My Trip to Arizona

I traveled to Arizona on February 7, 1998 with the intention of doing some firsthand UFOlogy research.  The topic of UFOs had become familiar enough for widespread media reporting following 'The Phoenix Lights' incident from the previous March.  My trip became possible after I contacted Tom Taylor, the Arizona state MUFON director.  I planned to conduct several interviews and attend a chat club meeting that would feature a variety of speakers on this topic.

Looking back at this time in my life, my Phoenix sojourn of a few days occurred during an awkward period when I was utilizing recorded audio (microcassette) journals in order to maintain a record of my experiences and this usually entailed my spontaneously saying whatever it was that was the first thought that came into my mind.

My first scheduled interview in Phoenix was with Ruth McKinley-Hovar, a MUFON member and psychotherapist specializing in anomalous trauma.  Here is a link to the Interview Transcript: Tape #449, Side #1.

Following the interview with Ruth, I attended a meeting of the Phoenix Art Bell Chat Club, a group named in honor of the radio show host of the weeknight “Coast to Coast AM” and Sunday evening show “Dreamland,” the late night national talkshows ostensibly dedicated to exploring paranormal subjects.  The chat club meeting that I attended was held in a crowded room at the Jan Ross New Age Bookstore.  Among four scheduled speakers, the most prominent at that time was Frances Emma Barwood.  A Phoenix councilwoman who was at the time a candidate for secretary of state, Barwood had received a flurry of media attention by calling for an official investigation into the March 13, 1997 UFO sightings.  Her husband, Mike Siavelis, accompanied her to the event. 

I discovered that Siavelis was a proponent for the American Hydrogen Association, an organization dedicated to the advancement of renewable resources with the motto “Prosperity without pollution.”  He gave me a fact sheet about hydrogen and it seemed a sensible and essential alternative to gasoline in consideration of Earth’s ecosystem.  I learned that hydrogen could be produced from water, sewer, garbage and agricultural wastes without causing air pollution, global warming, acid rain or ozone depletion, while being stored and supplied through current natural gas systems.

Another speaker was Jeff Willes, a local resident whose videotape of a “double-domed UFO” on September 17, 1997 resulted with him being interviewed by Linda Moulton Howe on “Dreamland” and he was also interviewed on a local Phoenix TV news show that aired his UFO footage.  Willes continued watching the skies and he said that he’d videotaped twenty further UFOs in the interim, sharing footage of several of these in his afternoon presentation.

Some brief comments about recent events on the topic of UFOs were shared by John Warnhoff, who said he personally had an experience based on an event that happened in 1957 with his family.  He explained that these events were his introduction to the field of UFOs and extraterrestrials.  During a short break in the proceedings, I told Warnhoff that I was surprised by just how prominent was the front page headline of the newspaper he’d brought — a November 1957 issue of the Wichita Beacon proclaiming “Mysterious Object in Sky Startles Scores of Kansans.”

The article mentioned that the weird craft made no sound.  I noticed another headline in the paper: “Forty-Four Missing Persons in a Vanished Pan American Stratocruiser.”

The following day, I spent a couple hours in Tempe conversing about UFOs and extraterrestrials with Dimitri ‘Jim’ Ossipov, a MUFON official originally from Bosnia.  Then I headed north toward Prescott to interview Selman Graves, whose mysterious experience almost fifty years ago had inspired a recent newspaper article with the headline “Did UFO crash in Valley in ‘47?”

The year 1947 was a pivotal year for UFOlogy as that was the year the expression ‘flying saucer’ was inspired following a comparison to a saucer in U.S. forest service pilot Kenneth Arnold’s description of nine objects seen flying at an incredible speed at 10,000 feet altitude in the vicinity of Mt. Rainier.  Other accounts appearing in newspapers that year included a report of three discs sighted over Mallardville, B.C.; five flying discs seen over Emmett, Idaho by the crew of United Airlines Flight 105; and eight flying saucers were reported to have made a landing on a mountainside near St. Maries, Idaho in full view of 10 people.  Perhaps the most sensational headline of 1947 was the one that appeared in the Roswell Daily Record on July 8: “RAAF Captures Flying Saucer On Ranch in Roswell Region.”

Here are portions of the June 26, 1997 article about Selman Graves from The Arizona Republic.  The article was written by Thomas Ropp.

Fat clouds drag saucer-shaped shadows over the desert and an old ranch house in Cave Creek obscured by mesquite and paloverde trees.

Inside, 73-year-old Selman Graves looks around a small, dank basement filled with hose tack hanging from rafters like strips of meat.  As his eyes adjust, he finds what he’s looking for, the bare spot near the door where Walt Salyer used to keep his freezer.

Even though fifty years have passed, Graves cannot forget the freezer or the two humanoids that may have been inside.

It’s been a half century since the “Incident” at Roswell, N.M., as well, what UFO believers point to as the most infamous crash of an unidentified flying object and government cover-up.  But Arizona, the center of national attention recently over a UFO flap in March, may have had its own Roswell, three months after the New Mexico incident.

The way Graves recalls it, he and his brother-in-law Bob Malody drove to Salyer’s house on a clear, crisp Saturday morning in early October 1947, to go rabbit hunting.  Salyer was not there so Graves and Malody made themselves at home in the basement.

When Salyer showed about 20 minutes later, he was agitated that 22-year-old Graves and 16-year-old Malody were there unsupervised.  Graves said he was especially nervous when anyone got near the freezer.

“This was out of character for him,” Graves said.  “Then he told us we would not be able to go hunting due west because the Air Force had restricted the area, and that if we fired our guns in that direction we could hit someone.”

Graves and Malody set off on horseback with the idea of meeting up with Salyer and his hunting party later.  They never did.

Instead, Graves and Malody ended up in a location that today is known as the Cave Creek Recreation Area.  They did a little hunting and explored the Go John Mine, part-owned by Malody’s parents.

At one point, Graves and Malody climbed to the top of the most prominent hill and looked south, back at Salyer’s ranch.  The air was clearer than it is now.  They could see Salyer’s house, his corral and even his water tank.

But when Graves looked west of the property, in the area he was told to stay away from, he witnessed a scene that made no sense then, and still haunts him five decades later.

“What we saw can best be described as a large aluminum dome-shaped thing sitting upright in the desert,” Graves said.  “I thought it might be some kind of observatory dome, except why would a dome be down at that elevation?”

Graves also remembered seeing five men and two trucks near the dome.  One looked like a military transport truck, capable of carrying personnel or equipment.

“But I didn’t see any equipment like cranes or anything like that,” Graves said.  “And the men didn’t seem to be doing any work.  I could not identify a uniform.”

Using Salyer’s ranch for size and distance perspective, Graves estimated that the dome was 36 feet in diameter and maybe a mile away.

Eventually Graves and Malody ended up back at Salyer’s ranch that day.  But Graves’ memory of what happened in the hours immediately after the sighting is sketchy.  He now feels both he and Malody may have been subjected to some kind of mind-bending hypnosis back at the ranch.

“There were men running around in the basement asking us questions about what we saw,” Graves said.  “I’m not sure what I told them but I do remember telling myself not to forget.  Not to forget.”

Graves never considered that he might have witnessed the crash site of an extraterrestrial craft until 1952, after he read Behind the Flying Saucers, a book by pioneer ufologist Frank Scully (yes, Dana Scully, the character in the X-Files, was named after him).

In the book, Scully wrote about the Cave Creek incident, saying that an informant told him that two humanoid bodies about 4½-feet tall were retrieved, one sitting inside the craft and the other halfway out the hatch.

Finally, Graves had a possible answer.  He also came to realize that he may have been standing next to the dead humanoids in Salyer’s basement.  Graves reasoned that Salyer, an ex-military man, was probably the one who called the military after the crash near his property.  He may have been the first one on the scene and even assisted in the recovery, including preserving the humanoids in his large freezer.

Graves moved from Arizona a few years after the incident.  He didn’t talk to Salyer about it until 15 years later, in 1962, when he drove out to Salyer’s ranch on a whim.  It was not a pleasant conversation.

“He immediately got angry,” Graves said.  “He said, ‘Nothing like that happened, and furthermore, you have never been here at my ranch before.’”

Salyer died of a heart attack in his home a few years later.

However, Phoenix resident Don Devereux said he recently came across information that indicates Salyer may very well have participated in the recovery operation.  Devereux is a former reporter for the Scottsdale Progress and consulting journalist for the TV show Unsolved Mysteries.  While researching the Cave Creek crash for an episode on Unsolved Mysteries, he met a New River man who claims to have drank with Salyer at the Cave Creek Corral many years ago.

“He was supposedly talking all about the incident, including the bodies in the freezer,” Devereux said.  “The people in the bar thought it was funny and were razzing him about it.”

Curiously, Malody, a Tucson resident for years, said he doesn’t remember the incident even though Graves said he was with him that day.

“Sel would like me to get hypnotized,” Malody said.  “But my feeling is, why bother?  Sel honestly believes in this stuff and as far as what he saw I don’t doubt it.”

Tom Taylor, state director of the International MUFON (Mutual UFO Network), has interviewed Graves and videotaped the session.

“I found him credible and interesting,” Taylor said.

Today, Graves is a quiet, thoughtful man who looks on every day “as a fabulous adventure.”  He has lived much of his life in Marble Head, Mass., a businessman working for his family’s boat-building company.  Since 1986 he’s lived in Prescott with his wife, Ann.

He has never sought publicity over the Cave Creek incident and has not been secretive either.  He said it doesn’t bother him if people find his story hard to swallow.

When I scheduled the interview time with Selman Graves, he offered to drive some of the way and suggested for me to meet him outside the city of Prescott at a market that turned out to be called The Blue Hills Market and Bell Gas.  Selman arrived punctually and he seemed spry and robust considering he was in his seventies.  I was interested in visiting Sedona so Selman agreed to accompany me there and back in my rental car.

I told Selman that Ruth had shown me a newspaper article involving him: “I didn’t have time to read it.  She’s going to mail me a copy.  It talked about aliens in the refrigerator or something.”  He laughed but soon became somber as he began sharing some of his impressions, wanting to provide an overview of his perspectives about life before addressing the sensational interlude that he thinks could have taken place a half century ago.  One of the things he mentioned was having recently seen a video tape narrated by Zecharia Sitchin whom he understood to have hypothesized that the Tower of Babel had been a landing platform for interplanetary travel.  I’d read about this in Sitchin’s The Stairway To Heaven (1980) with the description of a platform in the mountains of Lebanon with a foundation consisting of three immense slabs of granite that each weighed more than 10,000 tons.  These pre-Roman ruins of a temple complex are known as Baalbek and Sitchin noted that it once was also called Heliopolis.  Sitchin wrote:

All these local legends, which as all legends contain a kernel of age-old recollections of actual events, agree that the place is of extreme antiquity.  They ascribe its building to “giants” and connect its construction with the events of the Deluge.  They connect it with Ba’al, its functions being that of a “Tower of Babel”—a place from which to “scale the heavens.”

I commented to Selman that I, myself, found it interested to find contemporary parallels with the ancient mysteries.  “Now the Tower of Babel is television and radio and satellites,” I mused and offered the Fellini movie “Ginger and Fred” as one metaphorical representation of a modern ‘tower of babel.’

In commenting about his life, Selman would show a diverse range of interests while mentioning such famous names as Sir Edmund Hillary, Paramahansa Yogananda, Robert Monroe, George Adamski and Leonardo da Vinci.  Selman shared many profound thoughts, including some simple ones:  " . . . a person's attitude is very important.  As one ages, an attitude changes.  Now attitude is where you're at in existence . . . the great learning is love.”  He acknowledged this understanding could only instill empathy in one for any person or creature suffering in some way.  At one point he said: " . . . anything that's very complex becomes very simple as learning takes place."  His perspective of "the intelligent approach to life" was to have patience and try to avoid being angry.

He explained, “Everything is made from a substance that is so tiny that it isn’t something that you’re just going to be able to put under an ordinary microscope to see.  The electron microscope helped.  Philo Taylor Farnsworth knew when he was fourteen that he was going to create electronic television.  At fifteen he actually drew a working schematic of the movement of the electrons.  When he did do that, he created the module for the electron microscope and he did a lot of other things . . . These material things are all held in place by great — let’s call it energy — power.”

“The Oneness,” I concurred.

I learned that Selman had glimpsed UFOs numerous times and viewed these experiences as fortunate ones.  He began explaining his perspective of a very real extraterrestrial presence that the Intelligence guiding the functions of Earth was making known in "a slow and a moderate and ponderous way.”  A few minutes later, my passenger pointed out one of Sedona’s ‘sacred sites’ — Bell Rock.

I asked him about his career and he mentioned, "Primarily it was boats — yachts.  Small and large — built two of the cup contenders for the Americas Cup."  Then we passed San Miguel Drive.

Discussing vibrational healing with me, Selman mentioned, "Reginald Aubrey Fessenden was the first one to broadcast voice across the ocean . . . the frequency was crystal-controlled.  Quartz crystals cut so (that) the sending and receiving had a channel and that was the crystal control."

We had dinner at The Coffee Pot, a noisy Sedona restaurant that Selman said had originated as an enterprise of actress Jane Russell and where he’d taken his grandparents in 1947, the same year that he saw the seemingly grounded mystery object.  Upon noticing celebrity headshots on the wall of the restaurant, I felt like I was back in L.A.  This was the setting where Selman spoke about his headline-making experience and clarified some of the details.

One fact that the newspaper story hadn’t mentioned concerning the freezer in the basement was that the reason for Walt Salyer’s concern about his friends going near it was because, as Selman recalled, “He said that this had been contaminated and it might cause serious illness.  What he didn’t know is we’d already looked into it.”  Selman told me that he’d inspected the freezer when earlier considering what they would do with any rabbit they shot.  “But it was empty.  Why would he not want us going near it if it was empty?”  Salyer was described as "a retired military man who homesteaded the land."

Selman described the mysterious object he saw back in 1947: “It was dome-shaped with at the bottom what looked like a spur.  And if you ever saw domes made to go on a silo . . . that’s what it looked like . . . It was as big as the house . . . Nothing we could think of made sense.”

Upon returning to the ranch house later that day, Selman said that he was not released until 10:30 p.m.  The men who detained Selman and his companions seemed like government people and their endeavor was to instruct them that they hadn’t seen anything — a scenario that since that time has become familiar in the annals of UFOlogy.  A couple of the men wore suits and appeared to Selman as “behind-desk men."

Selman said that over the years he’d seen UFOs in the air.  Looking back at his life, he considered himself extraordinarily fortunate to have had his experiences.  Selman reflected, “We’re shown things that we at one point didn’t imagine were there.”  He also said that he couldn’t think of a time in his life when he actually felt any older.  One of Selman’s frustrations at observing human progress was an environmental grievance: “We could’ve been driving automobiles on hydrogen right after World War II.”  Selman told me his experiences included spending 1943 in the Philadelphia navy yard prior to the conclusion of his military service.

On the way back from Sedona, we continued to talk and he mentioned that he hadn't read many UFOlogy books.  He thought Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” was one movie that showed some understanding of the subject.  I told him that one distinction was that the movie had shown an intuitive factor among characters as an essential part of the phenomena.  Selman recalled, “The statements that they made — they said, ‘Well this man and these people were invited.’  And indeed they were . . . They were invited without (aliens) coming down and saying, ‘I’m from . . .’  They were attracted to be there . . .”

When we arrived back at where we originally met, he asked me about how my own book Testament had come about as he looked forward to reading it.  I gave a brief summary and left him with a copy.  He then revealed that recently his financial means had been wiped out by a criminal act — a fraudulent lawsuit and a judge whom he said hadn't bothered to read the documentation.  ". . . I owed no money, I had an income and over a million dollars of real equity, which I no longer have.”  He told me that he now looked at his situation as a challenging one and was optimistic because, he said, “I’ve always been able to take the existing pieces and make it work.”

I said to him somewhat jovially, "Well look at it this way.  Every wisdom tradition says to share your wealth."  I told him my spiritual awakening had left me ashamed that I hadn't been more generous in sharing my money with those less fortunate.

After we thanked one another for the shared occasion, I returned to my hotel.

There have been many people whom I've interviewed who have described unique accounts with me.  Although Selman was knowledgeable about a diverse range of metaphysical subjects, I decided that he did not have clear memories of some of the incidents he had attempted to describe so his account is most likely an example of how fading memories over the course of many years could be misinterpreted or reimagined based upon suggestions or some other form of irrelevant data.  Nonetheless, I thought much of his commentary was intriguing and it was obvious that he for many years had been sincerely interested in expanding his spiritual and metaphysical understanding of life.

Selman Graves (1925-2010 / photo by Mark Russell Bell)

Me in 1998 (photo by Selman Graves)