By Charles Lear
When it comes to reporting UFO sightings, it often happens that local police departments are the first organizations witnesses turn to. Many times, the reports to police take place while the UFO is still active in the area and patrol officers are able to respond and verify witness accounts. Famous examples are the 1966 case involving Dale Spaur and his partner, Wilbur “Barney” Neff, who chased a UFO from Portage County, Ohio, all the way into Pennsylvania, and another Ohio case, this time in Trumbull County in 1994, involving multiple officers chasing and observing UFOs. Their radio interactions have been preserved in the form of a recording from the police dispatch that was turned over to researcher Kenny Young. This week, we’ll look at a 1972 case out of Colby, Kansas, that involved multiple police witnesses and multiple UFOs.
There is a file on this case available at ufohistoryfiles.com containing newspaper and magazine articles on sightings reports in the area leading up to and including the Colby reports. Among the clippings is an article by Hayden C. Hewes, who founded the Oklahoma based International UFO Bureau at the age of 13 in 1957 and had a long history in UFOlogy and cryptozoology. Titled “UFOs Over Kansas” and published in the March 1973 issue of Fate magazine, the article contains details of UFO activity starting in Dighton, Kansas, in Late 1971.
According to Hewes, Dighton Police Chief M.R. Shelton said that the first sightings were thought to be military planes checking feedlot runoff using infrared photography and “attracted little interest.” The sightings continued into 1972 and the department started keeping records. They were contacted by Daniel Garcia of IUFOB, who kept in touch until he was able to get out to the area and talk to witnesses, some of whom were police, on August 12 and 13, 1972.
In the article, Shelton is quoted describing what was reported as round and red-orange in color, hovering off the ground about 10 miles west of Dighton. According to Shelton, it seemed to be under intelligent control as it would be stationary and then move away whenever an officer would use their radio to report it. Shelton explained, “Every time we transmit, it moves.”
Another officer, Captain John Banninger confirmed Shelton’s statements with his reports of multiple sightings he’d had where the UFO behaved just as Shelton described. Banninger reported a series of five sightings, two in March on the 22nd and 24th at around 10:15 p.m., and three in July, one on the 5th at an unspecified time, and one each on the 7th and 9th, at 4:45 a.m. According to him, in all but the July 5th sighting, where the UFO took off as soon as he saw it, the UFO took off as soon as he used his radio to report it.
After the UFO went out of sight on July 9th, Banninger radioed the Scott City Police, stationed 24 miles west of Dighton. According to Hewes, Scott City Officer Reginald Ford saw what could have been the same UFO coming from the east. Banninger’s description of what he saw was a “blue-white cast of an iodine quartz light varying to a peach-colored glow.”
While the activity started in the Dighton area, the focus in Hewes’ article and the others in the file is on the sightings in Colby, Kansas in August of 1972, and particularly one by Sergeant Paul Carter and Officer Dennis Brown.
Hewes’ article begins with Gem, Kansas, resident John Caulkins being awaked by his dog, “sometime after midnight” on August 19, 1972, and then calling the Colby police to report that he’d seen “a thing or a couple of things hovering over the horizon.” According to Hewes, they were flashing red and green lights.”
The Paul Carter Sighting From the APRO BulletinAt around 2:07 a.m., Colby Police Sergeant Paul Carter, unaware of Caulkin’s report, spotted an object matching the description given by Caulkin moving from northeast to southwest over Colby. He went after it and followed it for two miles until it stopped. Along the way, he radioed fellow officer Dennis Brown and tried to get a picture of the object with a Poloroid camera. When the object stopped, it was over a plowed field. According to Hewes, Carter saw a huge disc-shaped object 30-35 feet long hovering about 100 yards away.
Carter is quoted as saying, “All the time it was flashing red and green. It resembled a cereal bowl turned upside down and it was about 35 feet wide and 18-20 feet tall. As he watched, the object began to glow with a light so bright he couldn’t look at it. As it got brighter, something white began to drip from it, but Carter didn’t see anything land on the ground. After about eight minutes, around 2:15 a.m., the object “made a whooshing sound” and went straight up. It was out of sight within 3 seconds and Brown arrived just in time to see it take off.
The object then came back and Brown could clearly see what Carter had described. He had an instamatic camera with him and took some pictures. The object then took off again and headed southeast.
According to Hewes, Carter and Brown contacted the police in Oakley, Kansas, 20 miles away, and told them there was a UFO headed towards them. In less than a minute, Oakley Officer Earl Wood Jr. radioed back saying he had seen an object with what appeared to be six lights, “the three to the rear being white and the three to the front being either amber or red and green.” Wood could see it was a circular object and reported that something dripped from it that “disintegrated before it hit the ground.” After hovering for five minutes, at 2:27 a.m., it moved off towards the north until it was out of sight.
As this was happening, the Colby police received reports from local citizens, and Caulkins called again to report that he was seeing “two or three objects making weird noises.” Carter and Brown headed towards Gem to check it out and saw what seemed to be the same UFO with the same multicolored lights. It moved off nine miles to the northeast and Carter and Brown followed it until it stopped and hovered again. By now they were far out of their jurisdiction and stopped their pursuit. They observed it from a distance “for several hours” and also saw “between four and eight objects zipping through the night sky.”
Carter and Brown talked to a Missouri couple who reported that they encountered a bright white light that swept over them as they were driving on I-70. They thought it might have been a plane attempting an emergency landing, but a later check revealed no evidence of a landing in the area.
According to Hewes, Carter spoke to the investigators and reported that the pictures taken by Brown turned out blank and the Poloroid he took only showed something that looked like a car headlight.
Carter spoke freely to the press and wrote a letter to the Salina Journal that was printed in the September 12, 1972 issue. In it, he wrote: “I am not trying to say that there were ‘beings’ in ‘flying saucers’ up there. I am trying to point out that until a person has seen something like this, he cannot possibly explain it.” He described himself as being a “complete non-believer” prior to his sighting.
Charles Lear is the author of The Flying Saucer Investigators.