Unidentified flying objects or UFOs are back in the news again. During the first week of February a couple of Evansville Police officers saw a string of strange lights while sitting in their patrol car. The same lights were reported in Louisville. These reports brought up memories for me of something I saw in 1967. It even made the official US Government investigation of UFOs.

In '67 I was working as the 6PM to midnight DJ on a radio station in Orlando Florida. Here I am standing in front of the studio and transmitter building of radio station WHOO on my first day at work.

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The important thing to know is that the transmitter and broadcast studio that you see in the polaroid were located together on the very flat west side of Orlando with not too many lights to pollute the night sky. The station was 50,000 watts east-west directional which meant several very tall towers were located within a few hundred feet of the building.

The Milwaukee Braves baseball team had recently moved to Atlanta and on the night I spotted my UFOs we were carrying a Braves game. I had plenty of time to kill as I waited to insert local commercials into the broadcast. Suddenly the phone lit up. This was odd because not that many people could have been listening to the Braves getting clobbered again. Caller after caller asked about strange lights in the sky over the western part of the city. I knew McCoy air force base was located just a few miles away and since the Vietnam war had heated up in '67, heavy traffic in the sky wasn't uncommon. Also Cape Canaveral was sending space rockets up frequently. But the calls didn't stop. More and more people wanted to know what these strange sights in the night sky were.

When I had a break in the game I ventured outside and immediately I could see the lights. There were several travelling very fast in formation and would frequently change colors. they seemed to be able to dip and swerve faster than any plane possibly could. I watched as long as I could and headed back inside to the windowless studio where the phone was still lit up with more calls, I called McCoy air force base and they couldn't give me any information but they did take my name a the phone number at the radio station.

US archives www.archives.gov
US archives www.archives.gov
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The next day I got a call from the radio station receptionist to tell me an air force officer was waiting in the lobby to see me. Since I lived just a short drive away I got there in just a few minutes. I was greeted by a very stern  US air force major. He represented the official US air force UFO investigation--Project Blue Book.

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The reason the major wanted to interview me that day in '67 was that our radio towers were all logged on the air force maps of the Orlando area. The tower heights and exact locations were all plotted on those official charts. The Major had me take him to the exact location where I was standing when I saw the UFOs. He asked me where the lights were in relation to our towers. I remember his question about the size of the lights, "If you held a match at arms' length, how big was the light compared to the match head?". He had me fill out a questionnaire that was several pages long. At the end of our interview I asked him, "Did anyone at McCoy air force base see the lights"? He just looked at me with a little smile and said something that would be the modern equivalent of "Have a nice day". I never heard anything else from him.

Project Blue Book had begun in 1949 and ended in 1969, not long after I filed my sighting. The report was confidential until just recently. The main goal of the Blue Book investigation was to determine if the UFOs were any threat to US national security. It was determined that they were not. The project did collect a bunch of home movies of various sightings. Here are a couple of still shots of the better ones:

photo from national archives www.archives.gov
photo from national archives www.archives.gov
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photo from National Archives www.archives.gov
photo from National Archives www.archives.gov
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If you want to take a look at the de-classified videos you are welcome to by going to the national archives site. That will get you started and there's a lot to read.

Unarius Academy of Science Expects Flying Saucers in 2001
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