By Preston Dennett(excerpted from “UFOs over Nevada”)
THIS HAPPENED IN MY EXPERIENCER GROUP WITH MY MEMBER:
One unique feature of Nevada encounters are the large number of cases in which UFOs have been seen hovering at low altitude over various casinos. These “casino encounters” are not limited to simple sightings; in a few cases witnesses have reported seeing alleged ETs inside casinos, mingling unnoticed with the diverse group of casino visitors and tourists. As outrageous as this sounds, the cases are numerous enough to provide corroboration among each other.
First, let’s examine some cases of sightings over Casinos. On February 13, 1996, numerous residents in the Reno area observed a bizarre-looking glowing object hovering at a low altitude over downtown Reno. The first reports flooded into local police stations around 5:30 p.m. Four people said that they stood outside the Gold Dust Casino for about one hour watching the object, which they described as dark-colored, but glowing so brightly that it appeared to have a halo around it.
Another witness was Jason Ruiz, who saw the object close-up with a small group of people. Says Ruiz, “It was black and it looked like it had a like a force field around it. We didn’t see any planes for a half hour, and it wasn’t a helicopter.”
Yet another witness was Charles Gilliam, who was at the intersection of Second and Keystone when he looked to the south and saw the object hovering only about 1500 feet above the horizon. Says Gilliam, “It hovered in the same spot for about a half-hour and then it jutted up and down across the sky.”
Police investigators called the control tower workers at Reno/Tahoe International Airport, but the radar operators said they had no unexplained activity on their scopes. The police learned that the local First Interstate Bank released a small group of balloons in the area around the time of the sightings, however, the witnesses say that what they observed was not a balloon, but a glowing object.
On May 2, 2000 at around 11:10 p.m., Robert O. was in the Valley View/Diablo area (south of Tropicana) with a group of four other people when they saw three “star-like” objects moving across the cloudless night sky. According to Robert, the objects “circled, merged, formed triangles and other geometric shapes, hovered, faded in and out [and] performed extraordinary aerodynamic feats not associated with any craft I am aware of.”
Robert and the other witnesses were impressed. Robert describes himself as “a skeptic of UFO stuff,” but admits that the movement of the objects was “mystical.”
As they watched the display, their attention was suddenly drawn to another much larger object scooting across the sky. Says Robert, “It appeared to be a giant building with no lights, very, very large…no noise. [It was] very hard to discern the shape as the object was only a small shade lighter than the background sky.”
The witnesses were unable to estimate the exact size or distance of the object, which moved northward across the sky in thirty seconds. Robert guesses that the object was about two to five miles away, and the size of a 70 to 100-story building. It reminded him of the Empire State building. He could see the large casinos on the Las Vegas strip one mile away, and the object was at least four times larger than those buildings.
It was 2:30 a.m. sometime in the year 2000 when a man and his wife were in their room in the Binions casino. The husband had stepped out onto the balcony to have a cigar while his wife rested in bed. Out of the corner of his eye he saw what he first thought was a jet coming in for a landing at nearby Nellis AFB. Suddenly, the object turned towards downtown Las Vegas, moving toward him. It instantly became clear the object was not a plane. According to the witness, “It was huge–by huge I mean at least a mile long, and I think about four stories high. And it blended in with the night.” He jumped out of his chair and watched the object disappear behind the Fitzgerald’s Casino, and the reappear heading slowly west. He called for his wife to come look, but by the time she arrived, the craft had leveled off, becoming almost invisible. All she could see was “something dark.” Said the husband, “To me, when it leveled off it looked like some kind of cloak, like on the TV show Star Trek. It went right over the Stratosphere Casino.”
The Casino encounters are not limited to simple sightings. In some cases, aliens are actually seen inside casinos.
(The drawing is of similar beings from a Roswell witness)
According to a well-known Las Vegas researcher, in the mid 1980s (exact date unknown), she was contacted by a gentleman who worked in Las Vegas at a major casino. He declined to name the actual casino, but told the researcher that it was his job to sit in a separate room where he monitored the security cameras that had been placed in strategic locations throughout the casino. Whenever he observed suspicious behavior or cheating, he was immediately to report the incident to his supervisor so that action could be taken against the violator.
One day, while monitoring the dozens of video screens, one of them showed something incredible. This particular camera was hidden in the ceiling of the casino and looked down on the table from about a 45-degree angle above.
The video showed that there was a group of six or seven normal-looking people playing cards around one of the tables. However, among this group of people were two strange-looking people. They were about five feet tall, with slightly larger than normal bald heads and dark eyes and a very small nose and mouth. They were wearing strange white tunics or robes. They appeared to be observing the game as it was being played.
The security officer could hardly believe what he was seeing. Although the figures were humanoid, they were clearly not human. Even stranger, however, was that nobody in the casino seemed to notice them. Often there were some wild characters who came into casinos dressed in strange costumes, but they always attracted attention. These figures were attracting no attention at all, and yet, if they were in costumes, it was the best the security officer had ever seen.
By this time, all the personnel in the video room were gathered around the video monitor watching the strange event unfold. Then something happened which convinced all of them that the figures were not human.
The cameras in the casino are hidden very well behind mirrors and other innocent-looking objects. Only a few of the casino employees knew where the security cameras were located. As the security officers watched the video, to their amazement, one of the weird-looking figures lifted his head and stared directly into the security video camera. He clearly knew he was being filmed. The casino employee who revealed this incident declined to provide further info. The event was quickly covered up, he said, but he did manage to sneak out at least two snapshots taken from the security video, which he provided to the Las Vegas researcher. The photographs clearly show the two figures standing next to the gambling table. The photographs, if true, are nothing less than incredible.
In July 1990, London native Brian Hampton (a 47-year-old professor of history) decided to visit Las Vegas. His wife had recently died and he hoped that a trip to the United States would help him to start over.
In Las Vegas, he stayed at the well-known establishment, Circus-Circus. He enjoyed walking the strip and gazing at the neon lights. One afternoon as he walked along a busy street just off the strip and next to a casino, he saw two women looking at the sky. He also glanced up to see what they were observing. Says Hampton, “There in the sky were two round disks. Two UFOs. They bloody well just hung there. A few other people stopped and looked but nobody got excited. I thought, these bloody yanks must have seen this before.”
The objects were round, gray in color with a dark band around the edge and a dark circle in the center. The two objects hovered closely together, almost directly overhead. Camera in hand, Hampton quickly snapped a photograph.
At that instant, the object on the left turned white and began to wink out. Then the second object began to turn white. Hampton quickly snapped a second photograph as both objects disappeared.
Both photographs, when developed, showed exactly what Hampton had seen–two clearly unidentifiable flying objects. However, Hampton’s ordeal wasn’t over. Before developing the photographs, he went back to Circus-Circus to retire for the evening.
While undressing in his hotel room, he heard what sounded like children running in the hallway outside. Then the noises came again, only this time, they were coming from the bathroom inside his room. The bathroom door was closed, so Hampton stood up and said loudly, “Come out of there now. What are you doing in my room?”
There was no answer, so Hampton slowly opened the door. When it was half-way open, whoever was in the room “suddenly slammed the door back closed.”
Says Hampton, “I angrily pushed on the door and they pushed back. With the door partly open once again, I slide my arm along the inside bathroom wall to turn on the light which I did, but immediately ‘they’ turned the light back off and powerfully slammed the door. Now I was bloody well angry. I got down on the floor and braced my back against the closet wall, my feet against the bath door, and kicked it open. This was a bad idea!”
Only half-realizing that he wasn’t dealing with children, Hampton could hardly believe what happened next. As he says, “When the door opened, at least six dark gray shield ‘things’ came jumping through the open door. I now it sounds bloody crazy and I have never told anybody but I know what I saw.”
Hampton says the figures were small gray-skinned figures with large heads wearing uniforms, just like, he said, the figures Ed Walter’s described in his book, UFOs Over Gulf Breeze. Says Hampton, “They jumped on, over and around me. The last thing I remember was a nasty musty smell. That’s it. It all happened so fast that I hardly know what happened. I was blinded by a light and must have blacked out. When I woke up the next morning, I was lying on the floor next to the bathroom door.”
After returning home, Hampton continued to dwell upon his weird experiences, including the sighting and the encounter in the hotel room. Says Hampton, “I expected to see fantastic sites but what I saw was unbelievable. If I didn’t have the photographs, I could make myself think it was all a dream.”
A few months later, he picked up a copy of Ed Walter’s book. He was shocked to see that other people were having similar experiences and quickly wrote a letter to Walters, hoping that he would be able to “help me understand what I saw and later touched.”
Says Walters, “He was worried that I would not believe such an incredible encounter really happened.” Walters, however, became convinced of Hampton’s sincerity. Says Walters, “Both photographs present a significant sighting and his experiences later in his hotel room can only be described as alarming.”
In 1990, David Patterson (pseudonym) was traveling from New Mexico to his home in California when he decided to stop off in Las Vegas for a night of gambling. He went to the Tropicana Casino and played black-jack long into the night. It was the last place he expected to see an extraterrestrial. Writes the witness, “I went to the restroom around 4:00 a.m., and on my way back to the tables I stopped and watched a peculiar individual walking up the stairs. This person had a hat and sunglasses on, yet something wasn’t right with the way he was walking or climbing the stairs. It looked like he was stuck in mud; his knees sort of came out to the side as he tried raising his feet to take the next step. I noticed also that there were about three more that looked just like him at the top of the stairs, yet some taller. They were all skinny, tall, and I recall noticing their whitish-like hair that seemed to shimmer as if light was bouncing off it. I had never seen hair like this before. My reaction was, what a freak.”
The witness reports that at that exact moment, the figure that was walking up the stairs, stopped, turned around and looked at him, as if reading his thoughts.
The witness quickly returned to his table. It wasn’t until fifteen years later when read about the contacts of Charles Hall with “tall whites” in the Nevada desert that he wondered if perhaps he had seen extraterrestrials. The witness was impressed enough that he reported his encounter to NUFORC and several UFO researchers including Linda Moulton Howe and Dr. Richard Boylan. What are we to make of these casino encounters? Why are UFOs hovering so brazenly over densely populated areas? Are they truly walking among us? Is it that easy for them to come and go as they please? Apparently, yes! The question still remains, why?
One theory could be the pretty lights. For example, On September 2, 2005 three participants at the festival had climbed onto an observation deck they had built to watch the celebration from a distance. The bonfire had just been set when they looked up and saw “a set of five green lights traveling in a single file-line formation from east to west.”
The lights passed directly over the burn-sit, then abruptly rotated counter-clockwise and shot off to the northwest.
The witness reports that he had attended the festival on five previous occasions, but never saw anything like this before. As he says, “There was absolutely no doubt in my mind of what I saw that night.”
Another example: On December 20, 2000, the Las Vegas Review Journal printed the following short editorial column written by “Norm,” and called, Vegas Confidential: “Some folks are still buzzing about what some consider a UFO sighting high above the Thomas & Mack on December 1, [the] opening night of the National Finals Rodeo. Dozens watched as a large on-property searchlight–the largest in the world at 50,000 watts–locked on to the cylindrical object, which didn’t move for 45 minutes. ‘We haven’t received any calls,’ said Tech Sgt. Charles Ramey of Nellis Air Force Base Public Affairs office.”
Another theory to explain UFOs interest in casinos could be: they are just typical tourists, coming to check out the Las Vegas Strip, try the food, do a little gambling. Why not? What better way to study a species than to participate in their cultural activities?
The truth is, we don’t just don’t know. We can only speculate. Whatever the answer, the high number of cases shows that UFOs are exhibiting an active interest in casinos. (This Article was excerpted from UFOs Over Nevada, by Preston Dennett)
Preston Dennett Biography
Preston Dennett began investigating UFOs and the paranormal in 1986 when he discovered that his family, friends and co-workers were having dramatic unexplained encounters. Since then, he has interviewed hundreds of witnesses and investigated a wide variety of paranormal phenomena. He is a field investigator for the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), a ghost hunter, a paranormal researcher, and the author of 17 books and more than 100 articles on UFOs and the paranormal. His articles have appeared in numerous magazines including Fate, Atlantis Rising, MUFON UFO Journal, Nexus, Paranormal Magazine, UFO Magazine, Mysteries Magazine, Ufologist and others. His writing has been translated into several different languages including German, French, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese and Icelandic. He has appeared on numerous radio and television programs, including Midnight in the Desert with Art Bell, Coast-to-Coast and also the History Channel’s Deep Sea UFOs and UFO Hunters. His research has been presented in the LA Times, the LA Daily News, the Dallas Morning News and other newspapers. He has taught classes on various paranormal subjects and lectures across the United States. He currently resides in Reseda, California. www.prestondennett.weebly.com