A Helicopter Crew Encounters a UFO

by Charles Lear

As one looks into UFO history, there are cases that turn up again and again in books, blogs, magazines, newspapers, and documentaries. These are the “classic cases” and they’re classics because they still intrigue those who come across them. A case known as the “Coyne Incident” is one of those, and it has all the elements that make a good case: multiple credible witnesses, an official report, extensive investigation, and contemporary news coverage.

According to the report, on October 18, 1973, four men with the U.S. Army Reserve took off from Port Columbus, Ohio, in a UH-1H helicopter at around 10:30 p.m. headed for Cleveland Hopkins airport. In command and at the controls in the right front seat was 36-year-old Capt. Lawrence J. Coyne. At the controls in the left front seat was 26-year-old 1st Lt. Arrigo Jezzi. Sitting behind them were 35-year-old Sergeant John Healey and 23-year-old Sergeant Robert Yanacsek. They were flying at an altitude of 2500 feet above sea level, 1300 feet above the ground over farmland with an elevation of 1200 feet. It was a clear night lit by a quarter moon.

At around 11:00 p.m., they were over Charles Mill Lake near Mansfield, Ohio, when Healy spotted a red light to the west moving south. Shortly thereafter, Yanacsek spotted a red light on the southeast horizon that he thought might be a tower beacon or airplane wing light. Then the light turned and moved rapidly towards the helicopter.

Worried about an impact, Coyne made a powered descent of 500 feet per minute and radioed the National Guard tower in Mansfield to find out if they had an aircraft in the area. After getting an initial response, radio contact was lost.

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Injured by the UFO: Part 2

by Charles Lear

Starting in the 1960’s, UFOs began to interact with witnesses in a most unpleasant manner. In part one of this series, we looked at cases where people were injured by UFOs, specifically by being burned. One case involved an eight-year-old boy in Hobbs, New Mexico in 1964. This week we’ll look at another episode from 1968 that has a lot of similarities. Two other cases will be examined as well. One comes from New York, and the other is a famous case from Canada. All are unexplained and may make one think twice before approaching anything unusual floating in the sky.

The first case comes from a report in the May-June 1966 APRO Bulletin. On April 24, 1966, in Fleming, New York, 45-year-old Viola Smartwood was in the passenger seat, riding in a car with her husband. A glowing ball appeared out of the rain and hovered close by. They heard a “loud snap,” and a shock went through Mrs. Smartwood’s right side. She was paralyzed on that side and was taken to the hospital where she slowly regained motor control. As it was raining, ball lightning seems like a plausible explanation. The trouble is, it has not been scientifically confirmed that ball lightning actually exists, despite hundreds of years of reports.

Next up is a well-covered classic, but it’s interesting to consider it within this larger context. On May 20, 1967, a celebrated incident occurred near Falcon Lake in Manitoba, Canada. Stefan Michalak was an amateur geologist and was prospecting in the area when he sighted two disc-shaped craft descending in the southwest. He described them as looking like they had been milled out of a solid piece of steel. As he watched, one of the discs stopped and hovered 15 feet above him. The other one ascended and moved away towards the southwest changing colors from red to orange to grey until it disappeared from sight. In the meantime, the remaining object landed about 160 feet away from him and was also changing colors from red to iridescent steel. Michalek got out a pad of paper and sketched the object while looking at it for nearly 30 minutes. He described it as being 40 feet in diameter and 10 feet thick.

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‘Apol’ and Princess Moon Owl of the UFO

by Charles Lear

The 1975 book by John Keel, “The Mothman Prophecies,” is a complex book. The book’s through line centers on events in Point Pleasant, West Virginia from Nov. 15, 1966 to Dec. 15, 1967.  These involved UFOs, sightings of a winged humanoid with glowing red eyes dubbed “The Mothman” and the collapse of the Silver Bridge, which spanned the Ohio River. But, the book is about so much more than that. It can be read several times and, depending on the reader’s perspective, be a completely different experience each time. It contains contactee stories, abductee stories, MiB encounters, Grinning Man encounters, a nighttime bedroom invader in a checkered jacket, strange metallic voices on the telephone, paranoia, poltergeists and prophecies. The reader can dive in repeatedly and come up with a tale that is interesting enough on its own to warrant further research. The tale involving Jaye P. Paro, Apol and Princess Moon Owl is one of those.

John Keel was a New York City resident and freelance writer who traveled the world looking for stories. During the period covered in “The Mothman Prophecies,” he was dividing his time, investigating strange events in both Point Pleasant and Long Island. The Long Island tale begins in the book with Keel’s investigation of reports of strange visitors by residents living on Mount Misery. Mount Misery is the highest point on Long Island at 400 ft and, put simply, is a big pile of gravel left behind by the last glacier that stopped by around 20,000 years ago. One resident there told of being visited by four men, three of whom looked “like Indians.” They politely told her that her land belonged to their tribe and they meant to reclaim it. She was “frightened” by their feet.  They had no car and would have had to walk through mud to get to her house and yet they had none on their shoes. Keel was running into many similar stories of people who didn’t seem to quite fit in. He was becoming convinced that the people being described were extraterrestrials from another planet, or ultraterrestrials from another dimension.
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