But one small town in Montana has a secret that's out of this world.
It is a secret that has been hidden behind the town's pure Americana image for more than 50 years and has even provoked several "urban legends" in the area. It is a secret that stretches the boundaries separating the normal workaday world from the great multidimensional universe that surrounds us all.
Almost everyone has heard one story or another concerning UFOs. But at least two dozen residents of this one small community of 3,000 relate experiences with something unworldly
from simple UFO sightings to actual landings and abductions.
It's as though this one town, an endearing model of small-town America, was chosen as the object of UFO attention.
The biggest problem with alien abduction stories is that they are just that - stories. Rarely is there any independent verification for such accounts. For the first time, a new video entitled "The Secret of Redgate" narrated by "New York Times "Best Selling author Jim Marrs uses multiple techniques to probe and analyze the amazing stories emanating from this one small community
polygraph exams, hypnosis and government-developed remote viewing (RV).
The town's incredible secret began to surface in the mid-1990s when one former resident of the town launched her own investigation into the strange and unworldly experiences reported there.
Following painful and life-threatening surgery, Linda Croonquist began having troubling dreams and vague recollections of meeting strange beings as a child growing up on a Montana ranch.
Her curiosity was further piqued when she contacted her brother Steve. He not only confirmed the contact but was actually shocked that Linda didn't fully remember the incident. "You were there," he said. "You talked with our little grey friends. I don't understand why you didn't remember this."
Intrigued, Linda set out on a quest, a search for the reality within her memories. It was a trail which led back to her roots, back to her hometown of Deer Lodge. Linda began to contact old high school classmates and friends from her younger days. Amazingly, nearly all of them told one fascinating story or another about the area east of Deer Lodge known as Redgate.
This town of about 3,000 residents lies in Deer Lodge Valley located in Southwest Montana, about midway between Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks.
Since the end of the mining boom in Montana, Deer Lodge has subsisted on farming and ranching and its main tourist attraction
the old Montana Territorial Prison which was the scene of a famous 1959 riot and today houses both the Old Prison Museum and the Montana Auto Museum.
It is a quiet and peaceful community nestled in a long valley which runs north and south along the west slope of the Continental Divide. Sandwiched between two ranges of the Rocky Mountains which intercept most of the rainfall, Deer Lodge is a relatively dry place, accumulating only about 10 inches of rain per year
. But if the fields are dry, the town's numerous bars are not. Particularly on weekends, the local watering holes are filled with both young and old who look to the taverns as information and community centers. Here the stories concerning Redgate gain momentum and color.
The experiences in this one tiny town have continued for more than 50 years. For many years, people declined to talk about them fearing ridicule. "But, heck, I'm old enough now that I just don't care what anyone thinks. I know what I know," explained one man in his 50s.
Beginning in the 1950s and continuing right up to today, the area in the mountains east of Deer Lodge was a favorite teenage parking spot. It came to be known as the Redgate area because of an old wooden gate which bisected one of the only roads into the area. The gate at one time had been painted bright red but by the 1950s, only a few reddish streaks remained. Today the gate still stands but there is no sign of the original red paint.
Powell County High School encompasses all of the young people in the area and occasionally the bolder ones would find themselves on a date in the Redgate area. Open rolling and treeless fields, where Pronghorn antelope and deer are seen at all hours of the day and night, slope upward to the dark and piney woods of the Deerlodge National Forest.
Dick Slater, now of Missoula, Montana, grew up in Deer Lodge Valley and attended Powell County High School. He still clearly recalls a strange incident while out on a date in 1962:
"A friend and I double dated and we were in a place called Quake Lake, which was the result of an earthquake off of Yellowstone Park where a number of miners were buried some years ago. This was at night. We were parked on top of the slide area where there were still about 27 bodies that they never did recover. The radio was on. It was a warm evening, in late June if I remember and all of a sudden the radio went off, the music went off. I didn't pay much attention to it. But the friend that was with me was a pretty good mechanic, so we got out, popped the hood and took a look. Nothing looked out of order. We didn't know if maybe the battery had gone dead or whatever, so we got back in the car and tried to decide what to do since it was in such a remote area. Then all of a sudden the radio came back on. So we started the car, the lights turned on and everything. We didn't think too much about it and turned the engine back off.
"Within a period of about 10 minutes, the radio went off again. As soon as the radio went off, the thing I most remember about this, the thing that made it so unique to me, was the stillness, the absence of noise, the vacuum, around us. I noticed the pine needles in the nearby trees were moving yet there was no breeze. There was nothing. It was just completely still. We all sat observing this and were actually scared. We just sat there. It lasted for probably, as best I can remember, a couple or three minutes, maybe a little longer. Then the radio came back on and we started the car and left."
Shaken by the bizarre incident, Slater vowed never to visit the area again. But just about two weeks later, he was driving within a few miles of the place and remembered the incident.
"It was two in the morning and I was whipping right along and my memory went back to the incident and I thought, 'Man, this would be a terrible place for your car to quit.' I was going quite fast because I was anxious about this for whatever reason and wanted to get by there. Then right at the junction to Quake Lake the car quit. The radio went off, the lights went off and I coasted about half a mile, then the lights came back on and I started the car and went on. I had power brakes and power steering on this old '58 Pontiac and it was tough to steer. I never tried to stop. I wasn't interested in stopping the car. In fact, I would have liked to have gone as far away from that place as I could."
Stories like that of Dick Slater increased over the years. Other people reported strange power outages, bright lights moving in the night skies and eerie sounds. Soon, all the teenagers knew the Redgate area to be a strange and spooky place. But no one seemed to know why.
It seemed almost inevitable that the mystery of Redgate evolve into a story of murder.
There were various versions of the tale but everyone agreed that the basics involved a crazed man who killed his family in cold blood and then smeared their blood on the wooden gate. These anecdotes persisted well into the 1980s.
It did not take long to dispel the blood-on-the-gate story. Powell County Sheriff Scott F. Howard said a search of police records showed that no such murder ever occurred but he gave indication that something much more strange lay behind the murder legend.
"While my office has received no official reports," he explained. "I have heard many stories about people here having encounters with UFOs."
Sheriff Howard suggested a talk with Louis Menicucci, owner of a bakery in downtown Deer Lodge.
Menicucci told of several strange incidents including a neighbor who experienced two horse mutilations and the landing of a UFO near his home in Redgate area. Angela Menicucci Malmberg, Louis' daughter, vouched for father's accounts and added a few of her own..
As word of Linda's research spread through the town, others began to come forward.
Gene G. Hughes, owner of D L Auto Supply in Deer Lodge, told how his aunt and uncle in the 1970s watched a huge brightly-lit football-shaped object land in a meadow near their mountain home. Hughes' wife Elaine related how a giant UFO landed in the road just ahead of a friend.
Cass Casquilho told of standing in the mountains and watching what appeared to be a comet stop still in the night sky more than twice before continuing on its way. The curious sight was witnessed by fellow hunters in the 1970s.
Verda Clawson and her friend Helen Schaffer told of a snowmobiling outing in the 1980s which ended when an eerie "beeping" sound chased the group off a mountain in the Redgate area. A large dog with them became frightened and cowed. The two longtime Deer Lodge residents related the same details in separate interviews.
Mark Denton, who knew Linda in high school, recalled chasing a solitary bright light through the mountains on more than one occasion back in the 1960s. "It would appear to be right in front of us," he said. "But just as you topped one hill, it would be over the next. We never did catch the thing."
Bill Kelley, another of Linda's high school classmates, had quite the opposite experience. He told of one night in 1962 when he, his brother and another friend were driving home late after a dance in Deer Lodge.
"We were all pretty tired," Kelley recalled. "Usually there was never anyone on the roads that late at night. But all of a sudden I looked in the rearview mirror and there's a single bright light. I thought to myself, 'Hmmm, that's interesting. I wonder who the hell is following us' or something like that.
"This thing just kept getting brighter and brighter and pretty soon the inside of our car was bright. My brother looked at Kenny and just jumps into the back seat. Then Kenny followed him into the back seat. Well, I'm driving, so I can't jump in the back seat. It was bright all around us. But as fast as it got bright, it just went away again and my brother says, 'Aw, it's just the moon.' But we looked up and there's the moon and I thought, 'There's not two moons that I know of.'"
Linda was not satisfied with Bill's story. She felt there must have been more to it, so she asked Bill to undergo hypnosis. Bill agreed and more details of his late night encounter were revealed.
While in a hypnotic state, Bill relived the incident with all its fear and intensity.
"I'm not afraid...I'm not afraid," he kept mumbling to himself while describing how his brother Jack and Kenny were yelling, "Go, Bill, go! We gotta get out of here! It's getting closer!" Bill pushed the 1960 Pontiac sedan as fast as it would go on the twisting dark gravel road but the light kept coming.
Despite the pleas of his passengers, Bill stopped the car. "I gotta see..." he muttered stepping from the vehicle.
Awash in a brilliant light shining down on him, Bill stared upward and murmured in awe, "My God, look at the size of that thing...it's unbelievable."
But here his narration became confused and disjointed. He squirmed in the comfortable padded chair directly in front of the hypnotist. "I'm a little bit afraid," he acknowledged in a small quiet voice. "This is not good. This is not good."
Bill account under hypnosis ended with no real clarity of what happened, as though something had blocked the incident from his memory.
So a technology was employed
remote viewing. RV for a quarter of a century was developed and used secretly by the United States Government, first by the CIA and later by the US Army and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).
Remote Viewing is the ability to view persons, places and things at a distance by means other than the normal five senses. It was initially studied by the CIA beginning in the 1970s and eventually was used operationally by the U.S. Army's Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM). The use of remote viewing was first made public in 1995 and since that time, a growing number of persons have trained in this form of second sight.
While no one in government will admit to officially viewing UFOs, every single military-trained remote viewer had personal knowledge of the subject. Many times viewers were sent to view foreign submarines or aircraft only to encounter mysterious flying disks.
Linda Croonquist located about half dozen remote viewers who had certification in RV and had undergone testing to validate their effectiveness. This was the first time RV has been systemically used to penetrate accounts of UFOs and abductions and the results were amazing.
The viewers were asked to look at Bill Kelley's account. Of course, they were told nothing that would clue them to this case. A person sent a number code which represented Bill's encounter to a monitor who did not know what target the code represented. The monitor then passed the target code to the viewer. This is what is known as a "double blind" session, one in which neither the viewer nor the monitor knows the target.
The results were astounding.
Viewer # 1: "The primary target subject is a teenage male, slight to athletic build, brown hair, white...There are a total of three subjects (all male) in a car. The primary subject is the driver...This road is dirt covered and large enough for two cars to pass, but it is tight...There are no houses close, but in the distance are isolated farm houses and it is approximately 15 miles to the nearest town. This is in the early 1960s."
Yet another viewer reported: "The primary target is a 19-year-old white male, tall, muscular build, dark brown hair with light colored eyes. The primary subject is driving a car on a lonely stretch of road in the evening through forested, hilled and mountainous terrain. There are no urban centers near. It is set in the early 1960s."
It was obvious that the viewers were right on target
Bill Kelley and his passengers driving down that isolated road at night. But much more details were brought out by the remote viewing.
"I am looking at a flying object with subjects inside...non-human creatures," wrote one viewer. Another saw "Bright, bright light and energy, rising up from the ground...some kind of very powerful electro-magnetic energy emitted from a vehicle of transportation...a feeling of rising up...transporting human subjects...I deduct like in 'Beam me up, Scotty.'...subject fearful, frozen in shock, frozen feelings...awe...stunned...time that was lost...an implant in the brain."
The viewers concluded: "Three male subjects driving at night in a rural area. The target seemed to be an actual event involving a vehicle and a blindingly bright light. The event involved transporting subjects. The subjects were frightened, shocked and awed...It seemed like an alien abduction [by means of] a bright light beam."
One even produced a very clear drawing of what was seen
three human figures being drawn up into a saucer-shaped craft by a cone of energy.
(Continued on next page)
Impressed with the results of both the hypnosis and remote viewing, Linda Croonquist began to apply these investigative tools to others. Additionally, a polygraph examination, commonly called a lie detector test, was administered to several of the Deer Lodge narrators, including Kelley and Croonquist by James A. F. Kelly, former Chief Inspector of Security for the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission and a former assistant director of the International Association of Chiefs of Police. Kelly found no evidence of deception on the part of anyone connected to the Redgate stories.
Remote viewers saw that Dick Slater's experience with loss of power also involved a UFO but that there was no contact or abduction. It was simply a chance encounter, a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Such incidents continued right up until today. Josh Garrison and Brandon Kent, both in their early 20s, said they saw a bright light moving in a field in the Redgate area. Thinking it was a "swather," a farm harvester, with bright headlights, the young men approached to see if it was one of their friends. But as they approached, the light suddenly sped off and disappeared. This incident occurred in the summer of 2003.
But both Linda and her brother were a totally different case. Their experiences went far beyond simple sightings or bright lights.
Several hypnosis sessions along with lengthy remote viewing studies showed that the Croonquist siblings had been taken by non-human entities several times in their childhood beginning with the time that seven-year-old Steve introduced his five-year-old sister to "his little grey friends". Separately, they both provided identical and detailed descriptions of both the circumstances and their abductors.
Linda vividly described multiple trips aboard UFOs and her interaction with a variety of alien beings, including a kind and compassionate one that looked like a preying mantis. As there were no preying mantis's in Montana, Linda named this entity the "Grasshopper Lady". Steve described his visit to another world, one filled with canals under a dim sun.
"The Secret of Redgate" is reminiscent of the wildly popular 1960s book and movie concerning the alien abduction of Betty and Barney Hill. But that was just one couple from New Hampshire. The Redgate incidents concern more than two dozen persons, all from one small Montana town.
The unworldly secret of Redgate is the focus of the feature-length video documentary which in early 2004 won the coveted "People's Choice Award" at the International UFO Congress and Film Festival.
The feature is written and directed by Jim Marrs and produced by Lynda Cowen with Redgate Presentations of Dallas. The innovative photography and editing is by David Hickey and the original musical score by Billy Atwell of New York.
" The Secret of Redgate" also is presented at a website entitled "secretsofredgate.com" which features not only the conscious stories of many of the inhabitants of Deer Lodge but presents verbatim transcripts of hypnosis sessions and remote viewing studies. The site also contains photographs of the people and places involved along with drawings made by the remoter viewers and professionally-produced illustrations adding to the drama of these stories
Never before have stories of alien encounters and abductions been subjected to such intense and multi-disciplinary scrutiny.
While it will be up to the individual viewer to decide if the Redgate secret is real, the personal stories of so many residents of one small town make for riveting and compelling viewing. And the unique combination of a journalistic investigation together with hypnosis and remote viewing analysis ensures that "The Secret of Redgate "will be in demand by every person intrigued by the mysteries that surround us here on this tiny fringe planet called Earth
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