Author speaks to packed house about UFOs in Montana

It was standing room only in the Montana Room of the Havre Inn and Suites Monday night, where about 100 people had turned out to listen to author Joan Bird talk about UFOs in Montana.

The presentation was hosted by H. Earl Clack Memorial Museum, whose chairwoman, Judi Dritshulas, contacted Humanities Montana and asked for Bird to give a presentation on the topic after it proved a hot topic at Dritshulas' book club.

Bird moved to Montana in 1973 to pursue graduate studies in zoology at the University of Montana and is the author of "Montana UFOs and Extraterrestrials."

When Bird asked for everyone in the crowd who had ever had a "sighting" to raise their hands, several people raised their hands. She then asked for the skeptics to raise their hands. Two people raised their hands.

Bird said her aim was to break the "ridicule barrier" and to make it comfortable for people to share their experiences.

For Bird, there had always been interest in things that cannot be explained, but she said she became a believer in extraterrestrials after crop circles started to appear in Kalispell and Whitefish in 1998. She said that the next year another crop circle appeared, five miles north of where the ones in 1998 did. And in 2000, more crop circles appeared in the same area. In her book, she cites the events as having been written about in the Independent Record, the Missoulian and the Whitefish Pilot newspapers. She said it was the way the plants were bent but not broken that proved something sophisticated and otherworldly was responsible, along with other factors.

Bird talked about scientists and servicemen, like Dr. Josef Allen Hynek  and Leo Dworshak, who had written about their sightings and experiences, among others.

When asked about the nature of aliens - "do they mean us harm or are they good?" - Bird said extraterrestrials are like humans in that there are bad ones and good ones. She added that the good ones protect humanity from the bad ones.

After the end of the presentation, she invited people to share their experiences.

Dan Willson of Havre said he saw a glowing globe about "half the size of this room" that hovered above the taco restaurant building on 10th Avenue sometime mid-year in the late 1970s, when he was in high school.

"We watched this thing for 20 minutes," he said.

Willson said there was something pulsating inside the globe, but he couldn't see inside of it.

People in the neighborhood had gathered to watch, just like him, until it shot straight up at lightning speeds and disappeared.

Willson said he saw something else that was less fascinating and more "creepy."

Bird had touched on reported cow mutilations, also in the '70s in Montana, during her presentation and Willson talked about that after her presentation.

Willson described finding a mutilated cow on his property in Hoagland.

He said there was no blood in the cow, the left side of its face had the skin missing from its mouth as well as an eye, the udder was completely removed as if "burned off with a laser," and the cow had a hole in the backside about the size of a softball that revealed an empty cavity void of organs and blood.

"It was creepy," he said.

Bird signed books and talked to stragglers after the presentation.

There's a lot we can learn from extraterrestrials, especially wisdom, she said.