bt Charles Lear
As far as classic UFO cases go, Ohio may very well have more than any other state. There was the 1966 case where Deputy Sheriff Dale Spaur and his partner chased a UFO from Portage County, Ohio, all the way into Pennsylvania at speeds up to 100 mph. In 1973, there was the Coyne Incident, where four men in the Army Reserve reported an encounter near Mansfield, Ohio, with a UFO that pulled their helicopter, commanded by Lawrence J. Coyne, up from 1,700 feet to 3,500 feet while the controls were set for a descent. In 1994, police in Trumbull County responded to a police dispatcher who said she’d received calls about a UFO from local citizens. Before the night was over, police from five different departments gave chase, and a recording of their radio exchanges with the dispatch was given to researcher Kenny Young, who brought the case to the attention of the UFO community and the world. A 1971 case from Huron County, Ohio, that had multiple witnesses, including police officers, didn’t gain nearly was much notoriety as those above, and one might wonder if it might have been because of the way it was treated by the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena. The main witness sent a report to NICAP, but NICAP was in the midst of changes that may or not have been overseen by either or both the Air Force and the CIA.
On January 25, 1971, Ohio newspapers carried the story of multiple UFO reports received by the Willard Police, Huron County Sheriff’s Department, and the Ohio State Highway Patrol.
There is a description by one witness in the article headlined, “‘UFO Really Huge’ Says County Man” in the January 25, 1971 edition (page 2 of link) of the Norwalk, Ohio Reflector. Richard William, 18, said that at about 9:05 p.m. on Friday, January 22, he and his wife saw a low-flying object as he was driving on Niver Road towards Willard. The couple’s four-month-old son was with them. William said that as it approached him, he saw “one light on each side of the wing span.”
He estimated each wing to be 30 feet long. He said he blinked his lights and it “stopped and hovered down a little closer.” With his high beams on, he was almost able see the outline of the object. He said: “From the front, the object looked like an airplane, except it was really huge. It was bigger than any hovercraft.”
He thought at first that it was some sort of experimental plane but discounted the idea. He said the object moved off to the east and then south around Willard. He saw that the front was “all glass” and the rear was tapered down to a round end. He didn’t see a vertical stabilizer.
After explaining that he’d learned in school that there were millions of galaxies with millions of planets, he said: “It’s likely that many of those planets have life, and they could be more intelligent than we are.
An article in the January 25, 1971 edition (page 3 of link) of the Bellefontaine, Ohio Examiner headlined, “UFO Startles Willard Area Residents, Law Officers” has a sketch of the UFO with what appears to be a humanoid behind a clear dome on top made from witness reports above the headline. The source for the story is Capt. John Warner from the Huron County Sheriff’s Department.
Warner provided what is most likely an account of William’s encounter without naming the witness. He said the family was quite frightened by the encounter and that the witness said he “saw some movement behind a ‘glass dome’ at the top of the object.”
According to Warner, the sheriff’s office received six calls about the object from citizens of Willard and at least a dozen from Tiro. Warner added that a patrolman and a sheriff’s deputy also reported seeing the object twice. All of this was on Friday night. The officers reported seeing jets after the object “disappeared” that seemed to be pursuing it towards the west.
In the Reflector article, it is reported that Williams sent a two-page letter about the sighting to “an aerospace research office in Washington, D.C. As that is where NICAP was based, it seems likely that this was the “office” referred to, and indeed, there is a description of the sighting in the March 1971 edition (page 1 of link) of NICAP’s publication, UFO Investigator.
By 1971, the Air Force’s UFO investigation, Project Blue Book, had been shut down following a report by an Air force funded University of Colorado UFO study group. The group was headed by Dr. Edward U. Condon and was known as “The Condon Committee.”
As regards the subject of UFOs, among the recommendations in the report was that “only so much attention to the subject should be given as the Department of Defense deems to be necessary strictly from a defense point of view.” As for the continuation of Project Blue Book: “It is our impression that the defense function could be performed within the framework established for intelligence and surveillance operations without the continuance of a special unit such as Project Blue Book.” Project Blue Book was closed a little over a year after the October 31, 1968 release of the report.
Around this same time, Donald E. Keyhoe was removed as the director of NICAP and “kicked upstairs” as a member of the board of directors. Keyhoe had accused the Air Force of hiding UFO information from the public and lobbied Congress to hold open hearings on the subject. He was replaced by Stuart Nixon, who was thought by NICAP staff member, Gordon Lore, to be a “CIA plant.”
In an online written discussion, Jan Aldrich, Gordon Lore, Brad Sparks, and Michael Swords debate the ideas, with Fran Ridge as moderator, that NICAP was infiltrated by the Air Force and the CIA and that they moved to “defang” NICAP by getting Keyhoe removed as director. No agreed-upon conclusion was reached but the fact remains that NICAP quickly became a shadow of its former self, following Keyhoe’s departure. The way the Willard case was handled in the UFO Investigator not only reflects this, but it bears a striking resemblance to the way the Air Force handled cases that it seemed to have wanted to just go away.
The case is given three paragraphs on page three of the April 1971 edition of the UFO Investigator. According to the report, multiple sightings were “traced in part to a series of high-altitude atmospheric tests conducted from Elgin Air Force Base in Western Florida.” The tests involved rockets releasing chemicals into the atmosphere that created multi-colored clouds.” What might make one doubt that this explains the sightings in Huron County is that the tests were reported to have been conducted on January 26, a day after the sightings were reported in the papers, and four days after the sightings were said to have occurred.