Original headline:
Fishing trip in Colorado led to first UFO sighting
AINSWORTH -- At first, Merrill Strate said he saw only three very small, orange-glowing lights slowly moving across the sky.
The Ainsworth resident estimated the lights were less than two miles above the boat he and a friend were fishing from on Lonetree Lake in Colorado one night about 30 years ago.
Then the lights headed toward the water, sending geese that had been roosting in nearby trees flying. As the two men began to raise the boat anchor, Strate said that "the whitest, brightest, hottest light lit us up like an arc welder."
Strate said he then heard "very strong electrical vibrations right overhead."
"The noise was identical to a giant transformer," he said. "The vibrations were strong enough to chatter my teeth. The vibrations also lasted only a few seconds, then were gone."
Strate detailed his initial encounter with a UFO in his book, "Satan's Secrets and How He Has Deceived You."
This UFO experience, later followed by another encounter, led Strate to what he calls an obsession with such phenomena as pyramids, crop circles, Stonehenge and ancient American Indian designs.
All are tied to magnetic energy -- as is all of creation, he said.
Strate said he believes the ancient pyramids in Egypt and Stonehenge, a grouping of standing stones in southern England, were built thousands of years ago as wind-sun generators to supply electrical energy.
In his book, Strate wrote that in the 1940s into the 1960s, rural people in small towns and on farms and ranches used a "clean source of energy" -- 32-volt generators attached to their windmills.
But the alleged UFO crash at Roswell, N.M., in 1947 subsequently led to the electrical systems becoming unpopular.
"Most, if not all, quickly were jerked out, leaving people with big promises of a better way," he said.
Why? Strate said he believes it's because government officials and business leaders realized they needed to control the supply of energy "to hold everyone at bay" and preserve profits.
The result, Strate writes, were electrical high-lines strung "all around the country at great expense to supply these same (rural) people with electrical power."
"All of this so-called advanced technology requires the burning of much coal and other fossil fuels. The end result is that you cannot purchase anything in connection with the 32-volt system, you're getting large monthly bills, our air and water has been ruined and big business has its hands on the light switch," he also writes.
Strate said he realizes his message seems to be falling on deaf ears.
"We have used up much of our planet's resources for wars and other wrong reasons. Mother Earth has been totally abused by ignorance for profit. We call this progress."
Strate contends that the world's destruction is only a matter of time.
"(Man's) . . . excessive use of fossil fuels will cause our extinction," he writes.
A concluding remark by Strate in an accompanying video: "We must find true, clean energy or we're sunk."
