BROOKSVILLE

Opening

On the afternoon of 2 March 1965, John F. Reeves, a retired longshoreman in his sixties, was walking in the scrub near his home outside Brooksville, Florida, when he says he came upon a landed disc. A small figure in a suit and glass helmet walked toward him, pointed a device that flashed, and returned to the craft, which rose and left. Reeves came home with two sheets of thin paper covered in symbols, and he led people to footprints in the sand. The Air Force investigated, decoded the symbols, and called the case a hoax.

Timeline

2 March 1965, mid-afternoonReeves reports the encounter. His description, as recorded later by the Air Force: an object 20 to 30 feet across and about 6 feet thick, bluish-green and reddish-purple, standing on landing legs about 4 feet high. The occupant was "about five foot tall" in "a gray canvas-like suit with a glass helmet."

Following daysLocal and wire press run the story. Reeves shows the two sheets and the footprints. Visitors come to the site.

March 1965Lieutenant Goettle of MacDill Air Force Base, Tampa, investigates for Project Blue Book. The site shows no ground disturbance and no radioactivity. The paper is analyzed and found to be made of common fibers, consistent with ordinary lens or stencil paper.

The symbols turn out to be a simple substitution cipher. Decoded, they read: "Planet Mars - are you coming home soon - we miss you very much - why did you stay away too long."

Blue Book's evaluation: "We believe this to be a hoax."

December 1966Reeves reports a second landing. His later accounts grow: he describes being taken aboard and visiting another world.

Key figures

John F. Reeves is the only witness. He was a former Brooklyn longshoreman living alone on the edge of the woods. He never recanted.

Lieutenant Goettle is the MacDill officer whose report makes up most of the Blue Book file (case 1965-03-9070256).

Physical and documentary trail

The trail: the Blue Book case file, now public, which includes the witness description, the footprint notes, the paper analysis, and the decoded text. Newspaper coverage from March 1965 and photographs of Reeves holding the sheets survive.

The sheets are the physical evidence, and the case turns on them. The cipher that encodes them is the kind anyone could make with pencil and paper, the message is in English, and the paper is ordinary.

We believe this to be a hoax.

Things you might not know

• Reeves lived to 102. He was born in January 1899 and died in January 2002.
• His trips got longer. In later years he claimed to have travelled to the Moon in 1968 and to Venus.
• He lived between Brooksville and Weeki Wachee. The landing was on his own acreage on the edge of town.
• The town embraced it. The area once billed itself the "UFO Capital of the World", and a local brewery has sold a hazy IPA called The John Reeves Incident.

Competing explanations

A real encounter. Reeves saw what he said he saw, and the sheets were left for him. This requires visitors who write to Earth in English, in a schoolroom cipher, on commercial paper.

A hoax by Reeves. He made the sheets and the footprints himself. This fits the paper analysis and the cipher. His motive is unknown, although the attention he got in 1965, and the larger stories he told afterward, count for something.

A hoax played on Reeves. Someone else planted the footprints and paper for an old man known to walk those woods, and the landing is his embroidery. No one has ever been named.

Later life of the case

Brooksville turns up in UFO books mostly as a curiosity, because of the decoded message. The line about missing someone who stayed away too long gets quoted far more often than the Air Force's conclusion.

Finding

The best explanation is an earthly one. The only physical evidence is two sheets of ordinary paper carrying an English message in a simple cipher, and the investigators found nothing at the landing site. Whether Reeves made them or someone made them for him, nothing in the record needs a craft to explain it.

What still will not resolve: who wrote the message. That's a small question, but it's the only one this case has left.