by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear
In last week’s blog, we looked at a highly strange report out of Ohio that involved UFOs, Bigfoot-type creatures, and “black forms,” all of which reportedly besieged the family of “Robert S.” in Ohio during the months of June and July in 1981. The principal investigator was Dennis Pilichis, who self-published a booklet in 1982 titled, Night Siege: The Northern Ohio UFO-Creature Invasion. The witnesses, Robert S. and his sons, reportedly shot at “black forms” and hairy creatures with glowing red eyes, and Pilichis wrote that he saw a ladder leaning up against the house and shotgun shells littering the yard when he arrived, and upon investigation, found strange, three-toed footprints. This week, we’ll look at Pilichis’s claim that he witnessed a siege from the roof first-hand, along with investigators who were assisting him, and we’ll share some thoughts on the validity of the case from the researchers involved in the making of the Small Town Monsters Mysteries and Monsters episode, “Sasquatch Night Siege.”
Under the heading “The Encounters of July 6th and 7th 1981,” Pilichis says that “Willard McIntyre of the MARCEN Group of Maryland” made plans to visit him on his way to Mt. St. Helens to investigate Bigfoot reports. According to Pilichis, McIntyre arrived, and Pilichis briefed him on the events in his area of Rome, Ohio. He adds that James Carnes of Mecca, Ohio, stopped by as well, and they “all jumped in the car” and went to Robert S.’s home.
Pilichis describes finding that Robert had put up a barbwire fence around the front of his house and yard to protect his family from “some sort of large creature, a black form” that had walked up to “the window on the porch.” Pilichis notes there were 18- inch, five-toed impressions found in the yard, the driveway, and in front of the window. In addition to all this, Robert is said to have told Pilichis that “the forms had come back,” and Pilichis says that three-toed prints were found in the area as well as “big hoofmarks of some sort” that couldn’t be identified as coming from anything “earthly.”
An unusual discovery Pilichis describes is a set of five-toed footprints in four-feet- high grass where the grass was swirled around them “in a clockwise direction.” According to him, all of the above was documented and photographed on 35 mm film, though he doesn’t include any photos of the footprints with the swirled grass around them. He says that after “more taped interviews were taken” Carnes went home, and he, Pilichis, and McIntyre “decided to come back and spend the night.”
Pilichis says that when they arrived late in the day, the family was loading their guns getting ready for another night on the roof. According to him, one of the family members said they saw glowing red eyes in the wood line behind the house and he says that he, McIntyre, and two family members went out there. He explains that he “could not, first off, see many of the forms moving on the woodline [sic]”and attributes this to his “night vision abilities.” He points out that the family members could probably see better at night than he could as they “were expert hunters.”
Pilichis describes “an intense experience while out on the woodline [sic],” where “a glowing form” stepped out of the woods on the other side of a field, and three family members shot at it, hit it, and it seemed to fall into the high grass. He says they went to look and saw the grass was “smashed down” with a path leading away “as if something had dragged it’s [sic] self away into the woods.”
Pilichis says he and McIntyre threw rocks into the woods to see if they might hear something run away or see something come out after them and that “a rock came flying out of the woods” and landed by the family members 15 feet behind them. He then describes multiple instances of seeing glowing eyes and a form with a white glow.
According to Pilichis, the best sighting they had that night started with “three sets of glowing red eyes” around a dead tree. Pilichis describes a 12-feet-tall, black-haired creature stepping out and standing to the left of the tree and says he caught it in his flashlight beam, and it cast a shadow on the tree trunk. He says “everyone fired at it” and that the creature turned sideways “with a strange sort of motion,” walked out of the beam of light, and seemed unaffected by the shooting.
More encounters and shootings are described, including one on August 21st that reportedly involved Pilichis, McIntyre, and Larry Peters, a new addition to the investigation. There is also an account of a trap being set using live rabbits with a capsule of cyanide inside each of them (Pilichis doesn’t explain what getting the capsules “inside” entailed) and a tape loop of rabbits screaming. Pilichis reports that one rabbit was gone, and five-toed, 18-inch, “bigfoot-type” prints were found.
While Pilichis’s account is highly strange and dramatic, the fact that he presents what he claims are transcribed police reports, and has so many named witnesses, begs for some follow-up research, as 1981 was recent enough that it would be highly likely the witnesses would still be alive.
Supporting the story are transcripts of newspaper articles from the period from the Orwell, Ohio, Valley News presented on the website, Sasquatch Chronicles under the heading, “Strange Beast Roams in Rome, Ohio.” The first article is from the July 1, 1981, edition with the same headline as the heading of the posting, and describes “a Rome family” reporting that it shot a 7 to 9-feet-tall “black animal” that had been showing up repeatedly since the previous Wednesday. According to the article, sheriff deputies weren’t able to find the animal but did find footprints. The family is reported to have said that since the creature first showed up, “four ducks and some chickens have disappeared.”
The article in the July 8, 1981, Valley News headlined, “Rome’s Strange Beast: Is it Fact or Fantasy?” reports that “at least three area residents spotted what they believe is a nine-foot tall animal, which walks on its hind legs Tuesday night in the same area where sheriff’s deputies found large footprints a week ago.”
The last article is from the July 15, 1981, Valley News headlined “Rome’s Bigfoot: Fact or Fantasy?” and the source of the information is Pilichis. The account here contains many of the same elements as the account in Night Siege presented in chronological order with dates.
In the Small Town Monsters Mysteries and Monsters episode, “Sasquatch Night Siege,” the host, Eli Watson, provides background on how he came to know about this story through Andy Matzke (whom he met when both were the youngest Small Town Monsters film crew members), and how Matzke went about trying to verify the story. Matzke talks about how he went to Rome, Ohio, and how he sought to find people and organizations mentioned in Pilichis’s booklet.
Matzke’s father, Mark Matzke, a regular narrator for Small Town Monsters productions who passed his interest in the case down to his son, provides commentary and speculation throughout. The question of why Pilichis never followed up on the case in the over forty years before his death is raised by Watson, and Mark Matzke speculates that it was because Pilichis discovered it was a hoax and stayed quiet so he didn’t look like a fool. Supporting this is some background on Willard McIntyre.
McIntyre is identified by Andy Matzke (at around one hour in) as the person who presented a photo of what he claimed was a burned alien body (it was dubbed “The Tomato Man”) that was identified as an Air Force pilot by Ron Schaffner (who wrote about it in the article “The Tomato Man Revisited”) and investigators from the Ohio UFO Investigators League who noted not only elements of the uniform, but electrical wires and the frame of a pair of aviator glasses in the picture.
Matzke describes coming upon an article by Schaffner in which he wrote that during personal contact with McIntyre, McIntyre said that Pilichis believed everything he was told and would be easy to hoax, and that he, McIntyre, was related to one of the witnesses. Matzke presents the argument that the whole episode was a hoax perpetrated on Pilichis by McIntyre with the cooperation of the witnesses who possibly shot blanks.