The Bogue Inlet Fishermen's Three Red Lights

Bogue Inlet is a gap in the barrier islands of the central North Carolina coast. On one side lies the west end of Bogue Banks and the town of Emerald Isle. On the other lies Bear Island, part of Hammocks Beach State Park. The inlet is the ocean outlet for Swansboro, Cedar Point, Cape Carteret and Emerald Isle, and it is popular with anglers. In September 1966 five men from Goldsboro, an inland town in Wayne County roughly 90 miles from the coast, were there to fish. It was a year of heavy UFO reporting across the United States.

Early Sunday, 25 September 1966. The men were fishing near the inlet. No hour was recorded, and the newspaper never said whether they were on a boat, on the beach or on a pier. Then the lights came. Three of them. Red and large. "They came one at a time, like big, red moons," said Ray Capps, a mechanic at Dan Ward Motor Co.

One by one, they stopped directly above the fishermen. "They stopped right over us and glowed out," Capps said. The phrase allows two readings. The lights may have shone brightly. Or they may have glowed and then gone dark.

Through it all, one detail stood out. "There was no sound."

Capps did the talking, but he was not alone. Harold Hill, Willie Phelps, Charles Miller and Linwood Newsome were with him, and the report says all four also saw the objects. No later interviews with any of them have been found.

On Monday, 26 September 1966, the Goldsboro News-Argus ran a short item headlined "Fishermen Spot UFOs Along Coast." It is the only known record of the case. It does not say how long the lights hovered or how they left. It does not say the men told the Air Force, the Marines, the Coast Guard or the police.

The case is absent from the Project Blue Book list of 1966 unknowns, which records North Carolina cases that year at Salisbury, Burnsville and Vanceboro. It is absent from the NICAP chronology too. A month later Goldsboro made the news again, when people in town, including airmen at Seymour Johnson AFB, reported objects flashing green and red lights. That was a separate event.

No explanation has ever been published. The case was simply never examined.

One lead remains open. Bogue Inlet lies beside the coastal training areas of Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune, with Marine air stations nearby. Parachute illumination flares hang silently and then burn out, which could fit "glowed out." Whether any night training took place that weekend has never been checked. A bright planet or the Moon seen through haze fits less well. The men described three separate lights, each arriving alone and stopping overhead.

The Bogue Inlet lights never reached the books, the documentaries or the popular lists of North Carolina sightings. The clipping survives online in Patrick Gross's press archive, and that is all. Three red moons over the water. Five fishermen watching. And silence.