settled into positions. Steiger was writing while the Michigan story was still on the wires. His treatment of marsh gas as an open question rather than a punchline is the single clearest illustration of what that vantage point gives a reader.

The Kecksburg chapter deserves particular note in any assessment. Written three months after the event, it contains no crashed-saucer retrieval narrative, no military convoy mythology and no Roswell comparison, because none of that existed yet. It records a fireball, a rapid official attribution, and a local dispute. Anyone trying to establish what was actually claimed in 1965, as distinct from what accreted later, has very few sources this early, and this is one of them.

The fair summary is that this is a good popular book by a writer whose reputation was later damaged by volume. It should be read for what it captured rather than for what it concluded, and no claim in it should be relied on without checking it somewhere with footnotes.

Influence & Legacy

Its largest effect was distributional. A sixty-cent Award Books paperback on a wire rack reached hundreds of thousands of people who would never have bought a hardcover, and it did so at the exact moment the 1965–66 wave was making the subject nationally unavoidable. A significant fraction of the audience for the serious UFO literature of the following decade arrived through books like this one.

It also helped fix the shape of the popular UFO book: short thematic chapters, one case each, international spread, a mixture of official-secrecy framing and human-interest narrative, minimal apparatus. That template governed the mass-market treatment of the subject for the next thirty years and is still visible in television documentary structure.

Steiger's own subsequent career made him one of the most-read writers on anomalous subjects in the English language, and the criticism that followed him — enormous sales, thin sourcing — became a template too, and a cautionary one. His later Project Blue Book (1976) is the more substantial UFO book and is treated separately in this library.

For this site the volume's specific value is as a dating instrument. Where a claim about Exeter, Michigan, Boianai, Blenheim or Kecksburg appears in this book, it was in circulation by 1966; where it does not, it entered the literature later. For Kecksburg in particular, that distinction is the difference between the 1965 event and the case the 1990s built on top of it.

The Book

As an Amazon Associate, OverClassified may earn from qualifying purchases made through this link, at no extra cost to you.

Related Cases & Theories