The Norwood Searchlight Disc Sightings

In 1938 Rev. Gregory Miller became pastor of Saints Peter and Paul Catholic Church in Norwood, Ohio, a small city surrounded by Cincinnati. He bought an army-surplus searchlight rated at 8 million candlepower. T/Sgt. Donald R. Berger, assigned to the University of Cincinnati ROTC, ran it. Berger kept a log.

Friday, August 19, 1949. The first night of the parish "Jitney Carnival". Around 8:15 pm, with the beam close to vertical, Berger caught something. "The object was stationary, appearing as glowing disc," he wrote. Then the strange part. "When I moved the searchlight away, the object continued to glow."

He put it 4 to 5 miles off. Hundreds of people saw it. At dawn a Weather Bureau official saw two objects holding still in a 25 to 32 mph wind. "They looked like two weather ceiling balloons but they weren't moving," he told the Cincinnati Post.

It kept coming back. On September 11, over St. Gertrude Church in Madeira, Berger logged it at 15,000 to 20,000 ft. "The object disappeared within a few seconds, traveling straight up."

October 23, 1949. About 50 witnesses. Around 10 pm, two groups of about five triangular objects seemed to come out of the disc, travel down the beam and leave it. Thirty minutes later it happened again. Miller and his brother, Rev. Cletus Miller, compared them to "the apex of Indian arrow heads". Sgt. Leo Davidson of the Norwood Police filmed it in 16 mm. "They were visibly the size of pinheads but they didn't have the intensity to register clearly on the film."

Repeat witness William R. Winkler watched through a telescope and drew sketches. "It's not a flying saucer. Maybe it's a base for flying saucers." Mayor R. Ed Tepe later described a solid round body with ribbing that was "very discernible". On December 20 physicist Dr. Dare A. Wells and astronomer Prof. Paul Herget were present, and a diameter of about 10,000 ft was later attributed to Wells. The last logged night was March 10, 1950.

On August 22 a report went to the Ninth Air Force and on to Project Grudge at Wright-Patterson. Witnesses kept phoning the base. An ATIC agent attended on October 24. Two AFOSI agents came on December 20. Three days later Special Agent Harris L. Stewart closed the case. In the declassified copy, a University of Cincinnati physics professor blames light refracting off high clouds.

On the first night the Albee Theater downtown was also running a searchlight, and a local paper said callers were seeing beams "bouncing off of clouds". Wells told the Post: "In my opinion it's an optical illusion." Herget told the paper: "It's not a fake. I believe it may be caused by the illumination of gas in the atmosphere." Reporter Leo Hirtl suspected geese or other birds.

Ufologists answered that cloud cannot explain an object holding one place for months, or the smaller objects. Miller gave his material to Leonard H. Stringfield in 1954, and NICAP later listed the case among its photographic cases. Richard Haines called the explanations "mostly ludicrous". Ray Stanford claims the beam bends toward the object. Davidson's film was shown privately at WCPO in 1952. It has been lost ever since.