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A CLOSE ENCOUNTER OF THE THIRD KIND IN ROMANIA
Dan D. Farcas
During
the night of July 8 to 9, 1996, in the center of a village, in Eastern
Romania, a police sergeant and a guardian had a close encounter of the
III-rd kind. They saw a UFO hovering above the road and three humanoids
around it. Some other events seem to be connected with. The case was
widely exposed in the Romanian media but it was not thoroughly
investigated by UFO specialists being almost unknown abroad.
The
case was observed in the village Certesti (pronounced Tchertzeshty), district Galati, in South of
the Moldavian Region of Romania. Only newspaper and tabloid reporters
investigated the CE III in the next days and not UFO "professionals",
because of the lack of funds and of appropriate UFO research structures in
Romania. The TV producer Mihai Badescu, with a small team, was gone to
Certesti, on August 12, 1996, to make a short film about this event, for
TVR1, the main Romanian Public TV channel. He invited Calin Turcu and me
(both of us having books published in Romanian about the UFO phenomenon)
for comments. During that day, we had detailed discussions with the
witnesses of this encounter and with other people, including skeptics. The
main findings are mentioned bellow.
The police sergeant Marian Mancu and Marcel Rusu, voluntary guardian,
were patrolling on the main road passing the village Certesti, on July 8
to 9, 1996, at night, in front of the police office. In this place, on
both sides, between the road and the sidewalks, there are deep ditches,
with small bridges across them. The houses are behind the fences, in the
middle of orchards and gardens, except a two-storied apartment house,
opposite the police station. The police sergeant lived in one apartment of
this building. Around 0.30 AM, Mancu told Rusu that he would go home for
ten minutes, to eat something. The entrance is behind the building. The
moment the sergeant passed the corner, he heard a whistling sound from the
street and sensed a current of air. He turned immediately back, seeing on
the road something which "splashed blue and red lights, making a sound
like voom-voom".
At
the first moment the sergeant had the impression that a police car from
the district capital Galati arrived in a routine control. Getting closer
he realized
that the object was hovering half meter above the paving and a small and
very strange person is moving around it. He cried "Guard"! As an answer,
he observed the horrified guardian, coming half out from the ditch were he
was hiding himself, below a bridge. He whispered - "Mister Marian - the
Satan!"
Rusu declared later that, immediately after the sergeant
disappeared behind the apartment house, "a fluttering from the above
appeared..." The neon lighting of the street seemed to change in
intensity. The object descended smoothly, without noise, behind him. For a
short instant he was convinced too that it was the police car, for a
routine control, but, turning, he became frightened when realized that the
object had no contact with the ground and that three small human like
creatures are moving around it. As he declared "when I saw how they are,
their ugliness, I told myself they are not our own folk. I became afraid
and I was hiding myself in the ditch… if something happened… because I
have never seen such things in my life…"
As both witnesses agreed, the object had the form of a flat
hut, 5-6 meters across and 2-2.5 meters high, and was hovering and
balancing 0.5 meters above the ground. Around the edge it had a continuous
girdle of light "as a rainbow". The colors: red and blue (or green in
other declarations) changed from each other and flared. At the bottom of
the object was a bright white light. None of the witnesses saw doors,
portholes or other details.
After about two minutes, as they estimated, the UFO rose
vertically. At that moment its lights became much brighter, but the neon
streetlights went off. When the object reached around 30 meters, it
changed direction and turned toward East, with a tremendous speed. The
neon light went on after not more than thirty seconds.
The guardian Rusu saw better the humanoid creatures.
Sergeant Mancu noticed only one and only from behind. Their height was
estimated to be around one meter, maybe less ("as a child of six years").
Rusu said he heard some noises made by them, "as the rain in the drain
pipe". Both agreed the creatures gave the impression of "abortion" (in the
sense of "unfulfilled" as they mentioned later). The visitors had a big
head, very elongated behind, covered with bumps, with no hair, big ears
("as a palm of a man"). Their face was white and they had big eyes. Gray
scales with a metallic shining, as the fish scales, covered their body.
The belly was relatively big and limp. The arms were "not thicker than two
fingers". None of the witnesses remembered the nose, the mouth or shoes.
The witnesses could not tell for sure if the creatures were walking or
flying above the ground, but accepted as more likely the second
possibility. Rusu said they moved, "as they were drunk".
The physical traces were weak. A huge sweet cherry tree
nearby had around 15% of its leaves affected, as by an extreme heat, on
the side where the object was seen. The damage was visible even after one
month, when we were on the place. Some people from the village told us
that next morning, after the encounter, many leaves and broken limbs were
spread on the road on that place. Some others were convinced that was a
result of human activity. No other signs were recorded. Nobody measured
the radioactivity or took samples.
Sergeant Mancu declared that, after the object disappeared
he had to help Rusu to come out of the ditch. The guardian told him that
he was sick and he had to sit on the grass for a while before becoming
capable of walking. He remained convinced he was seeing Satan. After about
a quarter of an hour a tractor was coming on the street, driven by Nicu
Chicos. The two asked him if he had seen something. The tractor driver
finally admitted that he and another countryman Emil Bugeac,
of the nearby village Carlomanesti, had seen a bright light, with
some colored blinking, in the evening before at 10.30 or 11 P.M., three
kilometers away from Certesti. But it could be a plane too.
More interesting should be the testimony of the countryman
Gheorghe Ghenghea from Certesti. He was watching that night,
with his daughter, a song contest on TV. In a certain moment, the image
deteriorated, extinguished, restored for a moment, extinguished once
again, and after a short while came back without other problems. No other
lights were on in the house; so, it could be a short blackout. The witness
went out, to ask a neighbor about, but apparently, everybody was sleeping.
The color TV appliance was new and he had no problem with it until that
moment, or after. The inhabitants told us that some other electrical
appliances in the village were disturbed too. We had not the time to
verify these allegations.
Another interesting witness was Stefan Dumitru Carje,
from the village Cotoroaia, 4 km Northeast from Certesti. He woke
up, the same night, because of the barking of dogs, at 1.12 AM (he
remembered seeing the watch). The backyard was lighted by "very powerful
and extended yellow through red light" coming from the high. Going
outside, he was not capable to identify any source. "The sky was red and
the ground red… it was so bright you could read a newspaper". He told he
was 62, he had three years of army with the air force but it was a light
he had never seen. The witness controlled the dependencies. "All the
animals were up, but not scared. The birds were not croaking or cackling…
Only the dogs were barking". After a while he re‑entered the house. When
he was thinking to wake up his wife and two grandsons, to see the
phenomenon, "the light became thinner and thinner… easy, easy… maybe it
lasted three minutes until that powerful light disappeared and remained
the light of the night". He added later: "I saw something as a haze
raising up to a certain height and afterwards disappearing slowly in the
air".
The witnesses are credible. The police sergeant Marian
Mancu (30 years) was, for a while, veterinary technician, before
graduating a police school. He is married, with two children and he is
healthy and sane. The majority of the village population, including the
village mayor Gheorghe Nechifor, considers him a serious person,
not capable of lies or hoaxes. Mancu was interested in the historical
events of the region. He led an initiative to build a monument for the
heroes of the village, from the two world wars. He had a personal library
of several hundreds of books, but nothing about UFOs, paranormal or
connected issues. The sergeant told me that even he heard about UFOs, he
did not believe in them and was not concerned about.
The guardian Maricel Rusu (41 years) graduated six classes, but his
education seems lower. He reads little, with difficulty, and only "about
some crimes in newspapers". He has never heard almost anything
before about the UFO phenomenon. Maricel Rusu is Orthodox Christian but
not bigot or even practicing. This explains his first hypothesis, that he
met Satan and the fright after this finding. He has no recorded psychic
disorders, and he served in the army as sapper. The villagers did not
remember he was lying in the past. Even if he drinks sometimes, he has
never been seen drunk. Before the close encounter he had his arm badly
injured by a horse and he was following a treatment with antibiotics, so
he was restrained to drink alcohol.
It is unlikely the witnesses could invent all the very
peculiar details and to expose them in such a highly natural and
convincing manner. It is also unlikely that it could be a delusion staged
by someone else. Unfortunately we had not other means to certify this
impression, e.g. psychological tests, or lie detector, but we did not
discover anybody with any motivation to invent such a story.
Not all the villagers gave credit to the witnesses. A
mathematics teacher contests the story telling she was awake in this
period of time, living in the same apartment house as the sergeant, but
she heard and saw nothing. A person said that his "Mercedes" was on the
street, and it was confused with a UFO. Another person objected that the
place was too narrow for landing, because of the telephone or electrical
wires on both sides of the road. This objection was rejected, the distance
between the wires being comfortably wider than the dimensions estimated
for this UFO. More interesting, the "debunkers" were mainly people that
had legal problems with the local police, or people related to them.
On the above premises, we consider that the Certesti case
could be qualified as a CE III. But was it more than that? Maybe it was a
CE IV; in other terms, was it an abduction? A first argument is that, in
the following days, sergeant Mancu felt sick and powerless; he supposed he
was irradiated. The guardian Rusu had repeated nightmares. As he declares:
" I was dreaming on the following days… about how I was hiding myself in
the ditch… then I woke up frightened… because they were so ugly".
I questioned both of them about a possible "missing time"
period. None of them had such an impression. But when I tried to establish
more precisely the time marks, I found that none of them had a watch. The
sergeant said "I had not my watch with me… because the bracelet was torn".
Rusu had no watch at all.
Trying to establish the succession of the events, we found
strange discontinuities. No one of the witnesses remembered to see the
humanoids descending from the UFO or reentering. More than that, the
witnesses could not explain how the visitors did that, because no doors or
entrances were visible. Maricel Rusu declared "I did not see which way
they descended... They were already turning around". The situation was the
same when the UFO was flying up - the creatures simply were no more there,
and nobody saw them going up in the object. The same witness declared:
"they disappeared, but I didn’t take notice what way they disappeared... I
don't know where they entered and I did not see them entering... maybe
behind…" Sergeant Mancu recognized also that he could not explain how the
little men disappeared. His impression was that he observed the small
creature only for four-five seconds…
In the literature there are many cases when the witnesses
considered they had a CE III only for several seconds or minutes, but
after some complementary procedures, for example hypnotic regression, they
discover that it was a much longer story and a CE IV. Therefore, we
agreed, it would be interesting to use this technique, or something
similar, in this case too. Unfortunately, in Romania we face a lack of
professionals practicing hypnotic regression or willing to apply it in
such situations. Even the travelling expenses to arrange sessions
constitute a problem.
Another curiosity discovered in our visit was that the villagers of
Certesti told us about several other very interesting and quite typical
UFO observations, even close encounters, in the last years. They have
never been reported. They
would have
remained completely unknown if the main event had not happened. I wonder
about how many similar situations are in the villages of Romania and of
many other countries too.
As a peculiar but not unique sequel, we can mention that,
after two years, sergeant Mancu was fired from the police, most probable
because he tried to be "hypercorrect" in several cases, even against his
chiefs. One argument used was that Mancu is "that guy who sees UFOs"…
(Previously
published in EJUFOAS,
The
European Journal of UFO and Abduction
Studies, September 2001) |
