Ennepetal Police Patrol Sighting (Nösler and Roschlaub), 1976

Ennepetal lies in the Ennepe-Ruhr-Kreis, in North Rhine-Westphalia. On its southern edge sits Schweflinghausen, a hamlet at 370 metres between the Heilenbecke and Ennepe valleys, bordering Breckerfeld. Hilly, wooded country. Saturday, 12 June 1976, about 01:45. Two patrol officers, Hans-Werner Nösler and Ulrich Roschlaub, were driving Schweflinghauser Straße, coming from the Burg district towards Schweflinghausen.

To the right of the car, about 200 to 300 metres away, the object came down. In their report the officers wrote that it was fitted with a strongly shining rotating light. The halo of light covered 15 to 20 square metres, and the object made no sound. "We had the impression that it had landed," they wrote. The hilly ground kept them from being sure.

After about one or two minutes it rose again. It flew at high speed towards Breckerfeld-Delle and stopped above a wooded hill. There it hovered while the officers radioed for backup. About twenty minutes later, bright searchlights suddenly came on beneath the object, pointing in all directions. The object moved away at high speed towards Ennepetal-Gevelsberg.

Only one responder arrived in time. Jürgen Hoppmann, a helper with the Johanniter-Unfallhilfe, saw the UFO still hovering. The other units came too late.

The officers filed a written report. On 19 June 1976, BILD ran the headline "Zwei Polizisten sahen UFO". Two police officers saw a UFO. The story drew the GEP, Germany's largest UFO research group, based in Lüdenscheid. It obtained the police report from the NRW Interior Ministry and spoke with Nösler, who described an ellipsoid structure with a flat dome.

A search of the supposed landing site found nothing. The GEP classified the case as a close encounter of the first kind and presented it in its Journal für UFO-Forschung as a UFO in the strict sense. Unexplained.

Then the witnesses fell silent. All of them refused to be questioned again. None returned the GEP questionnaire. No reason was given.

Two ordinary answers surfaced. The Bundesanstalt für Flugsicherung in Düsseldorf reported that clearance had been given for the ascent of a model hot-air balloon, linked to a company party in the area. The balloon was said to have drifted towards Ennepetal. Nösler could hardly imagine mistaking the object for a balloon. The second answer stood in a potato field nearby. A flashing construction-site warning lamp had been put there by the field's owner, reportedly yellow, very intense and meant to keep off wild boar. The officers said they only noticed it after the object had gone, because the object's light was so strong.

CENAP, the sceptical German investigation network, used the case to challenge the GEP's claim that it promoted only good UFO cases. Its verdict: not a real UFO, but rather a misidentified known object. Its page reportedly also compares the domed ellipsoid to the spaceship ORION from the 1966 television series Raumpatrouille, repeated on WDR in 1973. No one has accused the witnesses of inventing anything. The debate is only about what they saw.

The case survives mostly through CENAP's critique. The GEP chose it as the opening episode of its YouTube series "UFO-Akten der GEP". The BILD article and the police report itself have not surfaced online. Two officers, one first-aid helper and twenty minutes of light over a wooded hill. Still argued over.