Most people have heard of Sutter's Fort, which can still be visited in Sacramento. It was the targeted, end-of-the-California trail for thousands of emigrants--including the Donner Party--before, during, and after the '49ers gold rush to California.

Many people have also heard of John Sutter of Switzerland who built the fort and, effectively, found the gold. What people don't know, and now the story can be told, is that Sutter knew the gold was there in the foothills before he came to California in 1839, and that UFOs, then based at Tahoe, played an integral part in the events of those days.

Sutter
Johann Augustus Sutter served in the Swiss army and afterwards had a variety of mysterious dealings with two Swiss banks. He left his wife and seven-year-old child for the United States in 1834. In the USA he traveled the 2,000-mile Oregon Trail to Fort Vancouver in "Oregon Country"-another fort that can still be visited. From Fort Vancouver, Sutter found his way to central California, then a part of Mexico. Sutter became a Mexican citizen and persuaded the local governor (Juan Bautista Alvarado) to grant him title to 48,827 acres of land around the junction of the American and Sacramento Rivers. Sutter named the land New Helvetia (New Switzerland), constructed a fort (1841), and set out to build a utopia.

Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs)
Strange aerial sightings have been recorded in cave paintings and writings for thousands of years. Many were probably astronomical in nature, i.e., they were about what is known today as comets, meteors, and the northern lights (aurora borealis). Chinese astronomers, for example, noted Haley's comet for the first time in 240 B.C.

The modern era of UFO sightings started on June 24, 1947. An American businessman flying his private plane near Mount Rainier (14, 411') in Washington State reported seeing nine brilliantly bright objects flying across the face of Rainier at "incredible speed." He calculated they were moving at over 1,200 mph by timing the objects between Rainier and Mount Adams, which is 50 miles away. The pilot said that they "flew like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water" and that the objects were "flat like a pie pan or a big disk." His words gave rise to the phrase flying saucers.

A few weeks later on July 4 a United Airlines crew reported more disk-like objects over Idaho. Together, the two early reports unleashed a flood of sightings, and eventually the Air Force and other organizations were compelled to study the evidence. Ultimately the objects were officially named UFOs, rather than saucers or disks. The common characteristics of the unknown objects boiled down to their quietness, evasive behavior, the absence of any trail behind them in the sky, the strange, graceful ("lenticular") clouds they left in their wake as they crossed high, mountain ridges, and that they seemed to fly in formations at times. UFOs in the USA also seemed to favor the West, including the Nevada deserts and the Sierra and Cascade mountain ranges.


Since 1947 the US Air Force has studied thousands of cases, the American Institute of Aeronautics & Astronautics has prepared a massive report, and the French government has done a scientific analysis for the period 1976 to 2004. All of these efforts come to roughly the same conclusion: Between 10 and 20 percent of the sightings are inexplicable and of an unknown object. Fortunately, perhaps, UFOs at Tahoe have never made the news even though they have a long history in the area

The Story
Long, long before John Sutter was born (1803), UFOs were visiting planet earth and mapping its resources. There were three major landing sites on earth favored by the visitors from space. The sites were alongside a) Lake Baikal in Southern Siberia, Russia; b) Lake Victoria in central Africa; and c) Lake Tahoe. All three are giant, freshwater lakes in remote locations.


The relatively shallow Lake Victoria gradually fell from favor because it periodically dried and disappeared.

The crescent shaped Lake Baikal-the "Blue Eye of Siberia"-is the deepest lake in the world at 5,371 feet. Like Tahoe, Baikal is surrounded by mountains. However there was little gold in the area, which, as the reader will soon see, was important for UFOs. So, over time, Tahoe became the prime base of UFO operations on and around earth, at least until after the gold rush.

Tahoe had four natural advantages over the other sites on earth: First, it was relatively remote, high in elevation (6,200'), ringed by higher mountains and vacant valleys, and it had a big surface area (192 sq. miles). This physical reality made the basin ideal for landing and parking in meadows and large valleys, including Squaw and Martis Valleys, and the usually flat lake allowed for skip-the-rock type training exercises by UFO pilots in training.


Second, Tahoe was close to one of the two fuel components that propelled the UFOs of that era. The premium, energy formula for UFOs required gold, and early extraterrestrial expeditions identified the vast deposits in the "gold country" just west of the Tahoe region.

Third, due to its depth (1,640'), Tahoe provided a constant source of pure, fresh water. Such water provided clean hydrogen, the second of the two required fuel components for the UFOs.

And fourth, Tahoe was roughly equal distance from the political power centers of the world-Japan, China, India, etc. to the West and Europe, Russia, and the Middle East, to the East.

In summary, Lake Baikal lacked a UFO fuel component (gold) and Lake Victoria lacked a reliable supply of pure fresh water.

UFO Technology
How did UFOs work? They used nuclear fusion based on hydrogen, which is the lightest element and the most abundant of the chemical elements. Hydrogen makes up roughly 75% of the universe's elemental mass. Stars are composed mostly of hydrogen in a plasma state. Hydrogen is integral to all water-the H in H2O.

The UFOs were propelled by the controlled fusion of hydrogen nuclei, with gold serving as an active agent. While humans value gold for its beauty, durability, and indestructibility, gold was actually destroyed in the UFO power process. Because UFOs roaming the universe consumed fuel (hydrogen and gold), they needed dependable, local fuel sources.

Mechanically, a fuel probe was extended downward from the UFO into either fresh water (for hydrogen) or a planet (for gold) and the UFO tanks were "filled up." The power systems were extremely efficient, so a UFO could travel for weeks without a refill.

At Tahoe, early UFO crews built a communications beacon and a small water-filling station at the north end or the lake (see picture). An incoming craft would fly to and hover near the station, extend its probe into the lake, and suck hydrogen aboard. The station also served as a gateway: Beings could be boarded from, or off-loaded to, land using the station and pier connecting it to the beach.


For gold, the pilots would zip to the gold country, hover over known deposits, force the probe into the ground, and bring gold aboard. Features internal to the probe allowed it to filter dirt and rock from the gold ore so that only gold was "inhaled" into the craft.

Swiss Bank Accounts
Banking had a tradition of privacy, protection, and stability that started in the Middle Ages-around 1,000 A.D. Once extraterrestrials discovered the rich resources of planet earth, they temporarily took on human forms and opened accounts in Switzerland using fictitious personal and corporate names. Gold, in particular, in addition to being a fuel, was an easy asset to deposit in the banks, and the aliens' accounts had grown quite large by 1834 when John Sutter left for America. He departed filled with very sensitive knowledge from his Swiss bank associates about the gold country in California, which was then "owned" by Mexico.

The Accident
A sawmill was one of John Sutter's many enterprises. In early 1848 he was having a mill built on a creek bed in Coloma, California, about 30 miles east of Sutter's Fort. Highway 49 runs through Coloma today. On the night of January 21, 1848 a UFO was taking on gold while he hovered over land upstream of the new sawmill site. As the pilot withdrew the probe from the earth, a sizeable boulder, loosened by the vibrations of the giant UFO, rolled downhill and crashed into the probe. As a result, raw gold spilled into the streambed from the probe before it could be retracted. The UFO zinged away...back to Tahoe. But the spill changed the history of the West.

Three days later on January 24, James W. Marshall, a carpenter at the sawmill, found pieces of gold in the streambed. He showed them to Sutter who had not yet found the gold he knew should be in the area. Sutter tried to silence Marshall, but the news leaked out. Within a year, the California Gold Rush was on. Tens of thousands of gold seekers and squatters flooded the gold country, overran Sutter's land, destroyed his goods and livestock, and left him essentially ruined by 1850 when California became a state. Then U.S. courts voided Sutter's Mexican land grants, a final blow to his utopia.

Sutter Disappears
After much effort and in ways unknown to this day, the bankrupt Sutter was finally able to make contact with extraterrestrials through his connections in Switzerland. On December 15, 1854, he traveled incognito to the north end of Lake Tahoe. As the sun rose the next morning, he was escorted aboard a UFO. An hour later he was deposited in Lititz, Pennsylvania, near Washington D.C. where he lived, a bitter man, until his death in 1880.


UFOs Leave Tahoe
The turmoil in the gold country from 1849 on decreased the attractiveness of Tahoe as a major base. There has been speculation for years that the UFOs shifted their main operations to Mount Shasta (14,162'), about 160 miles north Tahoe.


But every year there are "hotline" calls to the National UFO Reporting Center (in Harrington, WA) about shimmering saucers skipping up and down Lake Tahoe at high speed in the middle of the night and early morning hours. And telltale, lenticular clouds are regularly visible curling over the Carson Range on the east side on summer evenings. Perhaps the UFOs are still around...


Copyright (c) 2000 Steven C. Brandt