By KEN KORCZAK
Most people tag 1947 as the kick-off to the modern UFO era.
Two significant events happened in that year. In June of 1947, private pilot Kenneth Arnold (and Minnesota native) made his famous sighting of nine objects “skipping along” in the skies over Mt. Rainier.
About a month later came the headline in the Roswell Daily Record that the U.S. Air Force had recovered the debris of a flying disk that had crashed on a ranch near Roswell.
It was the Arnold sightings that some argue created the concept of the “flying saucer.”
Famous astronomer and skeptic Carl Sagan argued that flying saucers never existed before that and a closer examination of Kenneth Arnold’s description of what he saw doesn’t gibe with the objects being flying saucers at all.
In his book, The Demon Haunted World, Sagan noted that Arnold described the motion of the objects as only “acting like disks or saucers being skipped across the water.”
The objects were actually more boomerang-shaped. It was newspaper reporters who ran with the name flying saucer in their stories.
Sagan goes on to suggest this is when the collective psyche of humanity was injected with the suggestion that something like flying saucers existed — and only then did millions of people start seeing them — his point being that they’re not real, but some kind of mass psychic projection, at best.
But since then, many in ufology have pointed to several indicators to suggest that flying disks have been sighted long before Kenneth Arnold, Roswell and 1947.
Indeed, ancient cave paintings, tens of thousands of years old, depict disks flying in the air, as do artworks from the days of the Greeks/Romans and on through the Medieval and Renaissance periods.
UFOs IN GREAT DEPRESSION ERA FARM COUNTRY
Well, in the book I am reviewing today, LEO DWORSHAK, tells his story of encounters with a large flying disk that landed in a field near his North Dakota home in 1932.
The world’s top math geniuses tell us that’s 15 years before 1947.
True, skeptics will pounce and say Dworshak published his book in 2003 so it was natural for him to adopt the flying saucer motif to write his “fake” and/or “delusional “book.
But for the moment, let’s say “to hell” with the dogmatic skeptics of the Church of Scientific Materialist Fundamentalism and take a deeper look at this offering, UFOS ARE WITH US — TAKE MY WORD.
It’s a marvelous gem of a small book that bears a ring of deep authenticity.
It’s a remembrance penned by a simple, honest man who grew up on a hard-scrabble farm during the grinding hard times of the Great Depression.
A STORY OF THE GREAT PLAINS, PLAINLY TOLD
The tone is gentle, kind and straightforward. Shot throughout the narrative is an understated yet urgent plea for readers to accept this story as the plain truth — nothing more, nothing less.
The events take place on a remote farm near the small town of Killdeer, North Dakota. This is a vast, wide-open area where the endless flatness of the Great Plains of the Midwest began to transition to a rolling hill landscape.
The location is within the Bakken Formation which is among the most productive oil regions in the United States. Everything in Killdeer and the surrounding region today revolves around the boom-and-bust economy of the dirty oil business.
But back in 1932, the Bakken was untapped. This was farm country; it was sparsely populated and growing crops and raising livestock was just about everything.
The Dworshak family was of German heritage. Leo and his younger brother Mike spoke German as a first language. When they went into town, they were teased and bullied for their broken English.
They also faced hostility because of the awful events in Europe in the wake of World War I, and the rebirth and growing virulence of the militaristic German state of the early 1930s.
THE UFO ARRIVES
It was one fine summer day in 1932 when Leo, then about age 12, and his brother, Mike, about age 8, were out wandering the hilly countryside near their farmstead when they saw something remarkable. Leo describes their first encounter this way:
“It was a huge, round thing, as big as our barn at least. We just stood there gaping at it and began excitedly discussing what it was doing down there and trying to understand what we were seeing … it was silvery … It appeared to be perfectly round, not round like a baseball unless you could kind of flatten a baseball a little bit and put a bump or blister on the top, but more round like a silver dollar. I counted many different colors of light on it that came from a band around the edge.”
This initial, astonishing sighting would be only the beginning of a decades-long series of encounters with this magnificent craft. The experience would evolve from a close encounter of the first kind, to the second and third kinds and finally to a close encounter of the fourth kind.
J. Allen Hynek coined the “close encounter” terms but stopped at the “third kind.” It was Jacques Vallée who later added “the fourth kind” which he described as, “cases when witnesses experienced a transformation of their sense of reality.”
That would be an excellent description of what happened to Leo and Mike Dworshak. It is interesting to note, however, that although Leo was transformed by his experience, he managed to remain grounded and led an entirely normal life of a small-town working man. His younger brother Mike would later die fighting in the Korean War.
Leo and Mike would eventually make contact with the pilots of the UFO.
They looked like men who were all but indistinguishable from ordinary humans, except that they seemed to be near clones of each other. They were also such perfect specimens — with nary a blemish or slightest physical flaw. They were so exemplary it seemed downright unnatural.
The boys eventually engaged the aliens in wide-ranging conversations. The aliens spoke to them in perfect German. Mostly, however, they “absorbed” huge volumes of information via a psychic transfer process. The aliens imparted huge blocks of information and concepts directly into the minds of the Dworshak boys.
NOW …
I took pains to mention the Bakken oil fields earlier because it speaks directly to what these extraterrestrial visitors were doing in North Dakota back in the 1930s, according to Leo Dworshak.
He said they were deeply concerned about the cleanliness of the earth’s environment. They warned that soon — through the folly of mankind — this area and the entire planet would encounter difficult times because of the intense pollution that would result from our industrialized, toxic culture.
In addition to the thousands of oil wells pumping crude from beneath the earth, this area of North Dakota is also coal country.
Millions of tons of coal continue to be mined here every year and many local; utility companies — including my electric coop here in northern Minnesota — remain eager to buy cheap North Dakota coal-generated electricity.
North Dakota has become one of the wealthiest states in the Union thanks to its vast abundance of super-dirty coal and the billions of barrels of crude oil currently being extracted and still waiting to be pumped out and burned — spewing tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
The fossil fuel industry enjoys almost total dominance over the North Dakota legislature and the executive branch — and over the people of North Dakota, for that matter — because so many reap the benefits of the fast money that can be made with hydrocarbon energy.
The North Dakota economy has a destructive and toxic addiction to fossil fuels.
From this perspective, UFOs Are With Us — Take My Word takes on the aura of a mythological warning that seems timed for release when it was most needed.
Warnings of ecological and environmental disasters have been among the most common themes to emerge from the UFO community, especially among the abductees.
They frequently report that aliens show them intensely realistic holographic videos depicting scenes of horrendous environmental destruction. The aliens say this is to be our future if we don’t change our ways.
Leo Dworshak does not get up on a soapbox to preach or rant and rave about the environmental disaster to come as told to him by the ETs. Rather, the theme is woven seamlessly into the fabric of the story. The reader will also absorb it automatically, almost in the same manner with which the alien visitors caused Leo and Mike to sop up telepathic information.
I don’t want to give too much away by telling you more because this is a slender book of just 71 pages and I eagerly encourage all to get a copy — if you can. I resorted to scrounging my copy via a used bookseller on eBay. I got it for $4. It’s short but has the feeling and impact of a much larger document.
I put in among that special class of small UFO books, usually self-published by an experiencer, that rises above the normal clutter to become something special. A good example of another is EXTRATERRESTRIAL ODYSSEY by Roger Kvande who grew up in a rural area near the small town of Bagley, Minnesota. I review that book HERE.
Leo Dworshak died in 2007 at the age of 87. He continued to see and make contact with the aliens he met and befriended well into his adult life.
He describes his relationship with them as a deep and loving friendship. He held the UFO entities in awe, but they treated him as an equal and returned his feelings of profound and abiding respect.
NOTE: For more UFO-related stories, book reviews and all things paranormal, please consider visiting my site on Medium: KEN-ON-MEDIUM