Bangor Motorist Fires on a UFO: John King, 1966

March 1966. UFOs were front page news across the United States. In Michigan, the "swamp gas" reports of 20 and 21 March had drawn national attention. A wave of sightings was moving east. That spring, the headlines ran from Michigan to Maine.

Bangor, Maine. 11:50 p.m. on 23 March. John King, 22, was driving alone past a stand of elderberry bushes. Something was hovering just off the ground near the road. In his report to NICAP he described a yellowish elliptical object with a textured surface. Blue and white lights were set in its body. They rotated, and they looked like windows. A soft electrical humming came from it.

Then it moved toward him. His car lights dimmed. His radio stopped playing. "I could hear the elderberry bushes scraping as the thing came toward me," he said.

King was frightened. He took a pistol from his car, a .22 caliber according to the Bangor Daily News, and fired four shots. He said he hit it. The object glowed brightly and took off at high speed. It made a "zinging" sound, like the recoil of a spring. It rose quickly and was gone.

King walked into the police station and made a report. He told officers the object was orange, shaped like a deflated football, and that he could hear it scraping across nearby bushes as it passed at low altitude. He was not the only one. Police received two other reports of similar UFOs that night.

24 March. The story ran on the front page of the Bangor Daily News. The paper called Dow Air Force Base, on the west side of the city. An unidentified captain indicated he was not at liberty to either deny nor confirm that he had information related to the sightings. The New York News picked up the story, quoting King's description of a "60-foot-long glowing object."

NICAP took King's report and published it in its newsletter, the U.F.O. Investigator, in the issue for March and April 1966. Its chronology filed the case as Category 2. Its strangeness index summed it up in one line: a landed ellipse with body lights, within 50 feet, humming sound. NICAP also linked a Project Blue Book archive page for the case, but no Air Force conclusion has surfaced. There are no photographs, no radar returns, no bullet damage and no ground marks. No hoax claim has been made. No conventional explanation has been offered.

The accounts differ in small ways. NICAP says yellowish and elliptical. The local paper says orange, like a deflated football. Both may describe the same glowing oval.

The encounter belongs to a remarkable week. On the same day, in Temple, Oklahoma, instructor Eddie Laxson reported a wingless, fish-shaped craft blocking US Highway 70. In New England, it followed the close encounter at Exeter, New Hampshire, in September 1965.

In 2021, Troy R. Bennett reproduced the 1966 front page in a Bangor Daily News piece on Maine as a UFO hotspot, alongside cases such as the Allagash abduction. The clipping survives. The object, and whatever King's bullets struck, does not.