Originally published at Vegas Cannabis Magazine
BY SHWA LAYTART - FEBRUARY 9, 2020
Bill Shehan is the co-founder, publisher, and a writer for the award winning Vegas Cannabis and Tahoe Cannabis Magazines.
Well known in the cannabis industry and Nevada cannabis scene, Bill is two people in one. His heart is a clumsy hero, and his brain is a dark comedian. But one thing is for sure, Bill is all wild west and a fixture here in Las Vegas.
Bill’s presence in the room is like having a Viking who is about to go berserk coming at you. There’s one thing everyone can say about Wild Bill- he’s never left speechless or afraid.
Up until the day after his UFO encounter, I was saying the same. But after he showed me his videos and frantically told me his experience, the wild look in Bill’s eyes turned to fear.
Although Nevada is known for Area 51 and more recently, the 2019 Storm Area 51 event, residents of Nevada have been reporting UFOs since the massive super-wave of UFO activity starting in 1947. Even Native Americans have stories of the star people and UFOs throughout our skies.
When Bill first tried to tell me about what he experienced, he fumbled through the story, bouncing from recalling the memory to describing what he was seeing, at the same time physically showing signs of freaking out. Sometimes even unable to finish a sentence or speak, Bill scrolled through his phone photos and videos to show me what he recorded while he was driving north to deliver Vegas Cannabis magazines. As he looks for a few of the videos he wants to show me, I’m wondering how stoned Bill was, knowing that will be the first question everyone will ask. But this whole time, I notice an obvious panic and actual fear in Bill’s body language, voice and face.
Just glancing the first video, the lights look like street lights, or building lights, or car lights, as Bill’s van whips by going 70 MPH as he drove along the freeway through some city.
THERE ARE A SIGNIFICANT NUMBER OF CASES INVOLVING UFOS THAT PACE CARS ALONG THE DESERT HIGHWAY
As I begin to think Bill may be losing his mind, he hands me his phone, “This is the one.”
The video recording plays and out in the distance, there is something that looks oval in shape, hovering, with lights around it, and a beam of light is coming from it and hitting the earth.
As the video plays in slow motion, I see what looks like a UFO beaming something up, or down, from or to the desert. I’m actually looking at a UFO video. It looks exactly like a fuzzy, unexplainable video that I would see on YouTube, and one, as a skeptic, I would believe.
I tell Bill we need to go back up, but he says he never wants to go that way at night again.
I spoke with author, paranormal researcher and UFO expect Preston Dennett about Bill’s abduction to find out if his reaction was common.
“Most people I’ve interviewed do NOT report their sightings to anybody, so the numbers we see at MUFON [Mutual UFO Network] & NUFORC [National UFO Reporting Center] are just the tip of the iceberg and vastly understate the actual number of sightings. I’ve also noticed that people are less likely to report their encounter if it is exceedingly strange (ie: involving a landing or humanoids or an abduction.” Dennett explains.
As the weeks go by Bill is obsessed with the videos, going through them shot by shot and mentally disturbed by the whole experience. Finally, he agrees to sit down for an interview.
***********************************************************************************************************
Shwa: Alright Bill, let’s start from the beginning, what was the date and time?
Bill: November 10, [2019] approximately 11:02 PM I was talking to my wife on the phone and I see this light in the sky. It looked like a star at first, then it looked like a planet, it was getting brighter a little bit at a time. I was like, ‘What planet is that?’, and then it got even brighter and it was undoubtedly coming towards me. I told my wife ‘I gotta go, I’m going to film this’, but she thought I just hung up the phone because for some reason my phone turned black before I touched it again. It came back on after what felt like two minutes later. My wife thought it took me an hour or so to call her back [but to me] it felt like I was away from her phone call for what I thought was about 10-15 minutes tops. I couldn’t understand why she was mad at me, but I think I lost a half hour in there somewhere. Which doesn’t make sense because I was driving.
Shwa:Where were you coming from?
Bill: I was just leaving Beatty going north on 95 and I looked out my driver’s side window toward California. I had some stops up north to deliver magazines.
Shwa: You drive this trip every month, right?
Bill: Yah, and now I won’t drive it at night. I used to go in the middle of the night when there was no traffic.
Shwa: So the first thing you saw…?
Bill: I saw a star, or a planet… a bright light, and it was a full moon. The light was so huge, I thought it was coming down, I thought it was a meteor, it kept getting brighter as it was coming towards me. Then the light went off, and that’s when my phone went off, my dash started flickering, it had weird like…flashes of light going through my dash. My phone turned on and it seemed like two minutes…Then I start taking my video of the lights out in the distance.
That’s when Bill stuck his arm out the window and started video-recording the UFO lights out in the western horizon. The video that he had shown me a few weeks earlier.
Shwa: Did you stop?
Bill: No!
Shwa: What time did you get home?
Bill: That’s the weird thing, around 1 AM. I was so tired, I could barely stay awake while I was driving. So I pulled over, rolled a joint and I didn’t even smoke it. I was going to take it in the back [of the van] where I have my hammock, and chill. I didn’t make it to the back. I fell asleep in an upright sitting position.
Shwa: When you woke up, did you watch the videos?
Bill: Yeah, yeah.
Shwa: So was that your first time going through the video?
Bill: Yeah, and that’s when I saw the videos I took and videos that I don’t remember taking.
While examining the videos in detail, Bill discovered random videos and screenshots that he does not remember taking.
Bill’s eyes wander…
Bill: When the bright light came back on in the desert and shot a beam to the ground, that’s when I tried to get a better angle of the video. That’s when I got the video of the UFO 200 yards or so away, beaming shit up from the ground.
That’s the video that when you see shot-by-shot, it is almost undeniable that what you are looking at is a UFO with a beam coming from it.
Shwa: And you said you don’t want to go back? Bill: I definitely don’t want to go back at night. When I have to go back and pass out magazines I will just go in the day time.
After our interview, it was late afternoon. I was able to convince Bill to make the drive up past Beatty. Up to where he had his encounter and possible abduction. By the time we pass through Beatty, the sun had set and a full moon was rising up from the east.
Just outside of Bonnie Claire, “This is the spot. Over there.” Bill points to a spot out in the open valley lit up white by moonlight reflecting off the lithium that covers the topsoil. “That’s where I saw it. Some UFO was beaming shit up!”
It’s easy to see why a UFO would find this desolate area appealing. Not only are there plenty of hills, canyons, valleys, and mountains in the stretch that separates Nevada and California, but this chunk of land is government land.
OVER 80% OF THE NEVADA LAND IS OWNED BY THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT
Those other lights in the first video Bill showed me, the ones that seemed to be shooting past him as he drives through the city… I thought of those lights as we drove through the desert in the moonlight. I didn’t see anything that would cause those lights to show up on his videos. The 95 freeway is a two-lane road with an island separating traffic going the opposite direction. Those lights don’t seem like car lights to me. And there wasn’t a big lit up city that I remember driving though…
Once again, Bill immediately felt exhausted, so I took the wheel to drive back home to Las Vegas. Bill, now passed out next to me as if someone had just chloroformed him, rested peacefully. No more panic in his voice, no more fear in his eyes, just a light snore as we fly back into Clark County.
If you don’t believe Bob Lazar and Area 51 then you may not believe Wild Bill and his beaming UFO, but one thing is for sure- you can add this story to the plethora of UFO stories that have occurred here in Nevada.
Now will someone name a strain – Wild Bill’s Abduction??
*************************************************************************************************************
FAMOUS NEVADA UFO SIGHTINGS
Truman Bethurum: Claimed to have repeated contacts with human-looking ET’s in the Nevada desert.
Country singer Johnny Sands: Claimed he was abducted during a Las Vegas UFO wave.
Charles James Hall: Claimed repeated alien encounters with “Tall Whites” which he wrote about in his trilogy Millennial Hospitality.
The Las Vegas UFO crash of 1962 which still remains unexplained.
**********************************************************************************************************
NEVADA UFOs IN THE NEWS
May 27, 1897 issue of the Nevada State Journal, titled: “An Uncanny Visitor”. The article interviews officers who for three nights, watched a peculiar phenomenon. On the third night the officers tried to capture what was to them a human shaped phosphorescent lit being. When they rushed in to grab it, it hovered above them and then vanished.
July 15, 1931 Reno Evening Gazette reports a glowing object floating through the sky and landing in the foothills.
February 28, 1947 Witnesses at Lake Meade report seeing disks flying in formation.
June 28, 1947 First Lieutenant Eric B. Armstrong while flying his F-51 flighter above north Lake Meade at around 10,000 feet. He reported spotting five or six white round disks in formation about 4,000 feet below his jet. They cruzed along with him for a bit then sped up, shot off at an angle and vanished.
July 4, 1947 Raymond Harris was flying with a friend in his private 150 Voyager over Nevada. Both Raymond and his friend reported seeing five disks flying below them. That same day Clark County Building Inspector of Las Vegas, O.J. Morling, and his was reported seeing at least two dozen disks zooming through the sky heading northeast.
Since the 1940’s airline pilots have been reporting UFOs over and around the Las Vegas area. June 24, 1950 the same brightly colored glowing object was seen by both commercial and military pilots as well as Las Vegas CCA men on the ground.
*************************************************************************************************************
PROJECT BLUE BOOK IN NEVADA
The first Unidentified Blue Book Case #721 in Nevada
May 7, 1950 outside Ely, an older couple and their grandson spotted a silver-white object floating above the trees. After about ten minutes it began to rise up then shot out of sight.
The Second Unidentified Blue Book Case #1584 in Nevada
July 24, 1952 Air Force Lieutenant Colonels John L. McGinn and John R. Barton were flying in a B-25 over Carson Sink when they reported spotting three aircraft they assumed were ours until they got closer and realized it had no tail or pilot’s canopy. It suddenly approached their aircraft before darting off out of sight.
The Third Unidentified Blue Book Case #1986 in Nevada
August 26, 1952 at Lathrop Wells. USAF Captain D.A. Woods reported seeing a large bright object flying overhead before vanishing into the distance.
The Fourth Unidentified Blue Book Case #7650 in Nevada
September 24, 1961 A geologist from BLM for the U.S. Department of Interior reported seeing two large lights in the sky. One of them produced “smoke or fumes which seemed cloudlike.” Then it proceeded to shine a 100-foot-wide beam of light straight down and then disappeared. The second light moved south then a few minutes later turned east and took off.
For more information on UFO sightings in Nevada read:
UFOs OVER NEVADA by PRESTON DENNETT
To report a UFO sighting to the National UFO Reporting Center go to: http://www.ufocenter.com/reportform.html
Comments