Beaverdam entity encounter — Summer 1950

Mrs. Mason Vaughan’s Beaverdam, Virginia, account was described in a letter to NICAP dated 17 September 1958. HUMCAT places the alleged event on a summer evening in 1950, but explicitly allows that it may have been 1951. The year is therefore uncertain, and the later letter should not be mistaken for a contemporaneous investigation. She said she was at her well when she heard a humming noise resembling a swarm of bees. She reportedly saw an aluminum-colored, lens-shaped disc land in a field behind her home. She estimated its diameter at eight to ten feet. From an open central cockpit, a man wearing unusual goggles or a headpiece looked out. Apparently surprised, he immediately took off again. The disc’s diagonal departure allegedly struck an oak tree and broke off a limb. She also reported a depression left in the ground. The HUMCAT card supplies no investigator, examination of the broken limb, measurements of the depression or independent witness. It describes the occupant as a man, without unfamiliar facial anatomy, and does not record speech or an approach to the observer. Those limits matter when illustrating the case. The plate shows Vaughan, the compact lens-shaped craft and the goggled figure together during the reported landing, leaving the later tree collision as a separate phase rather than presenting an invented violent crash.