The Pine Deputies' Chase: Five Orange-Red Objects in the Louisiana Piney Woods

October 1973. The American South was in the grip of a UFO flap. On 11 October, Hickson and Parker had made their abduction claim at Pascagoula, Mississippi, and the story was everywhere. Five days later, it was Louisiana's turn. Pine is an unincorporated community in Washington Parish, between Franklinton, the parish seat, and Bogalusa. Pine forest on every side.

Late on Monday night, 15 October 1973, several deputies of the Washington Parish Sheriff's Department saw five orange-reddish objects. The press would call them "ships." The deputies gave chase for about 12 miles through what UPI called "the Louisiana piney woods," into the early hours of Tuesday. "Our deputies spotted five of them, and a bunch of witnesses saw them too," Deputy Michael Moore said.

Then came the moment that made the headlines. "One of our deputies was scared pretty bad. He turned on his red lights, and they came down at his patrol car. He turned them off and they just vanished like in a cloud."

Moore described the pattern. The ships would "come right down at you and then vanish above the treetops." One officer tried to take pictures.

UPI ran the story on Tuesday, 16 October. The Crescent-News in Defiance, Ohio, printed it as "UFO 'ATTACKS' CRUISER," while The Cincinnati Post included a paragraph in its front-page story "Ohio Countryside swarms with UFOs." The same dispatch carried a second sighting from that night near Slidell, over Lake Pontchartrain. Lloyd Mercier saw an object he put at 15 or 20 feet in diameter and said, "All I could see was a red glow." His verdict: "It was no moon and it was no balloon, and it was no ship."

Decades later, Richard H. Hall's compilation The UFO Evidence, Volume II offered a fuller picture, quoted in the NICAP chronology for 1973. "Sheriffs saw and chased pulsating orange objects that alternately hovered, swinging like pendulum, darted around at high speed." Those details are not in the surviving wire copy. Where Hall found them is not known.

No official investigation is on record. Project Blue Book had closed at the end of 1969. No sheriff's office report has been published. No deputy's own statement has surfaced, and no photograph from the officer with the camera has ever appeared.

The cited sources offer no case-specific explanation. Some possibilities can be raised, but none have been tested. Mars was close to its 25 October 1973 opposition and shone as a bright orange-red point; seen through trees from a moving car, a single bright light can seem to follow, swing or dart. That could fit the pendulum motion, but one planet does not easily account for five objects coming down at a patrol car. Aircraft lights or flares would need local records to check, and with Pascagoula in every paper, people may have been primed to watch the sky.

The Pine chase survives on one wire story and one line in a compilation. Even the geography is shaky. UPI placed Pine "150 miles northwest of similar sightings at Pascagoula, Miss.," a figure that looks overstated. Yet it sits in a cluster of Louisiana reports that month, from Crowley and Powhatan to the amber lights over Lake D'Arbonne. The deputies' names, the photographs and the local newspaper accounts are still missing.