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Man says 1973 UFO incident turned life upside down. Calvin Parker, Jr., stands in the area where he and fellow Mississippian Charles Hickson were allegedly abducted by aliens on Oct. 11,1973, on the banks of the Pascagoula River in Pascagoula Miss. The incident made headlines, sparked UFO sightings nationwide and became one of the most widely examined cases on record.
The fall of 1973 brought one of the largest waves of UFO sightings in U.S. history.
31 years ago in October, 1973 there were massive sightings of UFOs from over a large part of the United States. All one has to do is to check any newspaper archives to verify this. Besides the local organization (RUFOS) and two national organizations (Mutual UFO Network) and (Center for UFO Studies), I am a member of a state organization that investigates and researches UFOs. It is the Mutual UFO Network of Ohio. A few years ago a project we did was to collect newspaper articles from around the state of Ohio that were during the UFO wave of October, 1973. I have the 133 pages of Ohio newspaper articles if anyone would want to look them over. Just get in contact with me. The locals will remember this time period (October, 1973), as to where Pat Boone visited the Pumpkin Show. The massive UFO sightings also occurred during the Yom Kippur War in the Middle East when Israel was threatened. There was a possibility of World War III at the time.
But 40 years ago this month, and just days before thousands of kids flooded the streets for Halloween, the truth was way stranger than fiction as a UFO wave swept across the Midwest in October of 1973. Even the Ohio governor at the time, John J. Gilligan, had a close encounter with an “amber-colored vertical craft” for 30 minutes as he was driving with his wife. “I saw one the other night, so help me,” said the shaken Gilligan during a press conference that was cited by Walter Cronkite during the national news. “I'm absolutely serious. I saw this. It was not a plane. It was not a bird. It didn't wear a cape. And I really don't know what it was.”
"At 1,700 feet I braced myself for the impact with the other craft," he said. "It was coming from our right side. I was scared. There had been so little time to respond. The thing was terrifically fast." There was no crash. "We looked up and saw it stopped right over us," Coyne said. "It had a big, gray metallic-looking hull about 60 feet long. It was shaped like an airfoil or a streamlined fat cigar. There was a red light on the front. The leading edge glowed red a short distance back from the nose. There was a center dome. A green light at the rear reflected on the hull."
Coyne said the green light swiveled like a spotlight and beamed through the canopy of his craft, bathing the cabin in green light.
"I had made no attempt to pull up," he said. "All controls were set for a 20-degree dive. Yet we had climbed from 1,700 to 3,500 feet with no power in a couple of seconds with no g-forces or other noticeable strains."
My brother, Bill Carver, first noticed the lights in the distant southwestern sky. It was still daylight and the sun was setting. I remember seeing three lights and one of those lights (left of the other objects) may have been a star. My Dad, brother and myself shared the binoculars as we witnessed the middle object perform incredible movements dancing in the sky at incredible laser precision angles and speed. The middle object wasn’t as bright as the other two objects, but the maneuvers were spectacular. We could see red, green and white lights blinking constantly as we were viewing from a kitchen window.
As the object appeared closer to our neighborhood, we went outside to get a better view as the UFO slowly moved northeast towards Mansfield, Ohio. At this time, several of our neighbors came over to our property and witnessed the event.
During this time, I had driven a few blocks from my parent’s house and was driving north on Paul Boulevard. I stopped the car once I noticed how close the UFO was above the tree line over-looking Sunset Park. The chopper was beneath my view. Here in plain view was the UFO, green light on the front, white light and a red light on the rear on a nearly sixty-foot long dark metallic-grey object that had the appearance of a cigar shaped stogie. I sat in my car marveling at its appearance.
Suddenly the UFO shot off towards the northwest and in literally seconds it was the size of a star in the distance. Even faster, the object disappeared from sight. Soon, a small squadron of military jets appeared in the area and then flew away since the UFO had already departed.
Apparent ground witnesses to this event have been found by William E. Jones and Warren Nicholson, independent UFO researchers from Columbus, Ohio.
Mrs. E. C. and four adolescents were driving south from Mansfield to their rural home on October 18, 1973, at approximately 11 P.M., when they were attracted to a single steady bright red light. flying south “at medium altitude.” They watched for perhaps half a minute until it disappeared to the south over the trees.
Two of the children (cousins, both age thirteen) jumped from the car and observed both a helicopter and the object, which they described as “like a blimp,” “as big as a school bus,” “sort of pear shaped.” The object at that point subtended an angle equivalent to “a 100-mm cigarette box held at arm’s length.” The object assumed a hovering position over the helicopter, an estimated 500 feet back from the road and 500 feet above the trees. (The ground elevation at the site is almost exactly 1,000 feet above sea level; thus at the noted 1,700-foot altimeter reading, the helicopter was actually about 650 feet above the trees.) The object’s green light then flared up. “It was like rays coming down,” the witnesses said. The helicopter, the trees, the road, the car – everything turned green.”
According to Hamilton, the Coyne helicopter incident was one of the last things to happen the night of Oct. 18, 1973, which included an atmospheric explosion over Mansfield that was registered by seismographers in St. Louis and a UFO sighting in Sullivan that made the front page of the Ashland Times-Gazette on Oct. 19.
That night, former T-G photographer Chic Knight met two Ashland County Sheriff deputies who described seeing a disc-like object on Township Road 391 about a mile north of County Road 500 while responding to the Sullivan call. The officers stopped and exited their cruiser when they noticed the craft hovering above the trees but said they heard no motor noise coming from it. Then, as they shined a spotlight in its direction, the craft dove toward the deputies before veering off toward Nankin.
]“As far as the vehicle itself, there’s no doubt in our minds what it looked like. A craft that can move at terrific speeds in excess of 1,000 knots, and then stop on a dime, maintains altitude, can change altitude, climb, descend. To encounter a UFO when it approaches your aircraft, you have no idea what it is. I think if it wanted to collide with us, it could have. You can’t get away from it — you don’t have that much time to respond!”
Lending credibility to this case were eyewitnesses on the ground who observed the UFO-helicopter encounter. The Army didn’t prevent Coyne and his crew from speaking out about their experience. In fact, Coyne was allowed to recount the UFO incident to the United Nations in 1978, as seen below, under the sponsorship of Grenada.
originally posted by: moebius
a reply to: shawmanfromny
Red, green and white is a curious color choice, one that is used for navigation lights.
The day following the incident, Captain Coyne went to P. J. Vollmer, Federal Aviation Authority chief of operations at Hopkins Field, to find how and where to report the occurrence. ... Vollmer could not suggest an official agency to which to report, so the matter rested until Coyne related the event to his cousin, a reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Even after the newspaper account, there was no official interest expressed in the matter, so Coyne filled out reports a month later in order that the incident be officially on record.
originally posted by: shawmanfromny
I can tell you for a fact, that a report involving a potential midair collision is thoroughly investigated...
originally posted by: shawmanfromny
especially one involving an unidentified craft.
originally posted by: shawmanfromny
The Disposition Form starts this investigative process. The copy of the form may be available for the "public record," but the actual investigative reports may not...they may be classified, especially one involving a potential UFO sighting.
originally posted by: shawmanfromny
You, as well as MANY sceptics, continually belittle eyewitness testimonies from military personnel.
originally posted by: shawmanfromny
There was a seasoned Captain, a chemical engineer, a cop and a computer technician, who stated that the craft "stopped on a dime" right in front of them, before accelerating away.
originally posted by: shawmanfromny
They also stated that the craft made no noise.
originally posted by: shawmanfromny
Your post is a detailed "explanation" and what "little doubt left" may be only in your own mind, not shared by the helicopter crew and other ground witnesses.
Some of Klass's UFO explanations I wouldn't try to defend, but I do think his comments about waves or "flaps" probably have at least some validity:
originally posted by: KellyPrettyBear
I always want to know the reason for waves.
Once news coverage leads the public to believe that UFOs may be in the vicinity, there are numerous natural and man-made objects which, especially when seen at night, can take on unusual characteristics in the minds of hopeful viewers. Their UFO reports in turn add to the mass excitement, which encourages still more observers to watch for UFOs. This situation feeds upon itself until such time as the media lose interest in the subjects, and then the flap quickly runs out of steam.
It's not belittling so much as recognizing human perceptions have been demonstrated many times to be flawed. If you aren't aware of such cases as the Yukon UFO case which demonstrate this clearly, then you need to do some research. Nobody is calling these witnesses liars, but things are not always what they seem and no human is exempt from misperception, especially if they can't identify what they are looking at. Pilots have the highest misperception rate of any category of witnesses according to the most prolific UFO researcher, J Allen Hynek.
originally posted by: shawmanfromny
You, as well as MANY sceptics, continually belittle eyewitness testimonies from military personnel.
Pilots have the highest misperception rate of any category of witnesses according to the most prolific UFO researcher, J Allen Hynek.
originally posted by: Arbitrageur
Some of Klass's UFO explanations I wouldn't try to defend, but I do think his comments about waves or "flaps" probably have at least some validity
“Ground Zero” of UFO flap 1973 is easily just thirty to forty miles east of Wright-Patt, which is located in southwest Ohio. Eighty to a hundred calls a night about strange lights were being logged from there. The Coyne incident happened 150 miles to the northeast. Thus most of the “flap” occurred relatively in the same direction that an armada of US Air Force aircraft was heading, day-after-day, beginning October 14th, 1973. Could it be that all those witnesses were looking at ships and crafts from this world?
originally posted by: Arbitrageur
Nobody is calling these witnesses liars, but things are not always what they seem and no human is exempt from misperception, especially if they can't identify what they are looking at. Pilots have the highest misperception rate of any category of witnesses according to the most prolific UFO researcher, J Allen Hynek.
That effect played a significant part in the Coyne Incident and seems to have done so in quite a lot of others as well. I don't know how their training takes that into account, but it's one of those misperceptions that is pretty hard to avoid, trained or not. The TTSA "Go Fast" video is a good example of that, which I have analyzed in more detail here: Analysis of TTSA 2015 Go Fast UFO video