Sid Padrick and "Xeno", Manresa Beach, California (1965)

Santa Cruz County, California. Winter, 1965. Sid Padrick lived at La Selva Beach with his wife and three sons. He was a radio and TV technician. He also suffered from insomnia, and on restless nights he walked Manresa Beach, close to home, about 75 miles south of San Francisco.

January 30, 1965. Just before 2 a.m. Padrick heard a whistling, like a jet. Then an unlit dark disc approached from the Pacific Ocean. He later called it "like two real thick saucers inverted," about 50 feet across and 30 feet high. It descended until it hung a foot or two above the sand.

A voice came from the craft. It used his name. "Don't be afraid, we are not hostile. We mean no harm to you."

Padrick ran, but curiosity brought him back. He stepped through a square door into a brilliantly lit antechamber and met the crew. They looked between 20 and 25 years old, fair-skinned, with pointed noses and chins, in tight pale bluish-white suits. Only the leader spoke, calling himself Xeno in perfect English. Before each answer he paused 25 to 30 seconds, which suggested to Padrick that he was receiving instructions telepathically.

There were 14 rooms on two floors, and not one square corner. The light seemed to come right through the walls. On a screen he was shown the cigar-shaped mother ship, sitting in sunlight. Xeno said they came from "a planet in back of a planet which we observe," a world without sickness, crime, money or police. "Yes, we are human, but not your type."

The craft flew, and mountainous terrain appeared through the portholes. It landed on a hillside at a deserted camping site, later placed near Leggett. Xeno told him to step out so he could know this was real and not dreamed, and Padrick walked around the hull and touched it. Then, in a chapel with eight chairs and an altar, Xeno asked, "Would you like to pay your respects to the Supreme Deity?" Padrick knelt, said a prayer from childhood and wept before returning to the beach at about 4:05 a.m.

On February 4 Padrick phoned Hamilton AFB. Maj. Damon B. Reeder questioned him for about three hours, found him intelligent and "a glib talker," and concluded it was "not a valid UFO contact" but an attempt to lend the story Air Force credibility. Project Blue Book filed it as case #9256, an "unreliable report." Padrick told it differently. He said officers asked him to keep quiet about Xeno, and cited the Mantell case.

Donald Keyhoe lumped the story with the contactee "stupidities" of the George Adamski kind. Coral and Jim Lorenzen of APRO judged Padrick sincere but deluded. Clark and Coleman read it as Jungian symbolism, the round rooms as mandalas, the hidden planet as the unconscious. Timothy Good defended him, calling his answers "clear, precise, without guile." No hoax mechanism or confession has surfaced. Even the date is unsettled. One account places it on the night of March 6 to 7.

Padrick lectured through 1965, spoke to NICAP in Seattle and sketched the craft. He announced a book that never appeared, then dropped out of public view in the late 1960s. His words remain. "My life has been lifted way, way up beyond what I could ever have conceived."