Beauford E. Parham's Giant Spinning Top, Northeast Georgia, 1964

Summer 1964. Beauford E. Parham, a businessman from the Wellford, South Carolina area, was heading home after a business trip to Atlanta. The road took him through Franklin County in northeast Georgia, on the highway between Carnesville and Lavonia. It was late. There was not a cloud in the sky.

Late on the evening of June 29, 1964. Parham spotted a very bright light in the sky, coming directly toward his car. In one later account he took it for a meteor, falling at him at a 45° angle. He thought he was gone.

The next instant it was directly in front of his headlights, "spinning like a giant top." The top part turned clockwise. The bottom part turned counterclockwise. It was big enough to hold a man, about 6 ft tall and 8 ft wide. Amber. Small portholes on the bottom showed what looked like flames. A tower-like projection rose from the top, and vane-like shapes lined the rim. It made a hissing sound "like a million snakes." It smelled like embalming fluid.

Parham was doing 65 mph. The object held about five feet ahead of the car and a foot or two above the road. It stayed there for at least a mile, never touching the car. It vanished in a flash, then came back. Three times it came at or over the car. On the third pass the motor began to miss, and Parham stopped. His arms were beginning to burn. Then the object went up over the top of the car, left a strong odour behind, and disappeared in a split second.

Parham drove on to Lavonia, then to Anderson, South Carolina, to report to FAA staff and reporters. The car told its own story. Oily marks survived repeated cleanings. The hood was warped and the paint bubbled. The radiator had been "eaten away" and the water hose was collapsing. According to Charles Lear, FAA staff Albert Myrick and Dean Carpenter checked the car and found it radioactive, but did not say to what degree.

NICAP adviser Dan Sheridan, a former Marine Corps pilot, interviewed Parham and found him "a very sober individual." Reporter T. F. Acker called him "intelligent, sincere and sober." Dr. Julian G. Kirchick of NICAP's medical panel said a blood count "would be valuable depending upon the dosage received." Project Blue Book logged the case under the wrong date, June 28, and evaluated it as ball lightning.

Parham rejected the label. "Lightning would not rotate at top and bottom as this object did," he said. Ball lightning, he added, "could not have followed my car at least two miles." NICAP answered the Air Force with material from Westinghouse Research Laboratories, which put typical ball lightning at 10 to 20 cm across, lasting seconds to minutes. Dr. James E. McDonald questioned whether "any plasmoids of that type can be naturally generated in absence of intense electrical storms." No hoax claim has ever surfaced.

The case opened Strange Effects From UFOs, the 1969 NICAP report by Gordon Lore and Donald Keyhoe. Jacques Vallée, Frank Edwards and Brad Steiger all wrote it up. For researchers it remains a textbook close encounter of the second kind: one witness, one car, and a trail of physical effects. Parham died a year and a half later, aged 49, of a blood clot, according to a woman identifying herself as his daughter. No source links his death to that night on the Georgia highway.