by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear
On the morning of April 17, 1966, two sheriff deputies, Dale Spaur and Wilbur “Barney” Neff, chased a UFO from Portage County, Ohio, for 86 miles all the way into Pennsylvania. They chased the object at speeds ranging from 80 mph to 105 mph. According to them, there were times when the object actually stopped and waited for them to catch up to it. Other law enforcement officers witnessed the object after being alerted by radio communications between the deputies and their dispatcher. According to Project Blue Book Director Hector Quintanilla, the officers chased the planet Venus. Spaur stuck to the story that they had chased a physical object as others went silent, and he ended up losing his job and his family. A case that is remarkably similar is reported to have occurred in June of that year, and the officer who reported it also seems to have suffered for speaking out, but to a lesser extent than Spaur.
There is an article (page 3 of the pdf) by Bob Lindsey in the October 27, 1977, Richmond, Virginia, Times Dispatch headlined “UFO Sighting Changed Stevens’ Life.” Under the headline, there is a quote from William L. Stevens Jr.: “I often stop and wonder if you’re better off when you see something like that, to keep your mouth shut.”
According to Lindsey, at 3:30 a.m. on June 24, 1966, Stevens, a patrolman, was approaching the Ladies Mile Road intersection in his police car when he noticed some green and yellow lights in the air over the fairgrounds, where there had been a carnival set up a few days before. The lights seemed strange to him, and he drove into the county, past the city limits, to check them out. He then saw “an object shrouded in mist, encircled with lights and shaped like a blimp.”
According to Lindsey, Stevens said “it was hovering about 200 feet over Richmond-Henrico Turnpike, near the service entrance to the fairgrounds. He is quoted saying that he picked up his mic, went towards it, turned on his red light and his spotlight, and when his spotlight hit it, he could see that it “was in its own cloud like a fog or a mist.” He said it “immediately” turned away from him and that it “was shaped exactly like a dirigible, but it didn’t have a gondola or anything under it.”
According to Stevens, the object moved off and followed the road at treetop level as he followed under it, and he asked the dispatcher “to notify Byrd Field and get radar on.” He said, “I look down at my speedometer. I’m running 50, it’s running 50. I’m running 60, it’s running 60. So, we kept it up. It was just like it wanted me to follow him.”
According to Lindsey, the chase went on for almost five miles and was the last chase Stevens would be involved in, as he was “taken off the street and assigned to police lockup,” which he considered a demotion. Lindsey adds that “someone asked him if he saw any little green men with horns.” He says that nothing was picked up by the radar at Byrd field and that Stevens “had nothing but his word that he saw something.”
Lindsey tells the reader that Stevens was “visited by an Air Force representative and was questioned by the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), a private group.” Stevens is said to have wondered if what he saw was “an experimental craft being tested by the government.”
According to Lindsey, about a month after the chase, Stevens got some corroboration for his story from two county policemen who spoke anonymously with reporters saying they saw a light a few miles away from where the object disappeared at the end of Stevens’s chase. They said it, in Lindsey’s words, “moved through the sky, stopped, moved again and frequently changed directions.”
Lindsey goes into more detail about the chase and quotes Stevens extensively. He says the chase got up to 100 miles per hour and that Stevens ran a stop sign. He quotes Stevens as saying, “I came through the intersection about 100 miles an hour and by the grace of God nothing was coming. It never dawned on me that I’d run this stop sign until after it was all over with.” He said he wasn’t scared until then.
Lindsey adds more details about the craft in the same manner saying that it stayed about 200 feet in the air and that Stevens could see with his spotlight that is was “a dull, gray ship.” He quotes Stevens as saying it was “100, maybe 200 feet long and 35 feet high.” According to Stevens, when it was over a cemetery past the intersection of Meadowbridge and Shady Grove Roads, it left going “from a hundred miles an hour to thou . . . well, it had to be thousands of miles an hour. In seconds, it was out of sight.”
According to Lindsey, Stevens was now a police dispatcher but wanted to be a policeman and thought he would be “if it weren’t for the UFO.” The final three paragraphs are Stevens being quoted saying he sometimes thinks he should have turned his car around, gone back to Richmond and forgotten “the whole thing.” He explains: “Because people still don’t want to believe it; they want to joke about it, and it’s nothing to joke about.” He says “I wasn’t a UFO buff, but now I am because I’ve seen it. And I know what I saw.”
It seems Stevens wasn’t the only one to see a UFO over the Richmond area that year. He is quoted in order to corroborate another witness’s story in an article (page 2 of the pdf) in the October 29, 1999, Times-Dispatch by Mark Bownes headlined “Sheriff Reveals 1966 UFO Encounter And Death Of Dog.”
The story concerns a report by Henrico County Sheriff A. D. “Toby” Mathews that on August 9, 1966 (he is said to have been a road sergeant at the time), he saw a large UFO that was 30 feet in diameter hovering over his farm in Varina, Virginia. According to Bownes, Mathews said the object turned slightly, put out a burst of light, and “took off like a bullet” after he shone his flashlight on it. Mathews is said to have suspected that “whatever was inside” was responsible for the death of his German Shepherd, who was found dead with his collar removed on the road in front of Mathews’s driveway.
According to Bownes, “more than half a dozen people, including three Richmond area police officers, reported seeing similar objects hovering over the city, Henrico and Goochland County according to news accounts in The Times-Dispatch and The Richmond News Leader.” He says that The News Leader was told by a Richmond patrolman “that he chased the UFO in his patrol car.” He quotes Stevens from a “July 21, 1966, news story” as saying “If I live to be 100, I’ll never forget it.”