The year 1977 was one of the
most eventful in the history of UFOs. Just how it compares with other years
will never be known because no organization – local, national or international,
official or otherwise – keeps any kind of meaningful record of sightings and
encounters.
What we can say is that 1977
was a year of countless sightings around the world. A number of them came
during waves of sightings in Brazil, New Zealand, Uruguay, the United States
and possibly other countries. During those flaps, UFOs were seen over a period
of days or weeks and sometimes months. Some of them were quite spectacular.
Part of the UFO history of
the year 1977 was recorded in Carroll County in northwestern Arkansas. Although
not part of a wave, a remarkable single incident occurred on the night of
December 15, 1977.
Dozens of people saw a triangular-shaped
object, possibly as big as a football field, that moved slowly and low in
the sky. It was seen over a stretch of at least twenty-five miles of the county,
which is located in the Ozark Mountains.
It was, in effect, a mini-wave
that lasted two to three hours and occurred over much of the two-thousand-square-mile
county. Some of the sightings occurred less than fifteen miles from southwestern
Missouri's McDonald County, the site of an impressive UFO flap
earlier in the year. McDonald County is just
across the state line and a little west.
The Carroll County object was
seen as far west as Beaver Lake as it drifted slowly over the towns of Eureka
Springs, Berryville and Oak Grove, and vanished northeast into Missouri. The
incident startled many people, frightened some and delighted at least a few.
The first known witnesses were
Peter and Kathryn Bezjian, who saw an unusual craft pass over their home in
Eureka Springs. That was between seven and seven-thirty in the evening.
DIAMOND-SHAPED
“It was just after dinner and
I was lying down watching television,” Kathryn Bezjian, then sixty-six, said.
"I was looking out the window and saw these two round lights as large
as or larger than bright headlights on a car.
“My husband had fallen asleep.
I got up and walked out on the balcony. I thought that this was a plane and
it was going to crash. My husband was in naval aviation in World War Two for
almost three years, I've flown quite a bit and our grandson is an air traffic
controller, so I do know a little bit about planes. But it was coming so slow.
"I immediately woke my
husband up and said, 'Look, 
Honey,
that is a plane and it's going to crash,' but as I said it, the thought entered
my mind that it was coming too slow to crash. It was about fifteen minutes
getting here.
"The other thing that
impressed me so much was the sound. It was an even hmmmm, every cylinder hitting
on all fours, so controlled, so quiet, a beautiful humming sound.
“As
it got directly over us, the bottom of it was diamond-shaped. It looked like
raw wood. In the middle of this diamond was a red light, a signal-like light
like you'd see on any plane, and up underneath it were three or four small
red lights.
“And it was huge, the length
of this diamond. My husband said it was half as long as a football field.
I say no, but it was long."
SCIENTIST IS DELIGHTED
Where the object went immediately
after that, no one knows. The next glimpse of it came between nine and nine-thirty
from the edge of Beaver Lake, just southwest of Eureka Springs. The witnesses
were Frances and Ira Whitney, both retired.
"I still get excited when
I think about it because it's an unforgettable experience," said Mrs.
Whitney, then seventy-three, as she described what she saw while driving to
her home on Beaver Lake about five miles southwest of Eureka Springs.
Both she and her husband saw the object while driving home in separate
vehicles a few minutes apart. Ira Whitney, then sixty-nine, was a nuclear
chemist.
Neither was aware that the other was also seeing the object. Mrs. Whitney,
a biologist with a master's degree in science education, was driving home
from a school board meeting. It was about twenty-five after nine.
"I came around a curve
and saw these strange headlights up in the air," she said. "They
appeared to be a thousand to fifteen hundred feet up. My first impression
was that a big truck with floodlights was up on one of the hills.
“Then I slowed down because
it was so unusual. It was atypical. I looked again and thought, 'There's no
hill there.' Then, since I used to fly I thought, 'That’s a plane.' And I
thought, ‘No, those lights are too peculiar.’
"Then I came around another
curve and the thing was just standing there in the same position. It wasn't
moving. I'd never seen anything like this.
“I had been in the Air Force,
I built an airport when I came out and had a flying field and I flew and I've
kept up with the newest planes and this didn’t fit any category in my information.
"As I watched it, it started
coming down towards me. It was very low and I began to get excited because
it just wasn't real. And since I have an analytical mind I was analyzing like
crazy, and I thought, 'My God! I'm seeing a UFO!'
“There were just these two
bright lights. Then I saw two smaller ones, green lights. They were in the
wrong position for wing lights on a plane or anything like that. They were
at the top of those lights but off to the side of them.”
‘ISN’T THIS GREAT!’
She stopped her car and watched
for about five minutes. Then, thinking she could get a better view on the
next curve, she started the car again.
“And as I did, this thing started
planing down toward me and I thought, 'It's going to land on the highway –
isn't this great!' I opened the window and I couldn't hear anything. There
was no sound.
"It was big. In every
way it was big, but still no silhouette. You couldn't see any wings, no tails,
anything but lights. Then it stopped again and sort of looked me
over, and all of a sudden it whizzed off. l rushed around to the next curve
and saw nothing. That was the end of it. I was disappointed."
Ira Whitney had been at a lodge
meeting and came driving down the same road just a few minutes behind his
wife.
“I saw a pair of bright lights
in the distance across an arm of the lake that seemed to be standing still,"
he said. "I must have driven half to three-quarters of a mile further
and decided that there was something wrong with those lights. They just didn't
belong where they were.
“I decided to stop and get
my bearings. I got out of my truck to get a good view of it and it just seemed
to be standing still. At this point there was no noise. At that distance,
the lights appeared to be maybe ten feet apart in the sky. I had no idea of
the distance from me, probably half a mile.
"As I was watching it,
the lights began to move, but very, very slowly. It crossed my mind that the
thing must be huge and it is unusual because if it was an aircraft, at that
distance I should have been able to hear some noise. There was no noise, and
this kept bouncing in my mind the whole length of the experience.
"I would say it took a
full five minutes to cross from the top of that hill and go over my head,
and it went directly over my head. I turned around and saw one light as it
receded from me toward Berryville.
“As it approached, I assumed
the lights were approximately a thousand feet above me. It was close, and
the lights appeared to be roughly a hundred feet apart when they passed over
me. In a matter of seconds they passed beyond a hill out of my
sight."
NO DOUBT ABOUT IT
As soon as they got home and
realized they’d both seen the object, they compared notes. Their conclusion?
"A UFO," said Ira
Whitney.
"A UFO, no doubt,"
said Frances Whitney.
"I have lived so long
and done so many things,” she added. “I am one of those people who was in
on the beginning of this great age of ours. I've done everything. I flew across
the English Channel in 1922 and then I was in the new Air Force. At my age,
I feel I have taken part in so many exciting things that it is just fitting
that I should have seen a UFO.
“It's like the great fireworks
at the end. I was just delighted because I've done everything and seen everything."
The next witnesses were farther
east, toward the county seat of Berryville.
Bob Weathers, forty-seven,
general manager of the Carroll Electric Co-op, which then served eleven counties
in Arkansas and Missouri, was one of many in the Berryville area who saw it
between nine-thirty and ten. He and his wife were watching TV in their home
three miles west of Berryville when he noticed bright lights in the western
sky toward Eureka Springs.
"I saw three lights closely grouped," Weathers said. "After
watching them coming toward me for at least five minutes, I walked out in
front of the house. The lights were gradually getting closer.
“It came on and went almost directly over me. As it did, a fourth light
became visible. I’d never seen anything like it. It was moving real slow,
probably no more than five to ten miles an hour.
"By this time I'd watched
it for at least ten minutes. I went back inside and told my wife and the two
of us walked out on the back patio. She said she thought she could hear a
small humming noise.
“I don't know what it was.
It appeared to me it could have been a hot air balloon but the radio station
said the wind was blowing from the opposite direction that night."
KITE-SHAPED OBJECT
Berryville Police Officer Jim
Dwyer watched the lights for at least half an hour, most of the time from
the top of Saunders Heights in Berryville, the second highest mountain in
the county.
"I was patrolling, going
west and noticed three lights in the sky," said Patrolman Dwyer, then
twenty-five. "I watched them cross over Berryville fairly low. Looked
like they were sort of kite-shaped or triangle-shaped.
He thought it could have been as large as a football field.
“I went up to Saunders Heights
and watched from there as it kept going. The two lights that appeared to be
on the bottom of it just flashed out and then periodically they'd come back
on and the smaller light would get bigger and smaller.
"As I was watching, Howard
Hill, who works for the volunteer fire department, had a set of binoculars
and we watched it through the binoculars for quite a while. We just couldn’t
figure out what it was.
“I sat there and watched it
for probably thirty to forty-five minutes. Other people would come and watch
it and leave. Twenty-five to thirty people were up there during the time I
was there.
"I really don't know what
it was. I know in my mind it wasn't an airplane or a helium balloon or a weather
balloon. I’m not a hundred percent believer in UFOs but it was something I
couldn’t explain nor could anybody else that night.”
Jackie Bunch, then the clerk for Carroll County Circuit Court, was frightened
when she saw it.
"I had been bowling and went to my mother's to pick up my children
and we were on the way home," Mrs. Bunch said. "We were still in
the city limits and my little boy was the one that saw it first. 'Oh, Mommy,
there's a UFO,' he said, and I said, 'Ah, Vic, that's an airplane.'
‘REALLY FRIGHTENED’
“He just kept on and the more I looked at it the more I decided it wasn’t
an airplane. It was off to our left going to the right. It was a group of
yellowish looking lights.
"It really was something
unusual and it really frightened me. It made me a little nervous. There wasn't
a car on the road. Usually I meet several cars on the road going home, and
I knew I had to turn and go off that road.
“We watched it and I tried
not to upset the kids. I tried joking about it, saying it was just Santa Claus.
But it was something unusual, really something different."
Gene Wingate, then an announcer
for radio station KTHS in Berryville, was at home three miles north of Berryville,
watching television with his son, Kenneth, fifteen, and a friend.
"I looked out the living
room window towards the west at what I thought were two car lights at first,"
Wingate said. "I thought I was seeing lights on a mountain, but they
looked stationary.
“After five minutes or so I
got curious. The lights started getting closer, moving our way, toward the
house. We were kind of concerned about what they were. I'd never seen any
lights like that in the sky. We actually got a little bit scared because we
didn't know what it was.
"They moved directly over
the house. I could see a definite outline. From underneath it looked diamond-shaped.
After it passed over and nothing happened, we were kind of relieved.
“The next morning when I got
to work, I noticed we had had several reports of sightings of the same thing.
That's when I first realized it was something out of the ordinary.
"I have a thirty-minute
talk show so I put out a request for anybody who saw the thing to call me.
Four people called in and they all described the same craft."
Jim and Shirley Hudson and
their two sons, Dana, seventeen, and Pat, fifteen, saw the object from their
home about a mile southwest of Wingate’s home.
"We went out on the porch
and this spacecraft or whatever it was was going from west to east,” said
Mrs. Hudson. “It wasn't too far from our house, half a mile or so. There were
four huge white lights and looked to me like they were shining down. There
was one red light at the front. It was huge. It looked like it was five hundred
feet square."
Jim Hudson, who owned a small-engine
sales and service company in Berryville, said: "I don't think it was
quite as wide as it was long. We figured it was traveling about fifteen miles
an hour and was about two hundred feet off the ground. I'd say it would fit
pretty good on a football field.
"After it passed our house
you began to hear the noise of whatever was propelling the thing. It had a
humming noise like an electric motor that's maybe shorted out. It was fairly
quiet."
Mrs. Arlie Long saw it from her home four miles southeast of Berryville.
With her were her daughter Patty and a friend of Patty’s, Tina Wells.
"I was outside checking
on my Christmas lights and I saw this thing coming awfully slow,” said Mrs.
Long. “There were four lights. It was kind of kite-shaped until it got right
up close and then it looked more round, with two lights shining down to the
ground.
“My daughter was using an electric
comb and she screamed and threw the electric comb out in the hallway. I thought
my little dog was going to have fits.
“I ran into the house and got
them all quieted down and that thing was right over the house then. By the
time I got them quieted down I went to the back door and watched it until
it stopped over a field and huddled for I guess ten minutes. Then it went
off to the east.”
BLUE FLASH OF LIGHT
The next witness was Mrs. LaDonna
Walker, who lived three and a half miles east of Oak Grove. She said the object
followed her car for several miles. She was driving home from a high school
basketball game with her four sons and a neighbor boy.
"We were driving north on Route 103 between
nine-thirty and ten,” Mrs. Walker said. "We were about two miles out
of Green Forest when we first saw it and it's about twelve miles from Green
Forest, so we saw it for about ten miles. The boys first saw it, two lights
some ways off to the west.
“About a mile out of Oak Grove we saw this blue
flash, like a flash of lightning, and after that it seemed like the lights
came toward us. It followed us. We'd speed up and it would go faster. We'd
slow down and it would go slower.
“When we got to the four-way stop in Oak Grove,
the boys hollered to stop, they wanted to get out and look at it. So we stopped
and this machine or whatever it was hovered above us and there were four lights
in a square. There was a red light in the center and it hovered above us for
probably about a minute and then it took off to the northeast."
Greg Pyron, also an announcer for radio station KTHS, said: "We have
a weather station at the radio station and the wind that night was just the
opposite of the path this thing was going. The wind was roughly from east
to west. If it was a balloon, it should have been going in the opposite direction.
"We thought it might have
been an experimental craft but checking with the Air National Guard, the Air
Force at Little Rock and Fort Smith, there was no such traffic reported on
any of their scopes that night and no such authorizations that night.
“Apparently it was something
else but we could not find out what. The military denied any knowledge of
anything at all in the area that night. We received a flood of calls from
people reporting seeing the object."
The police received a number
of calls, too. The Carroll County Sheriff's Office, with headquarters in Berryville,
at that time handled all communications at night for the three police departments
in the county, Berryville, Eureka Springs and Green Forest.
"We had probably a dozen
to a dozen and a half calls that evening," said Carroll County Sheriff
Jerry Colvin. "The general consensus was that this was a type of triangle
or kite-shaped thing.
“Some saw different colors,
others say they saw just one type of lights, pure white. The primary shape,
the lighting and so forth all seem to be pretty much the same."
DISAPPEARS INTO MISSOURI
Where the object went after
that that night, no one knows. When last seen it was angling north up across
the state line into Missouri. I spent several days in Berryville and the rest
of Carroll County looking into these sightings and have wondered how far into
Missouri I could have traced it if I had had the time.
Several nights after the December
15 sighting, a Eureka Springs man had a startling experience.
"I was heading for Berryville
about eleven o'clock to see a girlfriend," said David Bland, then twenty-four,
a real estate and insurance salesman and former Eureka Springs city councilman.
"As I was coming down this steep hill I noticed something orange in the
sky approximately two hundred feet up, hovering in the sky.
“I was looking out the left
window. I thought I was seeing things. I ran off the road once so I pulled
over, rolled down my window and watched it for a minute or two. It was kind
of a moon-shaped object that was a fiery red. It became more intense as you
looked at the center of the object.
"Then it shot off in a
northeasterly direction just like a bullet. It was super speed. I've never
seen anything like it, and I thought I'd better keep this to myself or people
will think I'm off my rocker.
“The funny thing is, we had
been sitting drinking coffee and talking about the UFO sightings they'd had
in Berryville and I was kind of laughing about it. But this bothered me so
much I went back to Eureka Springs and reported it to Deputy Dale Walden.
He and another gentleman went and looked for the object but it never returned.
“It amazed me, it really did.
I was just astounded. It was incredible how fast it moved. I don't know what
it was but it made a believer out of me."
BLUE LIGHTS ‘SCARED ME BAD’
One other incident involved
a woman who worked late at night and was driving seventeen miles home on January
11, 1978.
“It happened at eleven-thirty
at night,” said Verla Donnell, an emergency medical technician
for Carroll General Hospital in Berryville. "It was snowing and it was
slick. I was driving real slow, like thirty-five."
About seven miles north of
Berryville on Route 221, she saw a red light off to the right. “I wondered
what it was because there's nothing there,” said Mrs. Donnell, the mother
of four children then two through ten. “It looked kind of triangular-shaped
or bell-shaped.
“I was going slow but eventually
I lost sight of it. Out of curiosity, I stopped and backed up until I could
see it again. It was big. It looked too big for that far away.
There's nothing there but trees and it was real cold and it looked like it
was above the trees.
"It had a yellow glow
on the edge. It was red in the center but it was yellow along the edge. It
wasn't stable. I watched it and it kind of floated off to the side and disappeared.
“The road was kind of low where
I was and I thought maybe when I came up on this little rise I could see it.
So I was looking but I didn't see anything red. I saw what looked like a blue
glow just over the hill.
"I wasn't scared then.
I kept looking and looking and there’s this little house and all at once these
blue balls of light just kind of oozed up from behind this house! There were
six of them. They went parallel to the road and there is no road there.
“I kept looking out the side
window and they just kept right beside me. That’s when I got scared. It scared
me real bad. Every time I'd look, it would be right beside me, staying with
me.
“My aunt and uncle live right up at the state line there and I decided to stop and maybe they could help me. So I stopped. I looked back and the lights were gone. When I got home I could hardly stand up I was so scared. I wouldn't even get out of the car until my husband came out.”
(For more on sightings of triangular-shaped objects, click here.)
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