Adams County deputies' sighting at West Union, Ohio

October 1973. Ohio was in the middle of a wave. Franklin County deputies were taking 30 to 40 reports a night, and in neighbouring Brown County residents between New Hope and Ripley described a flame colored ball with red and green lights hovering just above the tree tops. West Union, seat of Adams County, sat quietly near the Ohio River. In 1970 it was home to 1,951 people.

It was about 1:14 a.m. on Wednesday, October 17. Deputies Jerry Blanton and Tony Crawford were driving north on SR 41 into West Union. As they approached the light at SR 125, they saw it. The object was "just hanging about 200 feet above the ground" in the vicinity of Chaperal Road.

Blanton could not make out a body. Only the lights. Bright, pulsating red, green, blue and white. Their brilliance "seemed to keep them in a mesmerized state." He put its diameter at "1 1/2 times the wingspan of a small plane."

Then it moved. Its movements, the officers said, were jerky. "It would then zig then zag and move in a very tight circle." While they sat transfixed by the object, the two deputies were in radio contact with the jail.

West Union policeman Danny Davis heard the radio traffic and went to the jail. Blanton and Crawford arrived there too, and the three of them saw the object. Then Deputy Clyde Fields came in and was asked if he had seen anything unusual. "Fields at first wouldn't admit anything. Later, when the trio had related the story, he confirmed the sighting."

The men went back outside. The object had moved from its original location to a southwest position, between SR 41 and SR 125. All four, standing together, saw it. The next day the People's Defender carried the story on its front page. Four county law officers, it said, "definitely saw something early Wednesday morning they cannot identify."

They were not alone. The same article reported that Highland County Unit No. 80, with a game warden aboard, placed an object "just above tree top level." Two women came into the Hillsboro Police Station "in a high state of shock." Reports also came from the Ross County Sheriff's Department, the Chief of Police at Greenfield and Scioto County. The paper gave little detail on any of them.

No one in the article offered an explanation, and no hoax has ever been alleged against the West Union officers. Project Blue Book had closed in 1969, and no official file on the case is known. Officials at Wright-Patterson AFB classed the Dayton and Cincinnati sightings as "unofficial" and said none were detected on radar. In Indiana, children were blamed for plastic trashbags lifted by tiny lighted candles. L. J. Lorenzen of APRO put the reports down to "Americans' needs for diversions."

Later writers have pointed to Operation Nickel Grass, the C-141 cargo flights of the Yom Kippur War airlift, and to pranksters. None of these has been tied to West Union.

The case survives almost entirely through a single front page, preserved in Patrick Gross's archive of UFO press clippings. It belongs to the same October 1973 wave remembered for Pascagoula, Mississippi. Four officers. One radio channel. And a set of lights that never explained themselves.