The Week Of : 12/19/10 - 12/25/10 

Canton’s close encounter with Roswell UFO

By Ed Balint

Ralph A. Multer’s blue-collar life collided with the extraterrestrial in Canton many years ago.

A wounded World War II veteran who walked with a limp, Multer exhibited a gruff exterior. He liked to spin stories about his days as a gunner’s mate on a Navy warship, including ones about the Battle of Iwo Jima. Multer worked on cars and rode a motorcycle. His nickname was “Bear,” a reference to his large frame. And on occasion, he enjoyed a few swallows of vodka.

At 22 and married, Multer worked hard to support his wife, driving a truck for the Timken Co.

He wasn’t normally given to far-flung tales of flying saucers and little green men. Until, that is, the summer of 1947.

Multer is said to be Canton’s connection to the most famous UFO story in world history: The alleged crash of an alien spacecraft near Roswell, N.M., in July 1947.

He told loved ones he hauled material from the crashed spaceship to one of the Timken plants in Canton that summer. A Timken furnace could not dent, damage or melt the UFO wreckage. Not even slightly.

An FBI agent made it very clear. Don’t tell anybody about the covert operation. Keep it hush-hush.

That’s a fascinating story. A whopper. Is it true? Can it be verified? Especially when you consider Multer died in 1982. Could a company of Timken’s iconic stature be complicit in perhaps the greatest government cover-up of all time?

SUMMER OF ’47

July 8, 1947. UFO historians consider that a monumental date. It is when the Roswell Army Air Field issued a press release that a crashed flying disk had been recovered in the New Mexico desert.

The military quickly changed its story. A second press release stated the 509th Bomb Group at the Roswell base mistakenly had identified a weather balloon as flying saucer wreckage.

Legions of UFO buffs believe the Roswell story. Researchers and authors have interviewed hundreds of people on the subject, including former military officers. Some believers have obtained once-classified documents, connecting the dots to conclude that the government concealed the crash and stashed away dead aliens with balloon-shaped heads, large eyes and child-like bodies.

Others declare the Roswell story to be a ridiculous myth borne out of wild imaginations. They contend it’s utter nonsense concocted by nuts who are loose with the facts and heavy on speculation. They argue the UFO crowd has yet to produce hard evidence, such as a hunk of the damaged flying saucer.

Multer was a believer. He became one 63 years ago while working a four-hour shift for Timken.

Multer told his wife the story. Years later, he shared it with his daughter.

It was August or September. Multer had hoped to finish the shift and meet his wife for lunch. But the normalcy of the day quickly faded.

Multer said he and two other drivers were asked to pick up loads at a railroad yard. Three flatbed trucks, covered with canvas, carried the loads.

The load on Multer’s truck was the largest. The convoy of trucks was escorted by officials of some type. Multer had some level of security clearance at the company.

FBI agents had met the trio of truck drivers. Multer asked about the loads. An agent told him they were parts of a flying saucer recovered in New Mexico. The strength and durability of the material would be tested in a super-hot Timken furnace.

“They talked to a person later who was there that night (at one of the Timken plants), and they said they couldn’t cut it, they couldn’t even heat it,” said Sundi Multer-Lingle, Multer’s daughter. “The piece of metal, well I don’t know if you can call it metal, the object was absolutely impenetrable.”

Metallic. Lightweight. Silver or dark gray. That’s how her father described the mysterious material.

“We grew up with the story,” said Multer-Lingle, 58, who was born in Canton and lives in Knoxville, Tenn. “Dad would put us up on his lap, and he would tell us the story.”

He never changed his story. Or added details, she said.

“Dad wasn’t a liar at all,” Multer-Lingle said. “I mean, if he told you something, you believed it because that’s just how he was, and I heard this so many times and so much that we never doubted it.”

Multer’s late wife told UFO researchers the experience left a lasting impression on her husband. It “never left his mind from then on,” she said in an interview in the 1990s.

RALPH AND ROSWELL

Roswell-related stories inundate the Internet. Books, movies and television documentaries transformed the Roswell story into a pop culture phenomenon. A museum in Roswell is dedicated to the topic. The Roswell UFO Festival takes place each July. A website for the Roswell newspaper features UFO-themed merchandise for sale.

Tucked away on a handful of websites, the Multer story keeps a low profile in the world of sensational UFO accounts. Multer’s Roswell story apparently is not mentioned in any book.

At the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell, a search through the library’s database and archives turned up nothing about Multer and Timken as they relate to the UFO crash story, a museum employee said.

In the mid-1990s, William E. Jones and Irena McCammon Scott uncovered Multer’s story. That’s when Multer’s wife was interviewed. The duo co-authored an article about Multer in the Ohio UFO Notebook in 1994 as part of a compilation of pieces titled, “The Ohio UFO Crash Connection and Other Stories.”

Up until then, Ralph’s story had been a well-kept family secret, said Multer-Lingle. Outsiders weren’t privy to it. Multer’s wife, Violet M. Brown, died in 2009; at the time of her death, she was known as Vikki May Black.

Stricken with health problems, Ralph had died nearly 20 years earlier.

“I remember we went up to Timken (in Canton) and interviewed some people,” said Scott, 102, the UFO researcher who helped break the Multer story. “But I don’t remember how we got the story to start.”

MULTER’S STORY

Multer’s story is difficult to verify. According to records from the Golden Lodge United Steelworkers Local 1123, Multer left Timken in 1952. His daughter says that is when the family moved to the Portsmouth area in Scioto County, where Multer then worked as a railroad brakeman.

Timken spokeswoman Lorrie Paul Crum said Multer worked with the company in the early 1950s, initially in the steel operations and later as a truck driver. However, a search didn’t turn up all of the company records on Multer, Crum said.

“We didn’t have his beginning employment records,” she said.

“We had partial records. We don’t keep them for all the employees.”

Multer could have worked at Timken in 1947, said Tom Sponhour, editor of the Golden Lodge News, noting records can be sketchy that far back.

“We talked with retirees and executives familiar with all facets of ... Timken’s long-standing relationships with government and scientific organizations serving as one of the world’s foremost experts in metallurgy,” Crum said.

But “no one had any recollection of Multer’s story,” she wrote in an e-mail response.

The Repository contacted several Timken retirees who worked for the company in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Only one recalled hearing about Multer. Dominick T. Rex got a job at Timken in 1946 in the roller bearings plant.

“It was just a rumor about a truck driver (who) did something,” Rex recalled. “He did something, and it was Ralph.”

But the 84-year-old does not recall anything about a crashed UFO.

Scott, one of the UFO investigators who co-authored the original story about Multer, said she and the other researcher visited Timken in the mid-1990s to inquire about the former truck driver and Roswell.

None of the retired management and engineer employees contacted by UFO investigators had heard of the alleged Canton connection to Roswell, said Scott, who worked on satellite photography in the 1960s for the Defense Intelligence Agency. She is a former biology professor at St. Bonaventure University.

“I don’t have a firm conclusion,” she said of the alleged UFO crash.

The U.S. Department of Defense did not respond to a phone inquiry or e-mail from The Repository seeking comment about Roswell-related events in 1947 and Multer’s story. The agency forwarded the call Thursday to the U.S. Air Force.

As of Friday, the Air Force had not replied. In the mid-1990s, the Air Force issued two in-depth reports, following an inquiry by the General Accounting Office, in an effort to debunk the Roswell story.

UFO RESEARCHERS

Stanton T. Friedman, a well-known researcher and author in the UFO field, said he had not heard of a Canton link to Roswell. Friedman co-authored a book on the topic, “Crash at Corona: The Definitive Study of the Roswell Incident.”

Friedman, however, said he’s well aware of Timken.

“They’re a major company, and they had major responsibilities during the war,” he said.

“Timken probably would have had a reputation for developing very strong materials at very high temperatures,” said Friedman, 76, a nuclear physicist.

After exhaustive research, including interviews and an examination of countless government records, Friedman said he firmly believes that a UFO crashed near Roswell in 1947.

Donald R. Schmitt has been researching Roswell-related events the last 21 years. He has co-authored multiple books on the subject, including, “Witness to Roswell: Unmasking the Government’s Biggest Cover-up.”

“This is the granddaddy of them all,” Schmitt said of the Roswell story. “If we solve this, the entire mystery is solved.”

Schmitt is intrigued by Multer’s account. “This is another piece of the puzzle,” he said. Schmitt said he’s heard “eyewitness accounts” about material being loaded on freight cars near the former Roswell Army Air Field.

“All aftermath, all arrows point directly to Ohio,” Schmitt said of Roswell, referring to other alleged Ohio connections, including Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

"Why would (Multer) lie to his wife about this?,” Schmitt said. “He didn’t profit (from) this, he didn’t gain any notoriety or any publicity, he didn’t do any talk shows or any interviews.”

Schmitt said he’s 99 percent certain a UFO crashed in the Roswell area.

“That remaining 1 percent is the remaining 1 percent of the curiosity until we get a piece of the holy grail,” he added. “I do accept the challenge of the true skeptic, not the scoffer, but the skeptic who would remind us until you come up with the piece of the actual hardware, a piece of the ship, you won’t have 100 percent.”

ROSWELL SKEPTICS

Michael Shermer, founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, questions the Roswell story.

“I’m fairly familiar with the story, but I’ve not heard of this truck driver story before, so that’s odd,” Shermer wrote in an e-mail response. “And in any case, how would he know what alien metals look like? Compared to what? He’s a truck driver, not a materials engineer who would be familiar with various metals. It is probable that the entire story is made up, or at best confabulated from several different memories.”

“If all this was so top secret,” he wrote, “why would the government hire some no-name, non-governmental truck driver to haul the greatest discovery in the history of civilization?”

Benson Saler, a retired anthropology professor at Brandeis University, co-authored a book, “UFO Crash at Roswell: The Genesis of a Modern Myth.”

The point of the book was not to declare whether a UFO crashed or not, he said. But “we of course don’t think it crashed because we don’t know of any empirical evidence to support the idea that it crashed,” Saler said.

“What  we  were doing,” he said, “was tracing the development of an American myth that was unfolding right before our eyes.”

My hunt for paranormal activity

By Christine Bryant

I don't remember the first time I became interested in the paranormal.

I had never known anybody who had seen a ghost or experienced a paranormal event, that is, until I went to college at Ohio University.

For those of you who are familiar with the campus, I'm sure you also know the legends it holds, from the eeriness of the Ridges - a former lunatic asylum that overlooks the campus - to the countless stories of hauntings each building seemed to have.

My freshman year, I lived in Jefferson Hall, a four-floor building that stretched the length of a city block. The ghost that supposedly haunted my dorm building was that of a woman in white who roamed the halls late at night.

I never knew anyone who saw this woman in white, but nonetheless the story was terrifying, especially during middle-of-the-night trips to the bathroom, which was located down the hall from my room. I'll never forget how long it seemed to take to get to the bathroom, even though in reality it was only a matter of seconds.

There were stories, handed down from prior classes, told by people I didn't know.  But after I graduated, I seemed to meet more and more people who had experienced something paranormal. Some were open to talking about it. Others weren't.
Then came television shows like "Ghost Hunters" and "Paranormal Society," which whether you like them or not, opened the door to more conversations. Those who believed in the possibility that maybe something was out there that we didn't completely understand weren't all that crazy.

If you ask many of the "ghost hunters" out there today, they'll tell you they didn't need a television show to affirm their curiosity or the events they had experienced at one point in their lives.

For me, the shows didn't answer the questions I had begun to form more than 10 years ago when I was in school. In fact, I have more questions now than ever.

Is there life after death? Why do some people's spirits seem to pass while others don't? Are there reasonable explanations for even the most unreasonable things we've experienced?

In November, I was offered the opportunity to go on a "ghost hunt" with members of the Central Ohio Paranormal Society at the Little Theatre off Broadway in Grove City. (I would be amiss if I didn't shamelessly plug my story here. If you haven't read it, go to www.columbusmessenger.com and click on "Southwest.”)

For weeks leading up to the ghost hunt, my stomach turned as thoughts of uncertainty loomed in my head. For years, I've had questions that I've longed to have answered. But I've also had the fear of the unknown. And to me, by going on this ghost hunt, there was a real possibility that I might see or hear something that I wanted - yet didn't want - to see.

As it turned out, I didn't experience anything paranormal. But I was surrounded by people who had many of the same questions I had. For years, they've sought proof - scientific evidence - that paranormal activity does occur. At the same time, they've sought proof that in some instances, it does not.

Their theory: If something - a sound, a voice, a sighting - cannot be explained, it may be paranormal - or beyond normal.

That doesn't mean it's a ghost or a spirit. But that doesn't mean it's not either as well.
And that leaves us where we started - with questions.

Maybe some questions in life aren't meant to be answered. That doesn't mean, however, we shouldn't keep asking.

Family says they had to live with ghosts slamming doors, turning radios on and off for years

By Carol Biliczky
Beacon Journal staff writer
 

 

 

 

Paranormal investigator Mary Ann Winkowski calmly shooed them out of a modest ranch home in Akron and gave the family specially treated quince seeds from Italy to keep other ghosts at bay.

''I can only tell you what's happening in the present,'' she warned the family, who asked that their names not be used. ''I'm going to tell you what they're telling me. I don't know if it's true.''

The matronly resident of suburban Cleveland discovered as a child that she had a knack for communicating with the dearly departed at funerals.

 

As an adult, she made her living grooming dogs for 20 years, but paranormal investigating kept calling.

She turned to writing books, giving workshops and offering products on her Web site to keep errant energy at bay. Wearing her $40 or $45 sterling silver quince seed charms ''puts a 3- to 4-foot barrier'' that keeps earth-bound spirits away, she promises on her Web site, http://www.maryannwinkowski.com.

Winkowski's fame went national
when she became a paid consultant to CBS' Ghost Whisperer TV show featuring Jennifer Love Hewitt, which ended its run this year.

She has been a subject of study under Pam Frese, a College of Wooster professor who studies New Age religions.

Winkowski ''works to establish harmony between ancestors and spirits and those who are alive in this world,'' Frese said. ''She is a healer on many levels.''

Frese met Winkowski more than 20 years ago through Winkowski's daughter, then a student in Frese's Magic, Witchcraft, and Religion class at Wooster, a perennially popular offering that fills quickly.

Frese found that Winkowski, now 62, was a personable and devout Catholic and seemingly a fervent believer in her abilities.

''I don't know where she gets her information,'' Frese said, ''but I try to believe that she's communicating with spirits.''

So have hundreds of other people who have asked for Winkowski's help getting rid of curses, voodoo, spells, witchcraft and bad magic.

She visits about 200 homes a year at $300 a crack to stop spirits from fussing with electronics, busting light bulbs, flinging coasters off coffee tables, bedeviling pets, even hitting the bottom of popcorn boxes at movie theaters to make the kernels fly out and make the bearer think they've tripped.

Problem spirits

At the Akron home last week, father and daughter were at their wits' end. They had put up with doors slamming and radios and TVs turning on and off by themselves for years. Then their problems came to a head with a long streak of misfortune: The father's wife walked out, he was laid off and filed for bankruptcy.

''I promise you that I have searched for every explanation from bad luck to karma of a past life,'' the daughter wrote Winkowski in a heartfelt appeal. ''I have no where else to turn for advice and guidance.''

So the family was thrilled when Winkowski agreed to put their problems to rest. She told them where the spirits were in the small living room and communicated questions from them to the spirits by mental telepathy.

She stroked her chin thoughtfully with long, purple nails as she detangled the communications — sometimes partial, sometimes halting — from the dead. For the living, she interpreted what had been going on.

''An earthbound spirit doesn't eat or sleep but needs human energy to continue,'' she informed the family to nods all around. ''They're like energy vampires. He's been pushing your buttons for a long time.''

Cleansing the house

It turned out that Roland came to the family in 1995 and doesn't like a woman named Violet. Then there was Carrie, the impish 70-something who breaks mirrors, rouses the daughter from a deep sleep and sends things crashing in the attic.

''She likes things off-kilter,'' Winkowski explained.

More nods.

When Carrie agreed to give a message to the daughter's dead mother, tears roll down the daughter's face.

The third ghost was new to the house. The elderly Clyde wandered in looking for the store his family had owned decades before.

Winkowski knew where all were buried, when they died and at what age they passed. But it was time for them to do what they should have done within 48 hours of death, according to Winkowski: cross over.

So she stared at a blank spot on the paneled wall for several seconds, said she made a bright light — invisible, unfortunately, to the earthbound mortals — and coaxed the spirits through the portal.

There were no signs to demonstrate that anything was different in the modest house. There were no flashes of light, rushes of wind or sound. There was nothing to prove the spirits were gone.

But Winkowski gave the family quince seeds to put over the door jamb. This would repel any new visitors from walking in. Once the house was clean, she wanted it to stay that way.

''Since Maryann left, things have definitely improved,'' the daughter reported 10 days later. ''Unfortunately it is hard to explain but the house feels different and Dad feels better physically and mentally.''

Encounters of the paranormal kind

By: JESSICA ST. JAMES

The sounds of footsteps in an empty hall. Strange figures making shadows behind doors. Dark apparitions caught on videotape. A mysterious blonde girl in a blue dress.

These are some of the unexplained phenomena that brought paranormal investigators to the Chesapeake Community Center on Route 7.

For the past two weekends, PRIOV or Paranormal Research and Investigations of the Ohio Valley and Quest Paranormal Investigations hosted their second annual All Hallow’s Eve Ghost Hunt to investigate the happenings at the center, while also raising money for ongoing capital improvement projects to the center and other local charities.

“In all the years I’ve done this, all the places I’ve gone, this is hands down the most active place for phenomena,” said David Maynard, founder of Quest Paranormal.

Maynard, who said he has had a lifelong interest in the paranormal, began investigating the center back in March of 2009 and has done about a dozen investigations there, some jointly with PRIOV.

“We’ve got some decent evidence. We’ve never had anything not happen here,” he said.

Maynard said he has also been called to investigate several private residences, historical sites and businesses. He also has a theory on why there is so much paranormal activity in the area.

“Personally, my own theory on that is that energy is being pulled from that river. That is a huge source of power right there. I think it probably follows the length of the river.”

The four-night investigation of the center brought people from all over the Tri-State. Each session lasted from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. There were only allowed a maximum of 24 participants at each session to keep the groups small.

Before the participants were split into small groups for the ghost hunt, Maynard and his main researcher Dreama Jackson gave some history on the building and of the happenings and sightings.

According to Jackson’s research, the center was a building originally built by the Ku Klux Klan called the Fraternal Hall Building.

“There is also a tunnel going from the building under Route 7 so its members could sneak in and not be seen,” she said.

She also said that slaves were held there when they were caught, and that most of them didn’t make it out alive.

Jackson explaied that the building was turned into a one-room schoolhouse called East School, in 1921, with additions added on in 1948. The building has been used as the Chesapeake Community Center for the past 21 years.

Maynard described some of the happenings.

“I don’t really want to name names of the people we think are haunting the place simply out of respect for the family members that are still alive. But we know of at least two entities that are here,” he said.

One of the entities is a dark, shadowy male figure, which Maynard said he has caught on videotape, which he played for the group. He said he believed that it could be a janitor that worked there that died.

Founder and lead investigator of PRIOV, Bill Sawyers said, “There’s supposed to be a little girl that haunts the building. We caught her on video last year.”

They described this blonde girl as being about the age of 12, with long, curly blonde hair in a blue dress.

Maynard’s assistant, Nathan Carter, described an incident from the first two nights of the investigation.

“Two of my friends are actually victims of a physical experience with the paranormal, he said.” My friend, her hair was pulled downstairs in the locker room. And my other friend was lightly scratched on the arm.

He also said that during an investigation, they try to communicate with whatever may be there with them, and to try and get the entity to make its presence known. He also said that not every thing you hear on a ghost hunt is paranormal.

“A good rule of thumb whenever you’re ghost hunting is to believe that about half the stuff that you think is going on is just in your head. That’s the way I look at it. Your mind plays a lot of tricks on you.”

The investigation led participants into the depths of the community center’s boiler room, abandoned locker rooms, and a long, second floor hallway.

Quest Paranormal and PRIOV members led the investigation by asking any entities present to give them a sign of their presence. Participants stared into the darkness and waited for an answer, a sign.

Quest member Mike Delong told of strange happenings on the second floor of the center. He led a group to room 15, where a strange shadowy figure had been seen through the crack at the bottom of the door. He also showed the group where a dark silhouette has been seen passing behind a door at the end of the hall.

There was no activity that particular night in that hallway but Delong said, “Unfortunately, you can’t just call them up and say, ‘I’m coming, be active.’”

In the basement, the old girls’ locker room, with only the light of small flashlights, a group tried to call to the entity that they believe was responsible for the hair-pulling on previous nights.

“I felt a presence down in the basement,” said Chris Perkins, a participant from Ashland, Ky.

His wife, Cassie, said, “It was the feeling like there was someone standing behind you.”

The two said they had been on previous ghost hunts in the past, but this was their first time at the community center.

“I didn’t know the place was really haunted myself. I grew up in Chesapeake originally,” said Chris.

Another participant, Kyle Crump of Chesapeake, said he knew the center had a haunted history, and even experienced some unexplained happenings in the past. Crump has worked for the Southeast Ohio Emergency Medical Services in Chesapeake for 18 years and remembers when they used the center for an interim EMS center after their trailer flooded in 1998.

“That room at the end of the hall served as our interim EMS station for four years while they built our new station,” Crump said. “Everyone there reported a lot of activity. You would hear, because we were there 24 hours a day, footsteps all up and down the hall. You could hear everything around you.”

Crump also said he attended junior high in that building.

“I think it’s neat. As a kid, the downstairs was just so creepy. It’s kind of neat to get a chance to actually check them out to see if there was actually a reason why you were creeped out,” he said.

Many noises were heard and shadows were seen at the Chesapeake Community Center ghost hunt. Some were explained, whiles others were not. The members from Quest Paranormal and PRIOV both feel confident that paranormal activity has been confirmed there.

But, as Maynard said before, “In this field there are no concrete absolutes.”

PRIOV founder Sawyers said he hopes that people will come forward with their paranormal experiences if they feel they need help with happenings in their homes.

“They can’t call 911 for paranormal activity,” he said. “(Maynard and I) want them to be able to call us, and us give them, one of us, it doesn’t matter, the help that they deserve.”

WikiLeaks: new diplomatic cables contain UFO details, Julian Assange says

New leaked diplomatic cables set to be published by Wikileaks will contain fresh details on UFOs, according to the website's founder Julian Assange.

By Andrew Hough

Entities-R-Us 

By: Terri J. Garofalo

For more go to: www.entities-r-us.com