The Lake Erie Coast Guard "Football" UFO, Eastlake, Ohio

Friday, March 4, 1988. Sheila and Henry Baker were driving home to Eastlake, Ohio, with their three children after dinner. Eastlake sits on Lake Erie, east of Cleveland, beside the CEI coal burning plant. About 12 miles east stands the Perry Nuclear Plant. The moon was bright over the ice on the lake.

Near the waterfront, Sheila Baker noticed something hovering over the lake. The family drove down to the beach. It was a huge, gunmetal gray football-shaped object, rocking end to end like a teeter-totter. Blinding white light streamed from both ends of an object larger than the Goodyear blimp. And it was silent.

The lake was not. The ice cracked like claps of thunder, rumbling and roaring. Then five or six bright yellow triangular objects shot out of the center of the large object and began darting around independently. Henry Baker said they were smaller than a one-seat Cessna. They raced low over the ice, turned at abrupt right angles toward the Perry Nuclear Plant, climbed rapidly and returned, all within several seconds.

Sheila Baker phoned the Eastlake police, who referred her to the Coast Guard. From the Fairport Harbor station came Seaman James Power, towing a Boston Whaler, and Petty Officer John Knaub. They saw it too. Red and blue lights now flashed in sequence along the big object's lower edge. One triangle zoomed straight toward the Coast Guard vehicle, a blur of light, then veered east, straight up.

Over the radio came the call: "Be advised the object appears to be landing on the lake… There are other objects moving around it." The triangles returned to the parent craft as it appeared to land on the ice. Then every light vanished, and the noise from the ice stopped. The sighting had lasted roughly an hour.

The Coast Guard report was plain. It described smaller objects with red, green, white and yellow lights that strobed intermittently and could stop and hover in mid flight. It recorded no engine noises, and ice "cracking and moving abnormal amounts as the object came closer to it." Its verdict: "THE CREWMEMBERS WERE UNABLE TO IDENTIFY ANY OF THE OBJECTS."

MUFON investigators Richard P. Dell'Aquila and Dale B. Wedge took up the case as other witnesses came forward. One, known as T.K., took photographs. Only one turned out, showing the front of a triangle glowing an intense yellow/orange to white. The next night the same witnesses watched triangles again for about 45 minutes. Because of the effects on the ice, MUFON classified the case as a close encounter of the second kind.

On March 7, 1988, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Lake County News-Herald blamed Venus and Jupiter, close together in the sky that week. Air traffic controllers told Fairport Harbor the colours came from "spontaneous gas emissions from the two planets." A later Coast Guard report agreed: "the flashing lights are gases in the atmosphere."

Dell'Aquila pushed back. He doubted that Coast Guard personnel trained in celestial navigation could "so grossly misidentify the planets for several hours." The gas emissions idea has no astronomical basis.

In July 1992 the Plain Dealer returned to the story in Christopher Evans's feature "Space case: The night the coast guard got buzzed." In 2015 the series Close Encounters dramatised the Baker family's night in the episode "Casefile: Lake 'Eerie'." The first Coast Guard report still says what it said that night. The crew could not identify the objects.