Crystall recounts her closest encounter in Pine Bush in 1986, when a small boomerang-shaped craft with a geodesic dome hovered directly above her, close enough to touch. She describes shouting at the craft in frustration over the lack of communication, prompting it to fan one of its swiveling paddle-like wings over her. She also details seeing aliens approximately three and a half feet tall with thin frames and beige skin.
Art presses Crystall on the interpretive nature of her photographs and the challenge of presenting evidence that requires guided examination rather than offering immediately recognizable images. The discussion touches on the Senate's rejection of the nuclear test ban treaty and listener calls ranging from alien technology to the JFK Jr. crash.
Key Moments
Ellen Crystall's Hollywood UFO awakening: Ellen Crystall describes how her UFO photography career began in 1971 when she moved to Hollywood, two blocks from Hollywood and Vine, and was told UFOs circled the night sky nightly. Over weeks, distant lights resolved into clear flying saucers. She climbed a hill with a friend, took photos, and reports she ultimately saw aliens inside both the California craft and Pine Bush craft.
First Pine Bush trip: 20 triangle craft surround the car: On her first trip to Pine Bush, New York in 1980, Crystall says a local couple drove her and Omni Magazine's Harry Belson to the center of town, where at 10 p.m. she stepped from the car and was 'instantly surrounded by at least 20 triangle craft' - silent, clearly visible. She and Belson photographed about 10 frames. When the film came back from Photomat a week later, the craft were not there - only bright sprays of color.
Crystall's UV-emission theory of UFO photography: Crystall describes her years of research interviewing scientific photography experts to explain why her film captured what she did not see. She concludes the craft emit ultraviolet and other shortwave radiation that film records but the human eye misses, and that real UFO photographs from many sources show the same telltale bluish UV emissions somewhere in the frame.
Aliens with yellow eyes that wrap to the ears: Crystall describes the entities she saw up close: roughly three-and-a-half to four feet tall, very thin, with sickly beige (not gray) skin, almost no nose, and very large yellow eyes that wrapped around to the ears - alive and blinking. She notes nobody reported black eyes until Whitley Strieber popularized them; her witnesses originally saw yellow.