It’s late September 1973, and Southern California is burning. Fires fueled by hot Santa Ana winds up to 90 mph are breaking out across Riverside, Ventura, San Bernardino and Los Angeles counties. Ventura sees the worst of it, with 12,200 acres burning, causing nearly half a million dollars of damage.

Located in Ventura County, Simi Valley suffers what the newspaper calls “a blitzkrieg of fires.” From 9 a.m. on Sept. 26 through the early hours of Sept. 27, firefighters battled back multiple blazes on little sleep.

If the fires had started just a week later, the firefighters might have received assistance from another world.

On Oct. 4, a man driving on the Simi Freeway reportedly saw a triangular-shaped object 80-100 feet off the ground, “swaying like a boat at anchor,” with an 8-foot-long hose dangling from it. A being in what the man described as a “silvery wet suit” moved about the object before it all disappeared in a cloud of smoke.

Perhaps the being was on fire patrol and piloting an interstellar fire engine? If so, it should have stuck around. The flames returned to Ventura County just a few weeks later.

These events — the extreme weather and the strange craft — were just two moments in a nationwide chain of oddities in 1973. That year is remembered in UFO circles for its intense wave of sightings and, most surreally, the fall humanoid wave that accompanied it.

Chronicled by David Webb in his report, “1973 – Year of the Humanoids,” sightings began 52 years ago on August 9 and lasted through mid-December. Webb recorded 70 reports of humanoids over the five months, 55 of which occurred in the continental United States.

As part of his report, Webb analyzed similarities between cases, electromagnetic effects and timing patterns, among other methodologies.

What he didn’t look at was the weather.

Using the NOAA’s “Storm Data and Unusual Weather Phenomena” reports for August–December 1973, I cross-compared weather events with Webb’s humanoid cases and found that all but three sightings occurred within 40 miles of unusual weather events, often much closer than that max range.

Below is an interactive map charting these overlaps, which I’ll refer to throughout this piece.

What does any of this mean?

I’m glad you asked. The map uses the following color code:

• Orange: Storm and sighting happened within a week of each other.
• Purple: Storm happened within a month of sighting.
• Black: Storm occurred during the wave but over a month removed from any sighting.
• Green: Humanoid encounter with no associated storm.

In all, there were 136 weather events between August and December:

• 36 in August
• 25 in September
• 12 in October
• 35 in November
• 28 in December

Of those 136 events, the color breakout is as follows:

• 29 purple events associated with 21 sightings
• Seven orange events associated with six sightings.
• 101 black events associated with 21 sightings

As previously mentioned, three humanoid encounters didn’t have a nearby storm during the wave.

But weather is everywhere, so of course you’ll find it near encounters

True, but the NOAA reports track “unusual weather phenomena.” They don’t track everyday rain showers. A great example of this can be found in the Anthony Hill humanoid encounter, which Webb lists as occurring during a thunderstorm. However, that storm is not included in the NOAA’s report.

Almost all the NOAA reports are of weather events that either caused accidents, property damage, injury or death. Tornadoes, funnel clouds and waterspouts were also tracked in the reports.

A few examples of what kind of events the NOAA recorded include:

• Aug. 17, 1973: Hail the size of golf balls killed hundreds of birds around Chilton. Metal storage shed picked up by winds and mudslide occurred at Chilton after 2½ inches rain fell between 2 and 5 a.m.
• Oct. 4, 1973: State police observed the funnel four miles south of Von Ormy. It moved eastward without touching the ground.
• Nov. 27, 1973: Heavy rains caused a house to collapse and slide down a creek bank. One child was killed and the mother seriously injured.

Note — I did not change the wording of reports except when it improved readability or to correct spelling mistakes.

I still don’t see what this has to do with humanoids

That’s a much harder question to answer, as it’s challenging to make a one-to-one correlation with any given storm and a humanoid encounter. Why? For starters, if there is a direct relation between casual storms and sightings, we don’t have that data for it due to the reasons mentioned above.

Two, if there is any veracity to these sightings, I don’t believe they are of flesh and blood beings from another world. I think something much stranger is at work. If storm equals encounter, it’s due to something akin to what I’ve touched on in previous writings.

In short, the phenomenon seems to have more to do with the psyche than the physical.

What does that look like? Let’s return to the Simi Valley sighting and the fires of Ventura County as an example. Webb’s full write-up of the humanoid encounter is as follows:

“A man driving on the Simi Freeway saw a 30 by 50 foot triangular object in a dust cloud near the road, 80–100 feet away and swaying 10 feet above the ground. An 8-foot hose dangled from the bottom. A clear bubble, 3 feet in diameter, swiveled atop the UFO. As he watched, a being crawled around from behind the machine, looked at the witness and scrambled out of sight. The humanoid was of normal stature but wore a silvery wet suit. The bubble began rotating faster and disappeared inside the object, which emitted a whirring noise. A fog enveloped the craft, which then disappeared. An unidentified woman had reported a similar sighting a week before.”

Later in the analysis section of the report, Webb mentions the craft “swayed like a boat at anchor.”

It is immediately noticeable that this humanoid encounter is steeped in water imagery: the hose, the wet suit and moving like a boat. Chiefly, this is one of the few encounters that happened within a week of a weather event — the blitzkrieg of fires at Simi Valley.

Fire and water, imagery that’s been near-universal since the dawn of humankind. Yet, there might be more to it all than just that. The bubble atop the craft is an intriguing detail and reminiscent of the rounded glass cab of the fire engines common during that era, particularly the Crown Firecoach. And the silvery wet suit the being wore shares some resemblance with a fire proximity suit.

This, however, is where we get into murky territory. Suppose these are more co-created creatures than pyschical beings from another world. In that case, you have to try and deduce what their appearance and/or mannerisms are a personification of — the viewers’ memories of a recent weather event, the weather event itself, a combination of the two or something else altogether?

There’s also the issue of time. Few Humanoid encounters occurred in neat temporal proximity to the weather events. A skeptic might point to this and say, “gotcha!” On the other hand, one might suggest these encounters are harbingers, much like the popular connection made between Mothman sightings and the Silver Bridge collapse of 1967.

I lean somewhere in the middle. If these are phenomena of the psyche — which is not to say hallucinations or delusions — then time isn’t that great a factor. If there is a co-creative element at play, thoughts are not bound by time. The classic example is trauma, which lingers and influences the traumatized long after the initial traumatizing event has passed.

I’m still struggling with the whole humanoid, weather relationship

The Simi Valley encounter has the most apparent connection to the weather that preceded and followed it. However, there are plenty of other intriguing examples that hint at a connection.

From September 13–14, heavy rains struck the Northwest region of South Carolina, causing flash floods, evacuations and extensive damage to property and utilities. Greenville saw some of the worst flooding.

Then on November 11 in Greenville, Webb reported that, “a 3-foot being dressed in a light brown overall got into a cab and told the driver to take him to Greasy Corners, a local intersection. The head was featureless except for goggles or large eyes. It had on gloves and gold boots with gold buttons on the chest. The being paid for the fare with a dollar bill which had the green side colored yellow.”

The being’s boots, gloves and goggles are interesting considering the flooding, but what stands out most to me is the yellowed dollar bill. It sounds like what can happen to a dollar when it’s water-damaged.

Outside of individual cases, I picked up where Webb started and looked for connections between encounters that shared similar details.

Webb analyzed the similarities between humanoids encountered during abductions, for example. Of these, only the Loxley abduction didn’t take place near high rain and wind events.

Webb also examined cases involving electromagnetic anomalies, which I found occurring mainly near tornadoes and the remainder near severe thunderstorms.

One aspect I took note of was what I call “work crew behavior,” where multiple humanoids seemed to be at work looking for something. In the Albemarle and Reno encounters, these occurred near damaging windstorms. One of the Goffstown encounters also featured a work crew, and while a windstorm wasn’t reported, a cloudburst was.

Ultimately, if the project is worth anything, it’s an endeavor toward asking better questions.

Does this map give us another lens to look at the phenomena with? And if so, what is its relationship to us and nature?

I don’t have the answers.

I’ve made this map available to others for their research. Maybe you’ll see something I’ve missed? It would also be interesting to do a plot like this for other flaps — though I’ll let someone else undertake that project.

At the end, all I can say for sure about the fall of 1973 is this: The sky was alive in more ways than one.