Christiansen Encounter
At 7:45 p.m. the Edward Christiansen family, seven people, were driving southward along the Garden State Parkway, just north of Mayville, when a bright red, green, and white object plummeted from the sky and disappeared directly in front of them. They thought an airplane had crashed until they were parallel to Burleigh, NJ. Then they saw a large glowing sphere just above the treetops a few miles to the front and right.
Thinking it was a fire from the crashed plane, they pulled over to the side of the parkway and stopped, an illegal maneuver.
All 7 got out of the car to watch. Traffic was light but several cars did speed past them. As they watched, the object began to move and they realized it was not a fire but some kind of flying sphere. It executed a sharp turn and came toward the group, passing directly over their heads. It was completely silent.
As it approached their position, three powerful headlights became visible on the front of the object These lights appeared to be elongated and passed from the top of the craft to the underside. The object disappeared northward and they all experienced a strong emotional reaction. Mrs. Arline Christiansen and her sister, Gwendoline Martino, became hysterical, alarming their four children. Two of the youngsters began to cry.
They all returned to the car and drove home to Wildwood Crest.
Edward Christiansen, forty, a hard nosed businessman, refused to believe in flying saucers and tried to assure the women that there had to be a natural explanation. His sister in law Gwendoline decided to call the local air force base at Palmero. She spoke to an officer there and he seemed quite interested in her story and asked several questions. An hour later the family received a long distance phone call from another air force base, none of them could remember the name of the base or the names of the officers when interviewed several months later.
Each one of them was interviewed at great length by 3 or 4 officers.
They were told that their conversation was being taped, and the questions followed a pattern which suggested the officers were filling out detailed forms on the other end of the line. However, all of them were disappointed to find the air force would not give them any information or answer their own questions.
Something extraordinary seems to have happened that night. Instead of simply filing a report through normal channels, the officer at the Palmero base may have called Wright-Patterson in Ohio immediately. Officers from Project Blue Book then called the Christiansens for additional details.
However, it is puzzling that that many different officers would participate in the questioning. Incidentally, these witnesses are above average in income and intelligence and their overall reliability is unquestioned.
Later that evening as Mrs. Martino, who was spending the night at the Christiansens, was preparing for bed she suddenly heard a loud radio signal, a series of dots and dashes. She knew her brother in law had a portable CB radio and she assumed he had accidentally left it turned on. He and his wife were already in bed and asleep but she didn’t understand the radio and didn’t want to tamper with it.
She continued to hear the signals as she entered their bedroom and awakened them. They were unable to hear the signals, and the radio was turned off and in its case. The signals faded and Mrs. Martino went to bed baffled.
About 2 months later, on the afternoon of January 9, 1967, Edward Christiansen and his family returned to their new home in Wildwood, NJ, after a trip to Florida. They had just moved into the new house, some distance from the place where they had lived at the time of their November UFO sighting. Neither their address nor phone number was listed in the then current phone book. They entered their house by the back door. The front door was still heavily bolted and locked, the way they had left it when they had gone to Florida.
At 5:30 p.m., there was a knock on the front door. Mrs. Arline Christiansen was in the kitchen preparing dinner.
Check and see who that is, she asked her 17 year old daughter, Connie. If it’s a salesman, don’t answer.
Connie took a peek and reported back, It’s the strangest looking man I’ve ever seen.
Mrs. Christiansen went to the door, unbolted and unlatched it. It was growing dark and was bitter cold outside. There was no car in view and this seemed peculiar because the Christiansen home was removed from other houses in a rather isolated spot.
A tall man stood on the doorstep.
Does Edward Christiansen live here? he asked.
Arline admitted he did.
I’m from the Missing Heirs Bureau, the stranger continued. Mr. Christiansen may have inherited a great deal of money. May I come in?
It was an approach that was hard to resist. She stepped back and invited him in, calling out to her husband, who is 6'2" tall and heavyset. The stranger towered over him and must have been at least 6'6" tall. He was also enormously broad and might have weighed at least 300#. He wore a fur Russian style hat with a black visor on it and a very long black coat that seemed to be made of thin material, too thin for the cold weather.
This will only take 40 minutes, he said as he removed his hat and revealed an unusual head, large and round while his face seemed angular, pointed. He had black hair which was closely cropped to his head, as if his head had been shaved and the hair was just growing in again. There was a perfectly round spot on the back of his head as if that area had recently been shaved. His nose and mouth seemed relatively normal, but his eyes were large, protruding, like thyroid eyes, and set wide apart. One eye appeared to have a cast, like a glass eye, and did not move in unison with its companion.
Mr. Christiansen told him at the outset that a mistake had been made, that he could not believe that anyone had left him any money. The man assured him that he might, indeed, be the Edward Christiansen he was seeking and, in order to verify it, he would like to ask some questions. He removed his coat.
There was a badge on his shirt pocket which he quickly covered with his hand and removed, placing it in his coat pocket.
It looked like a gold or brass badge, Connie said later. But it wasn’t an ordinary police badge or anything like that. We just got a glimpse of it, but it seemed to have a big K on it with a small x alongside and there were some letters or numbers around the edge. It was obvious he didn’t want us to see it.
He was not wearing a suit jacket. Underneath his thin outer coat he was wearing a short sleeved shirt made of a Dacron like material. His trousers were of a dark material, gray or black, and were a little too short. When he sat down they rode high up his calves. He wore dark socks and dark shoes with unusually thick rubber soles.
Arline and Connie were most fascinated by a strange feature on his leg. When he sat down they could see a long thick green wire attached to the inside of his leg. It came up out of his socks and disappeared under his trousers. At one point it seemed to be indented into his leg and was covered by a large brown spot. Connie seemed to have studied him the most carefully and gave the best description.
The Christiansens said their visitor had an unnatural pallor. They assumed he was sick. His speech was also strange, with a high tinny voice that seemed especially peculiar coming from such a large man. He spoke in a dull, emotionless monotone in clipped words and phrases, much like a computer. Connie said that he sounded as if he were reciting everything from memory.
After the man had introduced himself, none of the family could remember his name, they all said it was something common like Brown or Smith, but they did remember that he said his friends called him Tiny, the family dog, Gigi, snarled and barked at him. He spoke to the dog and calmed it.
When Tiny had seated himself, Mrs. Christiansen told him they were about to eat and asked him if he wanted to join them. He replied that he was on a diet but that he would like a glass of water in about ten minutes. He seemed to wheeze, they all noted, like a man with asthma, and he appeared to have difficulty breathing.
Tiny produced a small notebook and a pen and assured the family that this was not any kind of confidence game. He was looking for an Edward Christiansen who was due to inherit a large sum of money and he would need information about Ed’s past history to determine if he was the man. He then proceeded to ask a long series of questions.
Did Ed have any scars or birthmarks?
Ed said he had a scar on his back from an operation and an appendix scar.
Tiny asked for every detail, the length, width, and exact position of those scars. He also asked for a complete list of all the schools Ed had attended, and the number and type of auto vehicles the family owned. At one point he asked the couple if they would be willing to fly to any place in the United States to collect the inheritance, explaining they would have to be present when the will was read. Ed and Arline agreed they could make themselves available for such a trip.
According to Connie, Tiny’s face gradually grew redder and redder as he talked and after a few minutes he turned to her and asked:
May I have that glass of water now?
She fetched the water for him and he took out a large yellow capsule which he gulped down. He returned to normal after taking it.
Tiny mentioned three specific names and asked Ed if he recognized any of them.
He did not and later he was able to remember only one of them, Roy Stevens. Connie said she thought another of the names was Taylor, but she wasn’t sure. At this time Ed did not know about Gwendoline Martino’s Gwen Stevens wrong numbers in December, nor had Gwen heard about Tiny and the three names until the family was interviewed in late February 1967.
Tiny concluded his interview less than an hour after he arrived. It was probably precisely forty minutes, just as he promised. He donned his hat and coat and told Ed he would be notified by mail within ten days.
Arline was in the kitchen when he left and she decided she was going to watch him and see where he went. She stepped out of the kitchen door and stood in the dark watching the big man as he walked toward the road.
His shoes squished loudly as he walked, she noted.
When he reached the road, he made a gesture with his hand and a black 1963 Cadillac drove through the trees and pulled up. It was driving in the pitch dark with its headlights out so she couldn’t see the driver. Tiny climbed into the car and it drove away, its headlights still out.
The next morning Ed was alone in the house when the phone rang. A female voice explained she was calling about the missing heir interview.
We’ve located the Edward Christiansen we were looking for in California, she explained.
Ed said he had felt sure he wasn’t the right one, thanked her, and hung up. When he told his family about the call, they all dismissed the incident from their minds until they were interviewed.
The wire running up the leg is one feature which has never been repeated in any MIB case. Was Tiny wearing electric socks? Or was he a wired android operated by remote control?
As for his badge, It's suspected that the K was really the Greek letter sigma, E, which has turned up repeatedly in other UFO cases, and is often used by scientists to express the strange or unknown.