The Lumberton UFO Wave and the Pembroke Soybean Field Landing

April 1975. Robeson County, North Carolina. A violent thunderstorm had just swept through the southeast of the state. Between 3 and 9 April, reports came in from Robeson, Hoke, Sampson, Bladen, Pitt and Columbus counties, centred on Lumberton. NICAP counts more than 29 separate sightings and close encounters, while the Center for UFO Studies put the number of law enforcement witnesses above thirty.

About 1:45 in the morning. Lumberton patrolmen P.H. Atkinson and Neil McCormick, with a third witness named Stanton, saw a light near the water tower behind Lumberton High School. Atkinson took it for a helicopter. Then the light moved across the sky in a wide arc. The officers drove toward Fayetteville Road for a closer look. The object abruptly vanished. "It just went out," Atkinson said. All three described a V-shaped object with red, blue and clear lights.

Across the county lines, it kept appearing. At 2:05, Hoke County deputies pursued a delta-shaped object flying northeast toward Sampson County. At 2:20, near Roseboro, a silent object with a searchlight passed over Highway 55 at about 200 feet, lighting up the pecan trees below. At 3:30, an Elizabethtown officer chased an object along Highway 701 until it vanished into cloud cover.

Late that evening it returned. In Grimesland, Officer Godley watched a disc-shaped object with red, blue and white lights zigzag through the sky. At 11:47 pm, Deputy Lewis pursued a V-shaped craft flying northeast toward Red Springs.

Sunday afternoon, 6 April. A soybean field off Philadelphus Road, just north of the Pembroke town line. Seven witnesses, most of them from the Strickland family, saw something land in the newly ploughed ground near their home. They described five large, triangular metallic objects. Some said they flew in formation. Others saw chrome-like attachments connecting them. A young boy said it kicked up a cloud of dust as high as a house.

It stayed only a few minutes. Then it lifted off and disappeared into the sky. Left behind were circular impressions and a strange blue-gray ash. The plants around them were unharmed and unburnt.

Three nights later, at 2:30 am on 9 April, a delta-shaped object hovered over a house three miles south of Lumberton. The power failed completely. It came back when the object left toward the east.

The Center for UFO Studies, J. Allen Hynek's organisation, led the inquiry. Jennie Zeidman, once a secretary on Project Blue Book, wrote The Lumberton Report, drawing together interviews, timelines, maps and news coverage. Ronn Thompson, a dispatcher for the Robeson County Sheriff's Department, helped coordinate the work. Journalist Lee Speigel travelled to Lumberton and said he saw what appeared to be the same unusual craft.

Investigators weighed helicopters, aircraft and astronomical objects. None fully accounted for the silence, the low hovering or the searchlights. No hoax allegation has surfaced, and no analysis of the ash has been reported. Nearly fifty years on, the case remains unresolved.

David Marler's Triangular UFOs presents Lumberton as the first well-documented wave of triangular UFO reports in the United States. One later account claims news reports from the area inspired early sequences of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, though no primary support for that link has been found.