The Presque Isle Beach Landing and the Gorilla-Shaped Figure

Sunday evening, July 31, 1966. A group from the Jamestown, New York area was at Presque Isle State Park in Erie, Pennsylvania, on Lake Erie. Their car, which belonged to Douglas Tibbetts, was stuck in the sand at Beach 6. With him were Betty Jean Klem, Anita Haifley, her two small children and Gerald LaBelle. Tibbetts and LaBelle reportedly went off to get help.

It began as a star that moved. "It got brighter," Klem said. "It would move fast, then dim. You could see it come down. It was metallic, sort of silvery."

"It landed between two trees. It came straight down. The car vibrated." The Blue Book summary says it came tumbling down from right to left, stopping 5 to 10 feet above the beach before settling heavily some 300 to 400 yards away. Once it was down, a circle of spotlights showed at the top.

Tibbetts described it as cube-shaped, with a tripod array of landing gear. Others remembered a mushroom shape. Klem said it sounded like the noise in a telephone receiver, only louder. Then a beam of light moved along the sand and lit up the woods.

Klem called the dark shape moving toward the car a formless creature. She could make out a head and shoulders. She saw no legs. Later accounts describe a black, featureless humanoid about six feet tall, gorilla shaped, moving slowly and awkwardly. It came within about five feet of the car. In LaBelle's account, it circled the car from a distance, then came close and clawed at it.

Klem sounded the horn frantically. The group screamed. Tibbetts was showing park patrolmen the landing area when the horn began. LaBelle remembered one officer dropping his service pistol in the sand and running on to the car without stopping. The figure sluggishly moved back into the brush, then the craft left.

Police found impressions about 18 inches wide and six to eight inches deep, 300 to 400 yards from the car. Pastor Robin Swope later listed diamond-shaped prints, three impressions in a triangle 11 feet apart, and conical tracks leading toward the car. Erie Police made plaster casts. A radiation test found nothing. Jacques Vallée's Magonia catalogue lists the case as number 784.

Peninsula Patrolmen Ralph E. Clark and Robert Loeb Jr. responded that night. On August 2 the Erie Morning News announced "Air Force Launches Probe of Erie UFO". An officer from Wright-Patterson AFB reportedly visited the site. NICAP members investigated as well, and a UPI wire story carried the creature report around the world. A psychiatrist who interviewed a witness, apparently Klem, found her testimony "seemed to be true and not due to illness or delusion." Project Blue Book filed it as case 10798, with the lights unidentified, the indentations judged unrelated and the "monster" called a probable animal. The park chief rejected the idea that it was a bear.

Later, Kim Faulkner said he had launched a children's hot-air balloon from his home on West 22nd Street around that date. Swope checked the weather records. Southwest winds would have carried a balloon northeast, not toward Beach 6. Even if a balloon explained the lights, it would not explain the marks in the sand.

LaBelle still stood by the story when Swope interviewed him in 2008. The case was featured at MUFON's "Eerie UFO Conference" in 2016 and dramatised by WQLN as "The Visit". Some writers link it to Pennsylvania Bigfoot reports. Erie still calls it unsolved.