The Old Field Point Road Two Objects Sighting and the Cecil County UFO Wave

"Some forty years ago," the Historical Society of Cecil County wrote in 2012, sightings of unidentified flying objects "zooming through the night air or hovering over rural roads kept Cecil County's police agencies busy." The reports started in the late 1960s. They continued into the early 1970s. Callers described "large silent objects with bright lights or flying saucer-like craft darting through the darkness." From the south-west edge of Elkton, Old Field Point Road runs south into the Elk Neck peninsula, toward Old Field Point on the Elk River, near the upper Chesapeake Bay.

One cold January night in 1971. A driver was travelling along Old Field Point Road. Ahead of his car, something was moving. It was "an object without engines, windows, or markings." It glided above the road. It made no sound.

"Suddenly the UFO stopped to hover over the road," the account runs, "as another object met the first one." Two objects, together, over a dark country road. No surviving summary records their shape, size, colour or lights, or how long they stayed. The driver reached a telephone and alerted the Elkton Police Department. The object, the caller said, was "floating silently on the southwest side of town."

Patrolman Marshall Purner answered the complaint. He never located the UFO. A later summary put it more plainly. Purner investigated and found nothing unusual.

The Cecil Whig carried the story on 27 January 1971. The headline read "New Year Ushers in more UFO sightings in Cecil County." A caption printed with the clipping in 2014 says the article recounts UFO sightings "by several people near Oldfield Point Road." A podcast in 2026 spoke of a family and other witnesses who encountered two UFOs while driving into Elkton. The names and the exact date sit in the original article, which has yet to be read in full.

The report was not alone. About two years later, a rash of sightings had people near Bay View abuzz. Rachel Gray called the state police after seeing "big, bright yellow and red lights floating erratically through the darkness." The troopers could not explain them. They phoned Andrews Air Force Base, which checked radar but found nothing to explain the sighting.

The Elkton police blotter, donated to the Historical Society of Cecil County, logs a call on 24 October 1973 at 8:08 p.m. A UFO over 279 and North Street. That was the month of the national flap that followed Pascagoula. An earlier entry, dated 21 January 1970, records another UFO call. It may be a separate report. It may be this one, written down with the wrong year.

The police explained most of the calls in the wave. They found helicopters, weather balloons, "and other logical things." But still, a few remained unexplained. No source says which group the Old Field Point Road case belongs to. Project Blue Book had closed on 17 December 1969, so the Air Force opened no file.

The case lives on through the Historical Society of Cecil County, which told it in 2012 and again in a Cecil Whig column in 2014. In 2026 Preston Dennett opened the Elkton section of his podcast UFOs in Your Hometown with the two-UFO encounter. A road. A patrolman who found nothing. And a newspaper page that still holds the rest of the story.