Ten Notable Police Run-ins with UFOs
The Lonnie Zamora case is the most dramatic and extravagantly studied of all UFO encounters involving peace officers. A touchstone of UFO studies, it is just one of many eye-opening accounts offered by law enforcement personnel.
1. August 13, 1960
Stan Scott and Charles Carson, two CHiPs officers on patrol near Corning, California, shortly before midnight observe a silent, airliner- sized object descend to within one hundred to two hundred feet above the ground before halting and reversing course, and halting again at about five hundred feet. As the object moves, it sweeps the ground with a broad red light.
The presence of the ovoid, glowing object is confirmed by radar personnel at nearby Red Bluff Air Station. Officers Scott and Carson slowly keep pace as the object moves east, pausing whenever it moves closer to the patrol car.
Oddly, the object retreats whenever the CHiPs officers flip on their cherry light. After nearly two hours, a second flying object joins the first. Both hover and emit periodic red beams before moving off, to disappear over the east horizon. The Air Force explains that Scott and Carson—as well as three deputies at the Tehama County sheriff’s office—had seen light refracted from Mars and two stars, Betelgeuse and Aldebaran. (Other explanations suggest weather balloons, the Northern Lights, and smoke from a distant forest fire.) Later, when it becomes clear that Mars and the two stars had been below the horizon at the time of the officers’ sightings, the Air Force alters its explanation, citing the star Capella.
2. September 21 and 24, 1962
During two nights at a quarry in Hawthorne, New Jersey, more than sixteen local police officers observe bright flying discs.
Four officers and a watchman witness the first incident; and at least a dozen officers, plus a reporter, are present for the second. A pranksters’ letter claiming that the objects are models launched from Bergenfield, New Jersey, is found to be the work of boys living in that town, which is located more than eight miles, as the crow flies, from Hawthorne. No models made by children could have traveled that far. Four area newspapers, including the Newark Evening News, support the claims of the officers.
3. April 17, 1966
At about 5:00 a.m., two deputies from the Portage County, Ohio, sheriff’s office near Ravenna get an okay from headquarters to chase an enormous, brightly lit ovoid UFO. The deputies drive for eighty-five miles at speeds up to a hundred, crossing into Pennsylvania to keep up with the smoothly gliding craft. Along the way, the deputies enlist an Ohio police officer and an officer from Pennsylvania for the pursuit. All four see the craft clearly, and hear the thing’s steady hum, a sound that Portage County deputy sheriff Dale Spaur later describes as “like . . . an overloaded transformer.” Moments after Spaur hears radio chatter about jets being scrambled to intercept the object, the UFO rapidly ascends “straight up” and disappears. A drawing done by Spaur depicts an egg-shaped craft with a sharply vertical tail.
The Air Force later denies that any jets were scrambled, and says the officers had seen two relatively mundane objects, a satellite and the planet Venus.
When the officers state they saw the UFO as well as the satellite and Venus, the Air Force has no comment.
Note: This event is frequently cited as the inspiration for a vaguely similar, two-minute chase sequence that is a highlight of the 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
4. August 13, 1970 and July 14, 1973
While on patrol near Hadersley, Denmark, on August 13, the cruiser driven by veteran officer Evald Maarup is suddenly bathed in blue light and stops dead. When the temperature inside the car rises, Maarup steps out and sees a metallic ovoid, about thirty feet in diameter, hovering overhead. The silent craft remains stationary for about five minutes, and then whisks itself away. Once the UFO has departed, Maarup’s patrol car starts up and operates normally. In the same area almost exactly three years later, Maarup observes a similar craft—though the object shows no interest in Maarup, and does not interfere with his car.
5. August 27, 1979
During night patrol on Minnesota State Route 220 near the North Dakota border, Marshall County, Minnesota, deputy sheriff Val Johnson’s Ford LTD is struck head-on by a ball of light moving rapidly northward from a tree line. Johnson loses consciousness, and awakes to find that his car has been flung across the road, and that he has mild burns around his eyes. A portion of his dental work is fractured. Although Johnson has no memory of applying the brakes, the highway shows a ninety-nine-foot skid track. The patrol car’s roof and trunk antennae are bent back at sharp angles, with the latter peculiarly bent at ninety degrees just a few inches from the top.
Although the car’s inner-left headlamp is smashed, there is no damage to the rim or chrome trim. The center roof light is broken, and the casing shows a thick, vertical char. The windshield exhibits a pattern of cracks that, according to a Ford Motor windshield specialist, is the result of an unexplainable combination of forces simultaneously pushing and pulling on the glass. Of particular interest is that the patrol car’s dash clock, and Deputy Johnson’s wristwatch, run fourteen minutes slow.
Note: The Val Johnson case is one of the most celebrated of all close encounters, because it involves an experienced police officer, well-documented physical evidence, and immediate police investigation. UFOlogist Guy Westcott, who investigated the case in 1979, returned to it in 2009, finally admitting that he had reached “a dead end,” and that the case must be classified as “an unknown.”
6. November 28, 1980
Shortly before dawn, Todmorden, West Yorkshire, England, police constable Alan Godfrey stops his patrol car to make a sketch of a rotating ovoid object flying low over a cow pasture—only to experience a hitch in time. When his senses return, fifteen minutes have passed and he is again driving. Significantly, other witnesses, including a constable from nearby Halifax, see an ovoid UFO at about the same time. Note: Under hypnotic regression later, Godfrey recalled the interior of the craft, and his meeting with a bearded man called Yosef. When a tabloid revealed Godfrey’s identity, his department forced him to take a psychological test.
Although he easily achieved a satisfactory result, he was encouraged to retire a few years later. Constable Godfrey is of further interest to UFOlogists: he helped investigate the June 1980 death of a local named Zygmund Adamski, a miner found dead on a coal pile five days after he had disappeared. Although nothing suggests that the crime is anything more than simple murder-robbery, several details, including Adamski’s half-dressed state and minor burns on the back of his head, encouraged tabloids to claim that Adamski had been abducted by a UFO and later dropped atop the pile of coal.
7. February 27, 1993
Shortly before midnight, Jefferson County, Kentucky, flying officers Kenny Graham (pilot) and Kenny Downs (spotter) are on routine patrol when their helicopter is approached from below by a pear- shaped object the size of a basketball. Although the copter is moving at a hundred miles per hour, the object easily closes distance. As Graham takes evasive action, Downs pins the object in the copter’s spotlight beam. The object rapidly ascends to the helicopter’s altitude (about five hundred feet) and discharges three, fist-sized “fireballs” in the copter’s direction, to no apparent effect. As Graham wheels away, the object disappears.
Note: Graham and Downs, as well as two officers who observed the dogfight from the ground, agreed that the object reacted to the helicopter with intent, approaching and then backing off, executing tight loops, and exhibiting unexplainable bursts of speed and sudden stops.
8. January 5, 2000
Officers from multiple towns near Scott AFB (southeast of Shiloh, Illinois) investigate a civilian report of a large, flying object lined with rows of windows. Lebanon, Illinois, Officer Ed Barton is the first to respond; he observes a pair of bright lights that finally reveal themselves as components of a massive triangular-shaped craft some seventy-five feet long and forty-five feet across. On the object’s underside, each corner is illuminated by a large, circular white light; the approximate center of the underside carries a smaller, blinking red light. The craft shows another red light at the center of its aft edge. The thing is noiseless, but Barton is more impressed by its ability to rotate without banking, as if on an invisible pivot. The craft’s vertical midline is described by a single band of light with multiple, melded colors. Shiloh officer David Martin gets a similar impression a few miles away, and notes that the object’s speed varies between fifteen and one hundred miles per hour.
Not long after, two other Illinois officers, from the towns of Millstadt and Dupo, see the craft.
Note: Although the triangular craft was at one point only two or three miles from Scott AFB, an Air Force representative asserted that Scott radar operators tracked nothing anomalous on January 5. Subsequent research by NUFORC (National UFO Reporting Center) revealed that Air National Guard F-15 fighters may have been scrambled from nearby Lambert Field, at St. Louis.
9. March 2002
For about ten minutes between 7:30 and 8:00 p.m., Officer Brian Roberts and his wife observe a large, saucer-shaped object in the sky about 325 yards from their home in Trawsfynydd, North Wales. Viewed through binoculars, the object shows a brilliant perimeter of light moving in a circular pattern along its vertical midline. Roberts is concerned because the craft hovers near the decommissioned Trawsfynydd nuclear power station.
10. December 26, 2003
Three Huntington, Indiana, police officers make a mid- afternoon sighting of a silent, slowly “tumbling” UFO not far from the town’s police station. The alternately black and orange object comes out of the north going northeast, and drops so close to a church steeple that Officer Randy Hoover expects it to get hung up there. After less than a minute, the object resumes a northerly course and disappears.
Note: The three officers remarked that the object’s shape was amorphous, suggesting a flat disc in some aspects, an oblong in others, and “wings” in still others. Although the object’s size could not be precisely estimated, the officers agreed on a diameter of about fifty feet. Pressed by local media, the Huntington and Fort Wayne airports
reported that nothing out of the ordinary occurred on December 26.