The Cisco Grove occupant report is just one more example of an opportunity that was missed. Or rather, one that seems to have been missed. What we don't know is who had been out in the forest cleaning the area in which the witness claimed to have seen the alien beings. Just who could have done that?
April 17, 1966: The Close Encounters Chase
At the beginning of the film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a number of police officers, in their cruisers, chase lights across Indiana. It is a funny variation on the cops and robbers movies that always require a car chase. And what is more interesting is that it is based on fact. The chase happened in the early morning hours of Sunday, April 17 in eastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania.
The Air Force would investigate and, of course, find a mundane explanation for the sightings. They would claim that the photographs submitted of the objects were nothing more than processing flaws on the negatives. They would attribute part of the sighting to an artificial satellite. And, they would attribute the rest to that old standby, Venus. On the Project Record Card, there is a handwritten note initialed by J. Allen Hynek. He wrote simply, "Do not agree."
As you read the account, remember how the Air Force explained the sightings. Remember that their investigation consisted of a couple of telephone calls to talk to the deputies involved, Dale Spaur and Wilbur Neff and that no one from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base bothered to visit in person until forced to do so by congressional interest. And, remember that this all took place in Ohio. Yes, Wright-Patterson is at one end of the state and Portage County at the other, almost as far away as possible and still remain in Ohio. But it is in Ohio and at the time the Air Force, by regulation, was supposed to investigate UFO sightings, especially those of a multiple witness nature when the witnesses were police officers.
Portage County Deputy Sheriff Dale F. Spaur was teamed with Wilbur "Barney" Neff, an auxiliary deputy, on the early morning of April 17. They were at the scene of an accident just east of Cleveland where a driver had slammed into a utility pole. They were there at 4:45 a.m., talking to the repairman, and listening as radio traffic between Portage and Summit counties described some strange events. A woman in Akron had called to say that a bright object "as big as a house" had flown over the neighborhood at an amazingly low altitude. No one in any of the police or sheriff's departments took the call seriously, including Spaur and Neff.
Not long after that, having left the accident scene, about three miles from Randolph, they passed an old truck on the side of the road. They pulled in behind it and walked toward it. Spaur glanced over his right shoulder and saw a moving light visible through the trees at the top of a small hill. He pointed it out to Neff, thinking, "That must be the UFO that's been talked about."
The object continued moving toward them, coming from the west, climbed, turned to the right, and flew over the road. It stopped, hovering only fifty to a hundred feet in the air. The object was oval shaped and gave off a brilliant blue-white light that caused Spaur's eyes to water. He told Air Force investigators, "The only shape was the roundness of it, imperfect circle, egg shaped, almost oblong, but not real oblong." Whenever it moved, it tipped toward the direction it was going.
Spaur told the Air Force, "[It] didn't have a red light. No wind. When it came over us it lighted the whole area. The ground was lighted by this object. Like looking at arc welder, blue-white light. The only sound heard was humming sound like a power transformer, no thrust like a jet. No sudden surge of power."
Without saying a word to one another, both deputies broke for the car. Spaur, according to the Air Force file, "We ran back and had a camera. Kept under surveillance till it could be possibly photographed. Those were our instructions after we had called in."
Spaur cautiously drove toward the object. He had a better view of it and thought the craft was about twenty feet thick and about thirty-five to forty-five feet in diameter. The UFO began to drift away from them, climbing to five hundred feet and speeding up. Soon the chase was reaching speeds over eighty miles an hour. Spaur, apparently using his speedometer as a guide told the Air Force officers, "Object was first going eighty to eight-three miles an hour."
Remember, as we discuss, the descriptions that have been given by Spaur. At no point has he suggested a light in the night sky. His is not speaking of a tiny source, but a large one that is lighting the ground as it flies over. Keep that in mind as we find out what the Air Force officers concluded at the end of their telephonic investigation.
They chased the object, using the roads available to them. At one point it crossed the road in front of the patrol car, the light so bright that Spaur told his fellow deputies that he didn't need his headlights. It passed over a construction site near Atwater Center, and illuminated the heavy equipment parked there.
At the Berlin Reservoir in Mahoning County, the object climbed to a thousand feet and crossed the highway once again. Spaur was still on Highway 224, chasing the object at speeds now approaching a hundred miles an hour. Still the object maintained the same distance between the police car and itself.
The chase continued, heading toward Pennsylvania. The UFO, now on the left side of the road, was beginning to pull away. It swung around, to the south, and flew over the road once again.
With the sun rising, Spaur got a better look at the object's structure. He said it had a dome-like top surface, an antenna or "fin-like" device that was about eighteen feet long and about a foot wide at the base, jutting up from the rear-center. He was describing what he'd seen on the craft that was clearly more substantial than a point of light.
Patrolman H. Wayne Huston, listening to the radio traffic, realized that the chase was coming toward him. Using the radio, he conferred with Spaur, and said that he would join him when he got close to East Palestine, Ohio. In a statement made eight days later, he said, "I saw the thing when Dale was about five miles away from me… It was running down Route 14, about eight to nine hundred feet up when it came by. That was the lowest I ever saw it."
Huston told investigators, "As it flew by, I was standing by my cruiser. I watched it go right overhead. It was shaped something like an ice cream cone, with a sort of partly melted down top. I don't know whether the bottom was solid or not. It might have been like a searchlight beam, coming to a point, but it was so bright I would say it was brighter than the sun when it came up… "
He continued, "Spaur and Neff came down the road right after it. I fell in behind them. We were going eighty to eighty-five miles an hour, a couple of times to around a hundred and five miles an hour. At one point at least, I was almost on Spaur's bumper, and we checked with each other what we saw. It was right straight ahead of us, a half to three-fourths of a mile ahead."
He finished his statement. "I am familiar enough with Rochester [Pennsylvania] and I guided him [Spaur] because I couldn't pass him in Bridgewater to lead him. At Brady's Run Park, a car started to come out, hit the traffic light treadle, and some trucks were there. We had to slow down and lost sight of it. We came on down Route 51. Just after we came out of the railroad underpass in Bridgewater, coming out of Fallston, we spotted it again, and then in front of them again as we turned to Rochester."