At 1,700 feet above the ground, the crew saw the object streak in front of, then above, the helicopter. It stopped dead for about ten seconds, filling the entire windscreen. All four crew members saw it clearly: it looked like a gray cigar with a small dome on top. One member thought he saw windows. The red light was still there, in the front of the object, and there was a white light on the side and green one on the bottom. The green light swung around like a searchlight and shone into the cabin, bathing it in green light. The object then accelerated to the west, soon appearing as nothing more than a white light. It made a sharp turn and moved northwest, where it was lost above Lake Erie.
Meanwhile, the helicopter’s magnetic compass had been spinning at a rate of four revolutions per minute. More seriously, and for no clear reason, the altimeter showed an altitude of 3,500 feet and a climbing ascent of one thousand feet per minute. Yet the stick (for descent) still pointed down. Coyne had not attempted to ascend, but his aircraft climbed to the dangerous altitude of 3,800 feet before he regained control. A few minutes later, radio frequencies returned. A complete inspection the next day found nothing wrong, and the event received a thorough investigation.
By itself, it was an amazing story. It was strengthened, however, by the presence of ground witnesses. A woman, while driving with her four children, claimed to have seen the entire encounter, including the green beam, which she said lit the ground around her.
Philip Klass said the crew misidentified a meteor or fireball and suggested the ground witnesses were lying. Jerome Clark dismissed Klass’s theory as “fantastic,” since none of the testimony was even remotely consistent with it. “By any standard,” wrote Clark, “it is one of the most important UFO events ever recorded.” Agreed.27
To those willing to look at it, the wave of 1973 effectively refuted the conclusions of the Condon Report. Although it had more “high strangeness” cases than most previous waves, they were reported by credible people. As odd as the cases were, they could not easily be dismissed. Of course, committed skeptics such as Condon remained steadfast. On October 21, he debunked the current sightings to the press and declared his own study of UFOs “was a waste of government money.” For the public, however, five years after Condon’s study was supposed to have ended fascination with UFOs, such was not the case. A November 1973 Gallup poll revealed that 51 percent of Americans believed UFOs were “real,” as opposed to 27 percent who thought they were “imaginary.” More startling still, 11 percent claimed to have seen one (the 1966 figure was 5 percent), translating roughly into the astonishing total of
SUMMARY
In 1969, and into the early 1970s, the American national security state was at its most expansive. This belied a losing effort in Southeast Asia. But while the Vietnam front was being lost and domestic dissent remained widespread, the UFO front appeared to be won. Flying saucers were relegated to a remote corner of cold war history as a curiosity in cultural paranoia and mass hysteria.
The UFO phenomenon, however, did not go away after the Condon Report debunked it. Odd, unexplained, and even fantastic events continued to be reported by sober, reliable people. Although the intense media fixation of 1940s or 1960s was no longer the rule in the 1970s, evidence for the reality of UFOs as something extraordinary, and even alien, did not escape the public.
