by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear
At the top of the first page of National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena 1988 Chronology on the NICAP website, there is an illustration depicting what witnesses said they saw land on a frozen section of Lake Erie in March of that year. The report comes from Eastlake, Ohio, and witnesses include members of the Coast Guard. Under the illustration is a link to the NICAP Case Directory page covering the incident along with this brief description: “Coast Guard witnesses, large illuminated ellipse hovering over Lake Erie, landing on ice. Smaller triangular objects emerged, zipped around independently.”
The Case Directory page has a brief summary by webmaster Fran Ridge of events which began at 8:35 p.m. According to Ridge, this case, which is “one of FUFOR’s (Fund for UFO Research) top cases,” had a possible “nuclear connection” (a nuclear power plant was nearby), and involved a “huge, gunmetal gray, football-shaped object that was rocking back and forth” which “was first observed by five people.”
Below the summary are links to “detailed reports and documents” which include the report from FUFOR, the partial transcript of an interview with the primary witnesses, the Coast Guard report, an email thread, and correspondence from the researchers.
According to the FUFOR report, Sheila and Henry Baker, along with their three children, had just gone out to dinner and were driving home on a bright moonlit night. Sheila saw something over the lake and told her husband to drive down to the beach.
According to Sheila (identified as W1) in the interview conducted by investigators Richard P. Dell’Aquila and Dale B. Wedge, Henry laughed at her, but she insisted there was something there. They went down to the beach and got out of the car, leaving the children inside. They saw what Sheila describes as “almost the size of a blimp” with “lights on both sides.” One was brighter than the other and one of them (she doesn’t specify which) flashed. She says “It wasn’t a constant light that was on.” The object was rocking back and forth “a little bit” and didn’t make any noise as it hovered.
Sheila says, “The ice was cracking really bad, and the ice down here doesn’t crack like that.” She adds, that “there were no animals barking or nothing,” which was “surprising” because there are a lot of dogs in the area and “you always hear the dogs out.”
According to Sheila, she started getting “weirded out,” and when the object turned towards them and started to come in for a landing, she became concerned for her children. She explains: “I didn’t want to stay down at the beach, because you never know what’s going to happen or if it was going to come down and get us or whatever.” She says it seemed to know they were there.
They went home, and the whole family continued watching the object from their living room. Sheila called her neighbor Sue to find out if she could see the same thing they were seeing. Sue went outside with her son, and they were also able to see the object.
After watching for “most of the evening,” the object started to come down and “we all got real curious and went down.” Sheila and her family, along with Sue, her husband and son, went down to the beach, and while the object was still in the air, they saw about five small, yellow, triangular objects come out of it that proceeded to fly around rapidly.
The object finally landed on the ice, and by that time, “the Coast Guard was down there.” Sheila explains: “I had called the Coast Guard, I would say at least twelve times, but they kept telling me, “Well, you’re crazy, and nothing’s wrong.” She describes the men from the Coast Guard as “young boys” and says they got scared as the triangular objects got closer and closer to their truck, which was parked on a hill. She says the group told them to turn off their headlights.
Henry arrives and gives his version of events:
“I watched this thing down at the beach with the Coast Guard guys. It was the strangest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. It had these guys running, they were so scared. It was strange. As it got lower to the water, all these little, what we thought were jets, came and hovered right above this thing. We assumed they were those Harrier jets that can just hover. When they got closer, these jets came about forty or fifty feet above the ice and they were going back and forth across the lake unbelievably fast. They were covering a fifty-mile stretch, like that (Snapping his fingers).”
According to Sheila, the men from the Coast Guard had driven up from the Fairport Harbor station after observing the lights from there. As for any sort of follow-up by the Coast Guard, she says this: “They said it was totally out of their league. They didn’t know what it was or what it could be. They didn’t want to speculate. They also said to us, even on the next day, that the Army and I guess, NASA did not want them to investigate any further.”
She adds that she spoke with “a person in command” who told her they, the Coast Guard, had to send all of their information to Wright-Patterson AFB and “a place in Detroit.” She says when she called the next day, “they were real snotty to me on the phone.”
The Coast Guard report is a re-creation, but there is a link to a photocopy of the actual document. According to the report, the station received a call at 20:35 about the large object, and two crew members were sent to investigate. As they were traveling to the location, two more calls were received, this time about the triangles. The triangles are described as “zipping around” and able to stop and hover.
When they got to the site, the crew members (Mobile 2) “reported the same activity.” After watching for about an hour, they reported that the large object was landing and “that the ice was cracking and moving abnormal amounts” as the object got closer.
When the object seemed to have landed, multi-colored lights lit up at each end while the ice “rumbled.” The lights then went out, the ice stopped making moving and making noise, and the smaller objects hovered around the large object. The lights went on again, and the smaller objects started flying around as if they were scouting the area.
Mobile 2 then reported that an object, low to the ice, was coming at them at high speed. They backed down the hill, and when they drove back up, the object was gone. They said they couldn’t see the objects when they turned off their headlights and that at one point, one of the objects put a spotlight on the area where the large object had been, and they “could not see anything, and then the object seemed to disappear.” When another object came at them, they flashed their headlights and it “moved off to the west.
This is the last part of the report: “3. THE CREWMEMBERS WERE UNABLE TO IDENTIFY ANY OF THE OBJECTS USING BINOCULARS AND AFTER CONTACTING LOCAL POLICE AND AIRPORTS, THIS UNIT WAS UNABLE TO IDENTIFY THE OBJECTS, AND RECALLED MOBILE 02.BTTOR-03:05:14:44”
The correspondence and email thread deal extensively with what became the official explanation for the sightings as reported in the article “Sky-Gazers Mistake Planets for UFOs” published in the March 7, 1988, News-Herald:
Visitors from another planet have nothing to do with the UFOs which were reported along the lake shore Friday and Saturday nights. But, according to the Coast Guard, the planets Jupiter and Venus are involved. When the US Coast Guard at Fairport Harbor received reports Friday night of UFOs in the sky, it checked with area airports to learn what their radar indicated. “We thought it might be someone in trouble setting off flares,” said Petty Officer John Knaub. “So, we investigated ourselves.”
Coast Guard members saw the lights over the lake about 1/4 mile east of the mouth of the Chagrin River. “But Lost Nation Airport advised us that we were seeing the planets Jupiter and Venus, which are lined up together in the sky. Apparently, the gases in the atmosphere created the appearance of smaller objects around them.”
The UFO reports rolled in again Saturday night, when the sky remained clear and was dominated by a full moon.
Knaub said the phenomena is visible around 9PM, as sky-gazers look west along the lake from Fairport Harbor.
This is mentioned during the interview with the Bakers, and Henry calls it “bullsh*t.”
Audio of the interview was recovered and can be heard on YouTube.
For additional details, including the names of the Coast Guard crew members, readers can visit the site run by Michael Lee Hill.