The Garson Invaders
Cycloptic Creepers from Canada
Hi there! Welcome back. Or if this is your first time reading, welcome! Things have been a bit wild lately. I fractured my elbow in a bike accident (I’m mostly fine now) but I was sidelined for a while. I’m also still working on wrapping up the edits on my book, preparing for the launch of another, and things are spinning back up at work (the eternal production cycle). But I haven’t forgotten all my Scoobies over here on Substack. This week I’m back with another little weirdo.
I’ve been thinking about Project Blue Book lately. The recent UFO flap, all the talk about unacknowledged government programs, and the death of David Lynch have conspired to point my brain in this direction. So for today’s monster I decided to dig into the treasure trove of Project Blue Book documents (available through FOIA) to see what I could fish out. What I found was a strange story out of Ontario, Canada which features an Italian miner and a trio of one-eyed ETs with some potentially sinister plans.
Project Blue Book
So much has been written about Project Blue Book of the years. I could devote this entire article to its history and still only scratch the surface. So for sanity’s sake, I’m going to keep this short. Here’s the tea for the uninitiated.
Project Blue Book was the code name for a formerly classified United States Air Force program that collected and analyzed reports of Flying Saucers between 1952 and 1969. All of this under the pretense of determining whether so called “Flying Saucers” were a threat to national security. According to the official records, Project Blue Book collected reports of 12,618 UFO sightings — 701 of which were classified as “unexplainable.”
The project was eventually declassified in the 70s with the final report stating: “No UFO reported, investigated and evaluated by the Air Force was ever an indication of threat to our national security.”
If you want to know more about Project Blue Book, check out this cool NYT’s article from a few years ago.
Today’s story comes from the Project Blue Book sightings collected in July of 1954. It wasn’t filed with an incident number, though it was given a Roll Name: 0021, and while the encounter itself happened in Canada — and the subsequent report was written by individuals from New York — the actual file is labeled North Arlington, Virginia. Which, for all my GeoGuesser fans out there, is the home of the Pentagon (among other high profile Federal agencies).
The Sighting
In early July, 1954, Ennio la Sarza, 23, was working at a large nickel mining operation in Garson, Ontario. The young man was alone on the mine property in the early evening when he was surprised by an object hurtling from the sky at “several times the speed of a jet plane.” He was certain it would crash but it slowed and began to hover above the ground. His description of the craft matches up closely with other 50s saucer sightings.
As Ennio stood, dumbfounded, in front of this strange craft it promptly opened and three otherworldly beings emerged. The report describes them as “About 13 ft. tall…greenish-blue in color…[with] bellies that seemed to glow, and a single eye in the center of what passed for a forehead. [They had] six sets of evenly distributed arms and/or hairy legs. The hands were equipped with crablike claws which opened and closed spasmodically…[and they sported] twin antenna in the head.”
That’s…quite the description.
These Garson Invaders, as they have come to be known in the annals of Ufology, sound like either something out of a fever dream or a bad 50’s B movie. So I think it’s understandable that as soon as one of them step toward Ennio, he did the sensible thing — he ran away. What happened next is described in the report as…
A completely unnecessary insert on my part but, come on, that’s hilarious. One of these Invaders was able to “telepathically” command Ennio to stop running. At that point, according to the report, the Invader “requested or ordered” Ennio to do…something. What, exactly, is unclear. The creature requested he complete some task that the young man refused to divulge to reporters or investigators. He stated only that he would “rather die” than do what was asked of him. It was at that point that he passed out. When he awoke, the Invaders and their craft were gone. According to an external report by the Sudbury Daily Star (not contained within the files of Project Blue Book) Ennio reported to the company’s first aid station where he briefly fainted again. Though he went on to finish his shift that evening. Perhaps the true monster here is the crushing claw of capitalism.
According to the Project Blue Book file, Ennio was “not familiar” with the flying saucer phenomena, didn’t read science fiction, and wasn’t a watcher of '“space movies.” For what that’s worth in terms of his credibility. Additionally, the Blue Book file contradicts the Daily Star article on a few points. Notably, the newspaper implies that the Invaders “came from Mars,” but the Blue Book report contains a denial from Ennio that he ever made that connection. Otherwise the two accounts line up in terms of descriptions and timeline. This is, more or less, the full account of Ennio’s encounter.
Borderland Science Research
The thing that stood out to me immediately in this report was its complete lack of context. It wasn’t written by a member of Project Blue Book, but seemingly collected from a third party. There is no explanation or addendum attached to the report that explains where it came from.
Here’s the context we do have. The report is a secondhand account written by an author identified only as ESS. The original report was taken down by a minister named Elder Charles Beck, of Buffalo, New York. Beck interviewed Ennio on July 9, 1954, one week after the young man’s encounter. The interview happened alongside Michael Bolton (not that one), a reporter for the Sudbury Daily Star, the same reporter that I imagine must have written the article above. Unfortunately, as with so many of these mid-century news articles, there is no byline. But the bigger question here, at least for me, was the identity of ESS.
Thankfully, there was another context clue to be found in the report, a reference to an organization known as BSR and a publication called Round Robin. If you’re a regular Monster of the Week reader you’ll know that I couldn’t refuse these breadcrumbs. So I sat out to track down the organization. At first, I thought it might be a typo in reference to the British UFO Research Association, or BUFORA. But I crossed that theory out pretty quickly. After some more research, I eventually turned up the name Borderland Science Research in a declassified FBI file.
As it turns out, the BSR still exists and is now known as the Borderland Science Research Foundation, or, BSRF. It describes itself as “a California non-profit research and education organization, founded in 1951 by Meade Layne for the purpose of studying parapsychology and extended consciousness. It has since expanded in scope to traverse as broad a path of the grand terrain of the borderland as may be uncovered by human perceptions (and perhaps even further).”
The foundation seems to have risen from post-war New Age thinkers and early Fortean researchers, including Vincent Gaddis, a controversial writer who showed up over in the Crawfordsville Spook encounter (which I wrote about here). Look, I’m not going to yuck anyone’s yums, but groups like this typically tended to work out of some misguided idea that their research was being “repressed” by traditional science. When it reality they were usually peddling pseudoscience. I mean the group’s “claims” about predicting different natural disasters is enough to get an idea of where they were coming from.
I’ll give them this, though, the foundation keeps solid records. I was able to look through back issues of their publication, Round Robin, and found what I was looking for: Volume 10, Number 2, published July & August 1954 containing the story “Space-Craft Landing in Canada” written by one Edward. S. Schultz, AKA, ESS.
While I still don’t know the exact reason a report from a fledgling parapsychology group found its way into the files of a Top Secret Air Force research program, I at least understand the broader context surrounding the report now.
Do I Believe?
The real question is what became of Ennio la Sarza? I haven’t been able to find any additional information about his life beyond that original encounter. It doesn’t seem like he went on to seek further fame or interviews. And, at least according to the BSR report, the one recorded interview he gave to Elder Beck was destroyed at Ennio’s request. Insofar as I can tell he never spoke publicly of the encounter again.
So what do I make of all this? The description of the Garson Invaders is definitely a colorful one. But then again, so were the descriptions of the Enfield Horror and the Dover Demon. And I can’t brush aside the amount of baggage attached to this story, from the ever controversial Project Blue Book to the New Age pseudoscience of the BSR. But I can’t blame Ennio for the people that took down and reported on his encounter. It’s been 70 years since the encounter, and if he is still around Ennio would be in his early 90s now. Regardless of whether we choose to believe in his story, it has kept his memory alive. Whatever became of him, I hope he found peace, and that he slept well in the knowledge that he may be one of the only humans to ever stand in defiance of a non-human intelligence.
So what do you think? Was Ennio visited by some Cycloptic Cryptids from beyond the stars (or, at least, Canada)? Let me know in the comments!
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In regards to the telepathic request, I'm sure it was of a sexual nature. Which is super creepy coming from 13 foot tall, one eyed hairy legged bugs. Poor guy, no wonder he refused to talk about it.
This was funny:
"Though he went on to finish his shift that evening. Perhaps the true monster here is the crushing claw of capitalism."
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I think the first I knew of the "Blue Book" project was the show, "Project Blue Book," on the History Channel with Aiden Gillen (Littlefinger in "Game of Thrones"). Thought that was a good show and was bummed there were only two seasons!
As to 13' aliens, who knows!!!