Sightings:The UFO Jackpot Found At A Trash Dump In December 1971

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This was originally written by Gaines M. Crook in  August 2004 and is presented as a "historical document".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. 

On our next trip to the Antelope Valley, we turned our search somewhat to the south and west, looking for possible signs of UFO landing spots. It was not easy looking over miles of desert for a place where we might find a place where UFOs would land. We, my wife, Bettie always accompanied me on these treks and usually drove the car, because I was always hopping out of the car for this reason or that. We then turned our efforts to just cruising the area at night hoping to see strange lights. This was a gigantic effort because the area searched was an average of at least 60 miles away from home and 30 miles wide.

This went on for some time when on another occasion on a Saturday night in December, 1971, we were chasing a light which was flying on the north side of Highway 138 and parallel to it. The light changed course and flew further north and so we went off Highway 138 to the north, on to 360th Street West which is a dirt road, in pursuit of it and followed it some distance then the object flew quite a ways away from us in a northerly direction and we lost track of it.

We arrived at a place that appeared to us to me a “little hill” which appeared to be too steep for the car to climb over. From the North, what appeared to be a car came toward us on what appeared to be a road on the top of the rise just described. The “car” then appeared to make a left turn over the steep little hill previously described and disappeared on the opposite side of the “hill”. I did not know whether our car could climb over the hill, it was so steep so I got out of the car and walked up to the top of the rise and saw on the other side, what appeared to be an ordinary station wagon down below the rise and about a couple hundred feet away with the interior lights on and four people in it.

Puzzled, I went back to the car and we started home. On the way home we encountered two more lights and chased them for a while. They were very close to the ground and close together. When they crossed the road in front of us, we decided that they were motorcycles and that it was time to give it up and go home! The next day on Sunday, we went back to the location where the lights crossed the road and found that at that place there were well maintained barbed wire cattle fences on both sides of the road!
We then proceeded back to the dirt road extension of 360th West again and found that the rise which I had misinterpreted as a hill was the old Los Angeles Owens River aqueduct (A steel pipe 10 feet in diameter) that had been filled in with enough earth on each side so that cars could drive over it.

It had no road on the top of it and further, it had pieces of angle iron welded to the exposed steel top of the pipe to keep motorcycles off it. In the area where I saw the “station wagon”, there was a newly plowed field, ready for planting, which had absolutely no signs that there had been a car or anything else resting on the field. Whatever was there must have been supported above ground.

On the top of the aqueduct, there were numerous burned “landing spots”, each with its own set of triangular “footprints”. About 1000 feet northward and still right adjacent to and separated only by the dirt road on the East side of the aqueduct, was the greatest amount of UFO signs that I have ever seen, before or after. The location was directly within a ravine. There were also a number of soil sampling holes in the ground of which I still have three faded Polaroid photos. The ravine at this location then was an “unofficial” trash dump. It had a sandy dry creek bed of which the north side was a “cliff” about 8 or 10 feet high with a sandy bottom. The South side was gently sloped from the bottom up that side.

There were some cottonwood trees in the ravine and one of these had branches hanging down completely around it so I had a great difficulty getting myself inside, between the drooping branches and the trunk. There was no possible way for any kind of physical device to get in there unless it was as small as me, and yet, what did I find inside the drooped branches but some calcined earth and triangular marks, characteristic of a UFO landing! This reinforces the point that UFOs are much stranger than the simple “interstellar vehicles” of the commonly imagined ET.

There were “landing tracks” all over the area. One of the oddities was that there were pieces of an aluminum-like metal near the tracks which had the appearance of once having been melted. I thought, at first that they resulted from aluminum drink cans being melted and later solidified. I later discarded this idea when I reasoned that these cans are less than ten thousandths of an inch (one fourth of a millimeter) thick.

If they are exposed to temperatures hot enough to melt aluminum in normal atmospheric oxygen, the aluminum would oxidize as it melted. I picked up numerous pieces of this metal and some of it was a good fraction of an inch thick. Unfortunately, this was later discarded along with a whole box of photos and notes about our UFO researches in 1999 when we had an emergency and had to vacate the building in which I had my test laboratory business for 25 years.