Richmond-Henrico Turnpike Police Chase, Patrolman William L. Stevens Jr. (1966)

1966 was a year of police chases. That April, deputies Dale Spaur and Wilbur "Barney" Neff pursued an object for 86 miles from Portage County, Ohio, into Pennsylvania. Two months later, the story came to Virginia.

Friday, June 24, 1966. About 3:30 a.m. William L. Stevens Jr., a Richmond city patrolman, was on night patrol alone. Near the service entrance to the fairgrounds, he saw an object hovering about 200 feet over the Richmond-Henrico Turnpike. It was "shrouded in mist, encircled with lights and shaped like a blimp." He turned his spotlight on it. It "was in its own cloud like a fog or a mist." It "was shaped exactly like a dirigible, but it didn't have a gondola or anything under it." A dull, gray ship. 100, maybe 200 feet long and 35 feet high.

Stevens radioed his dispatcher and asked "to notify Byrd Field and get radar on." Then the object moved off. It followed the road at treetop level. He followed beneath it.

"I look down at my speedometer. I'm running 50, it's running 50. I'm running 60, it's running 60. So, we kept it up. It was just like it wanted me to follow him."

The chase ran north and east for nearly five miles, through the intersection of Meadowbridge Road and Shady Grove Road. "I came through the intersection about 100 miles an hour and by the grace of God nothing was coming." Beyond it lay a cemetery. There, the object went "from a hundred miles an hour to thou . . . well, it had to be thousands of miles an hour. In seconds, it was out of sight." Byrd Field radar, by one account, picked up nothing.

About 40 minutes later, separate police witnesses observed a UFO in the same general area. Two Henrico County officers, speaking to reporters anonymously, described a light a few miles away that "moved through the sky, stopped, moved again and frequently changed directions."

Stevens was "taken off the street and assigned to police lockup." He saw it as a demotion. An Air Force representative came to see him. NICAP questioned him and reported the case in its U.F.O. Investigator that summer. In 1977 the Richmond Times-Dispatch ran Bob Lindsey's story under a blunt headline: "UFO Sighting Changed Stevens' Life." Looking back, Stevens said: "I often stop and wonder if you're better off when you see something like that, to keep your mouth shut."

The versions differ. NICAP described an "elliptical object" with lights "alternately yellow and green." Donald A. Johnson's compilation gives 100 feet long and 30 feet thick, white and greenish yellow lights, and a departure in a "high speed vertical climb." In that account, Stevens said, "It seemed to be playing with me." No hoax claim has surfaced, and no explanation was ever published. In the Portage County chase, Project Blue Book's Hector Quintanilla blamed Venus. Nothing similar appeared for Richmond. The UNICAT database lists the case, citing physicist James E. McDonald. Whether a Blue Book file exists remains unconfirmed.

Stevens was not alone that year. In August 1966, road sergeant A. D. "Toby" Mathews saw a UFO hovering over his farm in Varina, Henrico County. He kept it quiet until 1999, when the Times-Dispatch noted that more than half a dozen people, including three Richmond area police officers, had reported similar objects in 1966. The Stevens chase lives on in the books of Richard Hall and Richard F. Haines, and in Charles Lear's 2025 retelling.