Editor: Joseph Trainor
UFO SURPRISES AMATEUR ASTRONOMER
On Wednesday, April 10, 1996, at 8:30 p.m. Central time, a mother and daughter out stargazing near Huntsville, Alabama spotted a UFO making its approach.
The sky was clear, and the temperature a comfortable 50 degrees Fahrenheit, as the Huntsville woman and her six-year-old daughter arrived at their observation sight. Looking into the sky directly overhead, they spied “a fuzzy white light…like the Comet Hyakutake” descending in an arc toward the horizon and moving very rapidly.
The UFO halted its plunge just above the treeline, and the woman kept it in view for 15 minutes with her telescope. At first she thought it was a meteor, but the UFO “did not decrease in its intensity” and was “much larger than a star.” According to the woman, the UFO stopped, travelled horizontally to the left, stopped again, travelled to the right a short distance and stopped for a third time. The object then travelled straight up and straight down. Then it veered leftward and disappeared.
Note: Back in February, a cattle mutilation was reported in the Huntsville area.
UFOS APPEAR IN DAYLIGHT OVER SANTA FE
On Saturday, April 6, 1996 at 2:14 p.m., a teenaged boy standing in his yard on Los Arboles Street in Santa Fe, New Mexico spotted an unknown white object high in the sky. He said, “I thought it was just debris until I saw another one circling the one I saw previously…The lights were snow white.”
The youth immediately called his father and older brother to the scene. The brother had no trouble spotting the UFOs. It took the father a bit longer, but he saw three white UFOs darting about in the upper atmosphere.
The youth ran into the house to fetch a pair of binoculars. When he returned outside, he saw three F-16 jet interceptors approaching the area from the Nacimento Mountains northwest of the city. The jets flew over their neighbor’s house. By then, the UFOs had gone. At 2:19 p.m., the youth rushed indoors, fired up the computer and sent out news of his sighting via the Internet.
MASSIVE UFO FLAP IN SOUTH CENTRAL PENNSYLVANIA
On Monday evening, March 11, 1996, a UFO flew down the Path Valley and hovered near the Lakeview Motel and Restaurant in Fannettsburg, Pennsylvania. The UFO was seen by several people, who described it as a disk with flashing blue, pink and white lights. Fannettsburg is a small town on state Highway 75, three miles south of the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
On Tuesday night, March 12, the UFO was seen in the Amberson Valley, also in the villages of Spring Run, Dry Run and Willow Hill, north of the turnpike.
At 9 p.m. on Wednesday, March 13, the UFO hovered over T.J.’s Restaurant on Highway 75 in Willow Hill.
“It’s got everybody in an uproar here,” said Patti McNemar, the cook at T.J.’s. “They talk about it at breakfast, they talk about it at lunch, they talk about it when they walk out the door.”
The reports intrigued Rick Alexander and Lisa Harding, co-hosts of the morning talk show on WMIX-FM. On Thursday evening, March 14, Rick Alexander drove out to Amberson Mountain to have a look for himself. He spotted a UFO at 7:15 p.m. Eastern time.
“Whatever it is, I saw it,” Alexander said. “It was spherical in nature and had spider-like legs. Occasionally it would flash different colored lights.”
The previous night, March 13, the disc-shaped UFO was seen in Chambersburg, a city 27 miles southeast of Fannettsburg. At 7:45 p.m., Ms. Dena McGarvey of McConnellsburg looked out her window, using a pair of binoculars, and saw a bright light. At first she thought it was Jupiter or Venus, but then “it moved hastily across the sky in less than two minutes. That was not a planet.”
“The first time I saw it, it was moving east and (then) it was heading back west,” McGarvey said. “It was flashing red and green lights, moving at a very fast pace toward the west. It all of a sudden disappeared.”
A half hour later, Ms. McGarvey saw the UFO again “over in the Path Valley area.” As she observed the UFO for 45 minutes, it “stood perfectly still…flashing red, green and sometimes a blue light.” She described it as “a horizontal oval disk with a blackish ring around it.”
On Saturday, March 16, at 9:30 p.m., Art Clayton, 51, of Amberson Valley drove to the edge of town and saw a large object “that looked quite a bit bigger than an airplane would at the same distance.”
Note: Great UFO flap, eh? Unfortunately, it was only reported in the Record Herald Shopper Express and the Chambersburg Sentinel and on WMIX-FM. No one else in the media would touch it. Not AP, not Reuters, not the TV networks or the mighty CNN–nobody! That’s how it’s been since the 1973 flap, readers. Full coverage in the local papers–zero coverage everywhere else in the world. Let’s put an end to the media blackout of UFO news, shall we?
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Next week: More on the Mount Diablo UFO! See you next Sunday!