Sightings: The La Petite Road Scorchings And Bent Fence Post

Editor's Note:

This was originally written by Gaines M. Crook in  August 2004 and is presented as a "historical document". Therefore, no effort has been made to update or correct subsequent discoveries, research, or investigations.

This report was found among the "electronic documents" recovered after Mr. Crook's death in 2013. I have slightly reformatted the paragraphs for legibility. He subtitled this entry as:

A Most Spectacular Evidence of the Interaction of a High Energy Device with the Ground Environment

The California Aqueduct is an open concrete channel for most of its length, as it is in the Antelope Valley. In July, 1973, my wife, Bettie and I turned off Highway 138, in the western Antelope Valley to the north on a very short section of 245th Street West. which is just a few yards west of where the canal crosses State Highway 138, and found a burned spot on the ground which is the characteristic signature left by a landed UFO.

245th Street West is not paved here as it is only one short block long the north end is blocked by a fence and beyond the fence is the aqueduct canal. We walked down the hill towards the fence that blocked 245th St. and saw that the area under the fence on the north (opposite) side of the canal had been burned.


We then went down to LaPetite Road, which crosses the canal by a bridge and in a roundabout manner came to the opposite side of the scene which we had viewed from the spur of 145th Street West. This was the point at which the fire seemed to have originated. The fence on the north side of the aqueduct consisted of steel posts of a “hat” cross section and barbed wire but further west, it changed to wood posts and a rectangular weave livestock wire.


It appeared that an object had impacted one of the steel fence posts with such force to leave a “Kink” in the post. This is strange because there is no access whatever for any kind of a vehicle. From the point of impact, the grass under the fence was burned in a variable manner. I still have a good Polaroid photo of the bent post
I took many notes and Polaroid photographs, the notes were lost but I still have some of the Polaroid photos.

There were two features of this scene which were unique in my experience. One was that the burned areas under the fence as it went west from where the collision occurred in a definite “standing wave” sequence. Now this feature could have been caused by at least two sources.

One would be a quick discharge of current into the fence that energized the resonant characteristics of the physical layout of where it discharged and the other is that there is a coherent source of frequency, characteristic of the standing wave pattern. In this case, I strongly favor the first alternative.

Now the burns also depend on other factors than just the E field potential, such as the dryness of the burnable material, so the evidence of the standing waves was variable. As I remember it, the period of the standing waves was generally around 15 feet, indicating a resonant frequency somewhere in the vicinity of 30 MHz. Again, this period was certainly a Lecher wire demonstration.

Another outstanding feature of this site was the following, (which to me is even more interesting): There is a bridge on LaPetite Road where it crosses the Aqueduct. On each side of the road over the bridge above the canal there is a tall chain link fence to prevent people from throwing contaminating objects into the aqueduct. The distance between the fence on one side and on the other is perhaps 30 feet.

Looking at the chain link fence at an angle close to the plane of the fence, one could see mottled discolorations of the zinc coating on the steel wire which reminded me of a photo I had seen in a JPL technical report on high voltage breakdown, which showed a similar pattern. It was as if the fence on the two sides of the bridge had acted as a giant capacitor which had broken down and arced across the whole space of the road! The markings stayed on the fence for many years. Traces of them might still be visible if it were examined closely.

I have considered the effects of a simple scenario of where a UFO is treated as an insulated charged body being discharged to Earth as an entirely separate issue from the La Petite road affair and I have concluded that it is most unlikely that a body of reasonable size could hold a charge even a thousandth of what the burn marks on the ground appear to demonstrate. Let us take a sphere as a simple example. My experience from working with wire cage spheres as an electrostatic field detector tells me that a sphere is a good enough an approximation.

In the old CGS terms, the capacity of a sphere is:

 C_pf=1.1 r_cm

Where r = radius of the sphere in centimeters

For a sphere of 10 meters diameter, (500 cm in radius) the self capacity is 550 pf.

            Let’s do an experiment. Calculate the energy in a capacitor of 550 pf if charged to an extreme of one million (10⁶) volts

 ( E_j = ½ CV² = ½ 550 * 10^-12 * 10¹² = 225 Joules

 The resultant energy is in the same order of magnitude as the energy of the surge generators that I built for testing communications equipment: They discharged energy of the same order of magnitude, except the capacitors used were from 40 to 120 microfarads and the voltages not over 2500 V. They were, however, energetic enough to explode a ¼ watt resistor! 

Something else must be involved.