Jenny Randles "The Complete Book of Alien Abductions" has a number of encounters/abductions in this time period and I found a number of others when looking for further links/information on these (note a number are reported long after any alleged event, which clearly makes one a tad suspicious, but on the other hand it is only until the Modern Era of UFOs that a lot of people felt comfortable about relating their experiences):
What must be one of the earliest UFO sighting in the 20th Century is the 1901 Bournebrook encounter which involved a flying "hut" (surely only in Britain would someone see a flying shed!!):
www.mysteriousbritain.co.uk/england/west-midlands/ufos/bournebrook-ufo-1901.html1919, Australia:
An object was on the ground near the roadside with a man working on it. When the traveler went over to offer assistance, the man pointed something at him, knocking him senseless. When he came to the object was gone.
The link also includes a 1903 report of a man disappearing around the same time a light is seen but the link between the two could merely be coincidence.
www.scientificexploration.org/jse/articles/ufo_reports/schuessler/3.html1921 in Paris, although not reported until October 1954 (i.e. in the big French flap) and Magonia has a good overview:
The earliest so far dated report of an abduction attempt comes from L'Aurore of 12 September 1954, which reports that a M. Fili of Tehran was on the balcony of the second floor of his house when he saw a luminous object hovering 20m. away. Inside was a small man dressed in black, with a trunk like an elephant's. Fili felt magnetically drawn towards the object, but when he screamed it broke the spell, and the object took off. [17]
Eleven days later, in the unlikely location of the letters column in Paris Match came the earliest know abduction survivor report. Mr GB of Marseille recounted how as a boy he had been walking along the bank of the North Canal when he was seized by two men from behind bushes. They were tall, slender, and dressed in what looked like flexible metal diving suits. They carried him into a strange object which had square or rectangular portholes. Inside was a flexible couch on which he sat. The boy began to weep, and some minutes later an opening appeared in the ceiling of the cabin and he was on the ground again. He found that he had to walk for most of the afternoon to get back to where he had been taken from, though he had been on the craft for only about five minutes. [18]
Even in this third-hand summary we can detect elements of such well known later themes as doorway amnesia and time lapse, but otherwise this narrative at the very origin of the abduction saga is a very bare one: no medical examination, certainly no sex. It is determinedly secular and its antecedents are secular; for surely the story of a boy kidnapped by men in diving suits by a canal and taken to a craft whose escape hatch is in the roof belongs in a children' adventure story of kidnapping by submariners. The image of being pounced on from behind bushes hints at child abusers. Here we can see the emergence of the UFO abduction story out of a melange of secular abduction themes.
Since the above was written I have come across some interesting additions. The first is another translation of the 23 October 1954 piece in Paris-Match. In an article by Jerome Clark entitled 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 1901-1959' in Strange magazine (no. 10, 1992), he gives an account of the eight-year-old 'playing among some hills' rather than walking by the bank of a canal, when he was accosted by two tall, slender men wearing pliable helmets, who dragged him into an oddly shaped tank. After a while an opening appeared in the ceiling of the cabin, and a few seconds later he found himself on the ground.
Source (cached)
There is another intriguing one - a woman called Rose met a human and an alien in 1952 and the human claimed he was taken away by the aliens in 1932. I am still looking for an online account of this, Randles references a book called "Meeting with the Extraterrestrials"
1933 Nipawin, Saskatchewan, Canada - an alien spaceship repair situation:
www.ufoevidence.org/cases/case1143.htm1933 Italy - perhaps my favourite example here of aliens acting like dicks:
A man was taken from his home by a humanoid, who slapped him and left him in a tree. Neighbors helped him down.
www.scientificexploration.org/jse/articles/ufo_reports/schuessler/3.htmlIn Central Jutland in 1940 a young man spotted three creatures who disappeared as they approached their vehicle.
At Meriden, Warwickshire, Cathie Connelly saw some Nordics repairing a ship, she thought they were foreigners repairing an aircraft and ignored them (although how common a sight is that? I'd have a nose around) but when she looked back they had vanished.
In Feb 1942 Eileen Arnold had a very strange encounter with an impressive sounding "craft" which seemed to induce the "Oz Factor" and she went on to have contact with entities and become a psychic after this. There is an overview in an article on the OZ Factor and really this, and the one after it, don't really fit into the general ETH for UFOs and seem much more in the line of visionary experiences:
We would not expect to discover this effect in UFO sightings, but it is there in almost all close encounters that involve more than the sighting of a light in the distant sky. Retired headmistress Eileen Arnold well illustrates this point. Her encounter was in spring 1944, three years before the term flying saucer was first invented. So what she saw that afternoon was simply a mysterious vision in the sky, quite unfettered by today's preconceptions about aliens and spacecraft which, researchers feel, heavily colour what people describe.
The mind, after all, is not a camera, but a living, active, thinking process that changes dynamically and evolves. We see not only what is there but what is filterccl thro-lgh our own perccptions, beliefs, expectations and past experiences. Often what we 'see' may not be at all what is there.
Eileen was walking down the High Street in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, returning from a prenatal check-up. The pavements were busy, the road alive with traffic as the sun shone just after noon.
Interestingly, Eileen says that she was in a 'particularly sensitive state' that day, possibly because of her thoughts of the impending birth . She was doing many things 'on impulse' and having what felt like empathetic links with other people, even strangers she walked past. Then, something made her look up and she saw a spectacular object sailing across the sky. It was unlike any UFO you might have heard about before, being akin to a giant porcupine ejecting quills into the air as it glided through the atmosphere.
Of course, this phenomenon could not drift across a busy town in the middle of the day without hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people seeing it. But in fact it seems that nobody else saw it. This isolationism is one of the most intriguing, yet most common, aspects ofthe UFO close encounter.
Of the period whilst she watched this thing move silently above Cheltenham, Eileen records: 'There was a time lapse and an envi ronment lapse - which I don't have a name for. Time slowed. The extremely busy road altered. Trafflc and people had completely vanished but I did not even see the road and pavement . . . all I 'saw' apart from the UFO was the rooftop overwhich it appeared.'
http://blinknoodle.tripod.com/ofexpl.htmlAlbert Lancashire claims to be Britain's first abductee after a incident in September 1942. He was guarding a top secret radar station when a strange mist appeared that contained a glowing light. It shot a beam at him and he faded away. Afterwards he had psychic and poltergeist experiences and saw visions of his abduction. There is quite a bit on ths online:
http://ufoexperiences.blogspot.com/2006/09/shrinking-aliens.htmlwww.mysteriousbritain.co.uk/england/northumberland/ufos/cresswell-ufo-1942.htmlwww.scientificexploration.org/jse/articles/ufo_reports/schuessler/3.htmlThis from France in 1944 (quote from Randles earlier "Abductions", in TCBoAA it is pae 73):
"It occurred one hot and thundery day in the summer of 1944. World War II raged around the village of Le Verger, near Toulon-sur-Arroux, France, when a thirteen-year-old girl, Madeleine Arnoux, decided to risk the many Germans and resistance fighters in the woods to cycle out and pick berries. In doing so she confronted a strange object in the grass, like a small car but dull grey in colour. She then noticed that small men stood beside it, no more than three feet tall and dressed in brown one-piece suits. Feeling desperately afraid, she tried to run but was paralysed and lost all sense of time (the Oz Factor once more). Then, inexplicably, the object had gone and the hold on her was relaxed. She fled back to her village." (Randles, p.23)
http://members.ozemail.com.au/~amilani/jour7.html#The%20Oz%20Factor1946 in (deep breath) Aracariguama, Brazil a man was struck by a beam of light and liquified (early Chupa attack?):
http://ufoexperiences.blogspot.com/2007/08/road-to-aracariguama.htmlwww.scientificexploration.org/jse/articles/ufo_reports/schuessler/3.htmlThere is the Villa Santini case from 1947 in Italy (note that link is a good find as it seems to be the bulk of the "Humanoids" book, which is really useful) :
www.interstellar-travel.com/library/humanoids/1-VillaSantini.cfm
There is quite a good Wikipedia page on it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_abduction_phenomenonWhich reminds us that Fort discussed this possibility:
One supposes that if extra-mundane vessels have sometimes come close to this earth, then sailing away, terrestrial aëronauts may have occasionally left this earth, or may have been seized and carried away from this earth.
The pages also contain a number of other anomalous reports - some clearly seem to be moon lights, others fireballs and meteors, Venus makes an appearance and there is possibly one of the earliest "fire lanterns" explanation but some.... are difficult to explain.
www.resologist.net/lands224.htmThere are also some historical accounts here (flying bathtubs?):
www.stateoftheart.nl/phenomenon/frames/subjects/et/histsightings/histsight.htmThere is a UFO timelines here:
www.ufovillage.com/ufofeatures/2007/09242007.shtml
Also quite a few sightings involve individuals repairing their ships, so see also graylien's
Zen and the Art of Flying Saucer Maintenance.
