At 3:30 A.M. on November 2, just west of the town of Canadian, Texas, military and civilian witnesses reported a red and white submarine-shaped object at ground level, two or three times as long as a car and about ten feet high. A figure and possibly a white flag were near it; when a car stopped nearby, the object flashed a light, and the headlights failed.36
The best-known sighting of the wave, however, occurred on the night of November 2, in Levelland, Texas. Pedro Saucedo and passenger Joe Salav were driving a truck along Highway 116 toward Levelland. An immense, glowing object swept down over their truck and landed on the highway. Their engine died, and they heard faint clanking or hammering, as well as what sounded like unintelligible voices. The object itself was quite large: about two hundred feet long and dirigible-shaped. After three minutes on the ground, it rose swiftly and noiselessly, glowing brilliant red, and flew away. Levelland was buzzing with UFO reports all night. Sheriff Weir Clem and his deputy, Pat McCulloch, reported the Saucedo-Salav incident to the air force and believed that they saw the same or a similar object a short time later as they investigated another UFO report, their fourth that night. Other reports from Levelland also described a low-flying object, over two hundred feet long, equipped with a bright light, and which interfered with car engines. In some cases, people claimed the object landed on the road.37
Later that night, in White Sands, New Mexico, two men on army patrol in a jeep saw a bright, controlled object about 150 feet above the ground near the site of the first atomic bomb explosion. The object descended to ground level after about three minutes and landed a few miles away at the northern end of the testing grounds.38
After Levelland, the deluge. In Elmwood Park, Illinois, at 3:15 A.M. on November 4, two police officers and a third man were looking for the cause of a headlight failure. At that moment, a luminous object descended about two hundred feet from them. The car headlights functioned properly again, and they drove toward the object but had to stop at a cemetery wall. They turned off all lights and watched the object for two more minutes. In Alamogordo, New Mexico, later that day, White Sands engineer James Stokes watched an elliptical UFO swoop over the mountains as his car stalled. Stokes told reporters the object “was at least five hundred feet long. As it passed over, I felt a wave of heat.” He estimated its speed at between 1,500 and 2,500 mph. Because of Stokes’s training and his position, the story circulated widely.39
The wave continued on the fifth. In addition to the many sightings reported by civilians, one involved the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Sebago. The ship was in the Gulf of Mexico when it tracked an object on radar reaching 1,000 mph at one point and which stopped in midair. Four crew members saw the object visually as a bright, glowing, circular craft. Before the Pentagon expressed awareness of the incident, the story made the press.40
Sightings were even stranger the next day, and a few included claims of seeing human-looking occupants of UFO craft. Late that night in Montville, Ohio, a twenty-eight-year-old plasterer named Olden Moore was driving home when he saw an object that looked like a bright meteor split into two pieces, one of which went straight up. The other became larger while its color changed from bright white to blue-green. It hovered about two hundred feet above a field and landed with a soft whirring sound, perhaps five hundred feet away. Moore watched cautiously for fifteen minutes, then approached. What he saw was unforgettable. The object was shaped like “a covered dish” and fairly large: about fifty feet in diameter, fifteen feet high, with a cone on top about ten feet high. It pulsated slowly, and a haze surrounded it. Moore reported his flying saucer sighting to the sheriff the next morning, and a civil defense director investigated the site. He found high levels of radioactivity, two perfectly formed deep holes six inches in diameter, and unusual footprints that “came from nowhere and went nowhere.” In the investigator’s opinion, “a foreign object landed in that field.”
