A Briefcase in New Jersey and a Researcher's Call for Plasma Orb Testimony
Two separate bids to gather UFO testimony: a confidential briefcase handoff to MUFON in New Jersey, and an appeal by researcher Robert Hastings for accounts of plasma orbs.
Shortly after three o'clock on a Sunday afternoon, Bob Spearing sat down in a coffee shop in Boonton, New Jersey, with two people and a briefcase. Spearing is a director of the Mutual UFO Network, and he had driven more than an hour for what the organisation describes as an exclusive and highly confidential meeting. The date given is 27 September 2026. The briefcase, according to the account MUFON published, had come into the possession of a woman named Cara, who had emailed him about it. It contained, the network says, long-lost UFO research.
The trail behind the case runs back to the late John Rohlman and his sister, Edith Hiawatsch. The two, MUFON reports, were working together on a book setting out what it calls incredible, unreleased information about the UFO phenomenon. The material available describes the contents of the briefcase no further than that, and does not say how Cara came by it. What the episode offers, in the account as it stands, is a handover: a piece of history locked away for years, passed across a table to an archive.
In a separate development, the researcher Robert Hastings has issued an appeal for testimony from people who say they have encountered mysterious orbs of plasmatic appearance whose behaviour seems conscious. His aim is to gather fresh cases for a forthcoming book on the various forms of contact with supposed non-human intelligences. Mystery Planet, which reported the appeal, notes that Hastings has spent more than four decades investigating UFO incidents linked to American nuclear weapons installations, and that he has interviewed more than 160 veterans in that time.
The two efforts are unconnected, one resting on an unpublished manuscript and the other on first-person accounts. What they share is a method and an appetite: the assumption that testimony and documents held privately, sometimes for decades, are worth retrieving before they are lost. Neither report, as published, offers verification of what the briefcase contained or of what the witnesses describe.
The lasting image is a small one. A briefcase on a coffee-shop table in Boonton, handed over by people who had kept it; and elsewhere a researcher, after more than four decades of inquiries, still asking who else might come forward.