Yatzitz Incident

The Encounter

The Yatzitz incident is one of the better-known reported encounters from Israel's 1990s UFO wave, which Israeli UFO researchers and the press described as hundreds of close-encounter claims over a single decade. Its details come almost entirely from a 1996 feature in The Jerusalem Report, later syndicated by Religion News. The article describes a witness named Ksantini and a friend who were frightened by a large figure in the fields near Yatzitz, a moshav about 7 km south of Ramle in the Shephelah (see Wikipedia's entry on the village for location context).

The article gives no exact date. It refers to the encounter's "anniversary" in March 1996, which points to March 1995, but no source found confirms that year. The entry is therefore recorded at year precision.

The Search and the Footprints

According to the account, Ksantini said the figure was "too big to be a man" and was not a horse, a camel, or any other animal he knew. The two men alerted the moshav's security chief, who contacted the Border Police. By early the next morning about 30 officers were searching the area. They found no figure, but they did find deep footprints, which they followed for roughly 8 km.

Interpretation and Reception

Skeptics said the prints were made by camels, a common sight in the region. Israel's small but active UFO community treated the moshav as the site of a new visitation. Israeli ufology, as the 1996 article describes it, was divided between a rationalist majority and a mystic minority, and Yatzitz became one of the cases the mystic camp pointed to.

For wider context on how Israeli UFO belief has been treated in the press, see The Forward's piece on Jewish UFO history. Ufology-oriented archives of 1995 Israeli reports, such as Patrick Gross's Israel pages, contain related material but are partisan and were not independently verified here.

Assessment

Yatzitz rests on one detailed press account. No police report, contemporaneous newspaper item, or follow-up investigation was located, and the date is inferred. The camel explanation is plausible and the footprints were never documented in a way that could test it. The case is worth recording as an example of the 1990s Israeli wave and its reception, not as an established event.