1997: UFO Roundup: Volume 2 Number 11: March 16, 1997

MAJOR UFO FLAP GRIPS PHOENIX, ARIZONA On Tuesday, March 10, 1997, at 9:15 p.m., Steve Blandings and his wife were at their home in Ahwatukee, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix near Sky Harbor Airport, about 3 miles (5 kilometers) west of Interstate Highway 10 and just south of Chandler Boulevard. The southward-facing balcony offers a panoramic view of the South Mountains and the Gila River Indian Reservation. “I noticed a bright yellow light in the southwest sky over the Gila River reservation,” Steve told the ROUNDUP. “It stayed in the same place for about 20 minutes. I called my wife outside to the second story balcony, and the light moved down on the horizon from its position at about 20 degrees to the horizon, […] Read More

1997: UFO Roundup: Volume 2 Number 10: March 9, 1997

MAJOR UFO FLAP GOING ON IN NORTHERN NEW ENGLAND Since January 22, 1997, a major UFO flap has been going on in the three New England states of New Hampshire (N.H.), Vermont (Vt.) and Maine (Me.), with 17 sightings and one encounter reported. On January 23, Beverly Higgins was driving home from work. “It was ten to seven,” she recalled, “I was on Route 3 coming home from Littleton (N.H.), just before the Columbia trailer park when I saw this thing across my windshield, just above my steering wheel.” Ms. Higgins watched the object cross the sky from west to east, coming from Vermont and passing over the Connecticut River. “It was oval–I counted six windows and there was a green light in front […] Read More

1997: UFO Roundup: Volume 2 Number 9: March 2, 1997

DAYLIGHT DISC SEEN IN NORTHERN MINNESOTA A silver-gray saucer was seen in broad daylight in Hermantown, Minnesota at 1:40 p.m. on Monday, February 24, 1997. The UFO appeared over Minnesota Highway 53 in Hermantown, just west of the Lakes 8 Cinema and Wal-Mart. Hermantown (population 6759) is a suburb of the port city of Duluth, located at the western end of Lake Superior. The UFO was witnessed by over 10 people, including Dave Briscoe, Minnesota state director of Skywatch International. Briscoe described the object as “the craft was ‘oval-saucer’ shaped and silver-grey in color.” “I was about seven miles away by vehicle,” Briscoe reported. “And I saw the object for approximately three minutes. Other witnesses said they saw it for about fifteen (minutes). Reports […] Read More

1997: UFO Roundup: Volume 2 Number 8: February 23, 1997

UFOs HAUNT NIGHT SKIES ALL OVER AUSTRALIA For the past two weeks, Australia has been repeatedly visited by UFOs. Over 50 encounters have been reported since February 1, including two landings in the suburbs of Melbourne. The flap began Saturday, February 1, 1997, with an incident in Tasmania, the island off Australia’s southern coast. A Glengarry family reported finding traces of a weird “bright yellow jelly slime” in their yard. At 9:45 p.m., in Broken Hill, New South Wales (N.S.W.), a city 750 kilometers (450 miles) west of Sydney, people reported “sighting two bright lights traveling from the northwest to the southeast.” At 9:51 p.m., another man saw a glowing object fly from the southeast to the northwest, then reverse direction and “shoot off […] Read More

1997: UFO Roundup: Volume 2 Number 7: February 16, 1997

UFOs SIGHTED ALL OVER THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST The states of Oregon and Washington were hit by a major UFO flap last weekend. In Inglewood, Washington (population 4,000), a suburb of Seattle, Jim Waylons was returning to his apartment house around 10:30 p.m. when he spotted “a bright yellow light” hovering over the neighborhood. The unknown object reportedly “hovered over the town for at least 45 minutes,” and its presence set off “alarms and security lights” in the building. “They apparently had trouble turning them off until the light in the sky had left.” The incident took place on Friday, February 7, 1997. Also on February 7, two Wallowa County Sheriff’s Department deputies encountered a UFO while on patrol in Joseph, Oregon (population 1,000). The […] Read More

1997: UFO Roundup: Volume 2 Number 6: February 9, 1997

FIVE UFOs OVER GULF COAST On Wednesday, February 5, 1997, at 11:30 p.m., motorists driving north on Texas Highway 36 from Brazoria (population 3,025) spotted a formation of five circular red lights in the sky. One of the motorists was the husband of Nancy Marcum, South Texas regional director of Skywatch, International. Mrs. Marcum has provided a detailed summary of her husband’s sighting. “He said from this distance they looked about tree (top) level as he was coming closer to West Columbia (population 4,109).” The UFOs passed directly over the Marcum vehicle, and he estimated “that they were about a thousand feet up. I told him I didn’t know how high a thousand would be, so he said about three radio towers high.” Mrs. […] Read More

1997: UFO Roundup: Volume 2 Number 5: February 2, 1997

TELSTAR 401 DISAPPEARS IN FLIGHT An AT&T television relay satellite has disappeared from its geostationary orbit, and nobody knows quite what happened to it. Telstar 401, a $200 million satellite built by Lockheed Martin, was launched in December 1993 and placed in orbit over the Earth at longitude 97 degrees West. The spacecraft functioned perfectly well for three years and then disaster struck. On January 6, 1997, the sun ejected a coronal discharge, a magnetically-charged cloud of hydrogen and helium 30 million miles wide. This “solar tsunami” rushed outward into the solar system at 1 million miles per hour, reaching the Earth on January 10. The cloud was tracked by 20 Earth satellites, including the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) launched in December 1995, […] Read More

1997: UFO Roundup: Volume 2 Number 4: January 26, 1997

UFO FLAP SWEEPS MEDITERRANEAN The recent “green fireball” sighting over Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci Airport was just the kickoff for a UFO flap that has swept Italy, Sardinia, and Corsica during the past two weeks. Eight major sightings are now being investigated by the Centro Italiano di Studi Ufologici (CISU), according to their newsletter, the CISU Flash for January 25, 1997. On December 11, 1996, at about 8 a.m., people in the village of Ascoli Piceno in the Sibillini mountain range saw “a flaming object with a (visible) trail” flying high in the sky. Following the sighting, a Fire Brigade helicopter spotted a mysterious pond of melted snow near the peak of Mount Vettore. (See the Italian newspaper Corriere Adriatico for December 12, 1996. […] Read More

1997: UFO Roundup: Volume 2 Number 3: January 19, 1997

AIRPLANE VANISHES OVER LONG ISLAND SOUND People in Westbrook, Connecticut were amazed Wednesday morning, January 15, 1997, when they heard that a single-engine plane dive toward the waters of Long Island Sound…and then vanish. According to the newspaper The Day, “the Coast Guard, state Department of Environmental Protection, two rescue helicopters, fire departments from Westbrook, Old Saybrook, Madison and Clinton, and some marine patrols and private boats searched 100 square miles after a man reported he had seen a plane dive into the water.” “Daniel Bowes of Meetinghouse Lane was having a cup of coffee at about 7:30 a.m. at West Beach on Salt Island Road when he saw a plane flying low over the water, according to Ralph Buck, a captain of the […] Read More

1997: UFO Roundup: Volume 2 Number 2: January 12, 1997

GREEN FIREBALL SEEN IN CENTRAL ITALY At about 6:15 p.m. on Monday, January 6, 1997, a dazzling green fireball crossed Italy’s Adriatic coast north of Foggia, heading west. The glowing object crossed the Apennine Mountains, passing north of Campobasso and Isernia, and flew over Rome at approximately 6:22 p.m. The fireball lit up the sky. Thousands saw it, including the air traffic controllers at Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci International Airport. Captain Giovanni Fior del Mondo, the pilot of the Alitalia flight from Madrid, Spain, was making his final approach into Da Vinci when he spotted the fireball. He described it as “a bright green light” which he kept in view for five seconds. Italian radio station RAI-1 reported, “Several hundred witnesses saw a large, […] Read More

1997: UFO Roundup: Volume 2 Number 1: January 5, 1997

Editor: Joseph Trainor New year, new volume, new layout, new editor. It looks like some changes here at UFO ROUNDUP. Actually, it’s the same editor, using his birth name instead of a screen name. Readers, let us know how you like our new look. One thing hasn’t changed, though, and that’s the number of UFO sightings. We have a bumper crop to kick off the new year, so read on… UFO HOVERS OVER CINCINNATI MALL On Tuesday, December 24, 1996, at 8 p.m., four people were driving down Moneycreek Road in Cincinnati, Ohio. They were “out looking at the Christmas lights,” but the lights they saw hovering over the Western Hills Plaza shopping center had nothing to do with the holiday. The quartet observed […] Read More

UFO ROUNDUP: VOLUME 1 NUMBER 44: December 29, 1996

REPUTED ALIEN CAPTURED IN NORTHERN ISRAEL On Saturday night, December 21, 1996, residents of Ahyud, a village just outside the city of Akko in northern Israel called the police to report “luminescent blue disks” flying over their farms. At 11 p.m., Mrs. Zyona Damti, 34, looked out a window and saw “an alien” standing in front of her father-in-law’s barn. She described the entity as 20 centimeters tall and “humanoid: head, trunk, two arms, small hands, two large black eyes. The color was greenish–the umbilicus was clearly visible.” Mrs. Damti told her father-in-law what she had seen, but he replied that “it was nothing.” At 8 a.m. the following morning, December 22, Mrs. Damti went outside and found the entity lying on the ground […] Read More

UFO ROUNDUP: VOLUME 1 NUMBER 43: December 22, 1996

GREEN FIREBALL SHAKES UP THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST On Tuesday, December 17, 1996, at 6:15 a.m., people living in the Pacific Northwest were startled to see “a glowing green fireball” approaching from the western horizon. An early morning commuter in Maple Valley, Washington, east of Seattle, reported that the unusual fireball “came to within 500 feet” of his car before shooting off in an easterly direction towards Wenatchee. People living in King and Snohomish counties reported seeing the fireball “go down near Richmond Beach” on Puget Sound. The King County Sheriff’s Department told the Seattle Times that they’d received many calls about the fireball from residents of Issaquah (population 5,536) and Bellevue (population 74,000). Bellevue is located across Lake Washington from Seattle, on the eastern […] Read More

UFO ROUNDUP: VOLUME 1 NUMBER 42: December 15, 1996

SAUDI JETLINER SEES UFO IN TWA 800 CRASH ZONE A Saudi Airlines jetliner encountered “a bright greenish object” while flying at 12,000 feet early Thursday morning, December 12, 1996. The encounter took place over the ocean about ten miles south of East Moriches, Long Island, New York. According to the USA Radio News broadcast on Friday, the Saudi jetliner was coming into John F. Kennedy International Airport at 6 a.m. when the flight crew spotted “a greenish-white object with a long tail.” The object was traveling from east to west, the same bearing as the Boeing 747, but at a higher altitude. According to the CNN report of the incident, the mysterious object was picked up on the Boeing 747’s cockpit radar set. “At […] Read More