It took forever to move across the sky.
Dan Beemer, Owensberg Kentucky Messenger-Inquirer, 30 January 1980
My interest in UFOs is still lurking in the depths of my childhood, in the latter days of the Cold War when there seemed a very good chance that an unusual thingy in the sky was military rather than interstellar. It’s hard to describe to people born later how alarming it was to see something you didn’t recognise up there in the era of nuclear brinkmanship. Or something you did recognise, come to that.
I lived in what was then a first-strike target, a major MOD admin town in England surrounded by RAF and USAF installations. If the US or the USSR lost the plot I wasn’t going to live to see the nuclear winter. Which is a good thing, by the way.
On the one hand that meant I regularly got to enjoy the Red Arrows. Yay! Miss those close formation whooshes. On the other it frequently meant holding my breath as fugly fighter jets roared over my roof, praying that I wasn’t about to (quite briefly) see a bright flash and a mushroom cloud.
Although my interest in unexplained phenomena is lifelong, in the 70s and 80s I didn’t have access to much source information beyond what was spotted over my own county and reported in the local news. That’s why I love going back over old newspapers online – what a fantastic, bottomless resource for just about any subject of interest!
Here’s a UFO sighting I’d never heard of before from the end of 1980. For context, US forces had just disastrously failed to rescue hostages in Iran and a further, even more covert attempt was allegedly in the works; the unfortunate airmen at Rendlesham had just had their bizarre Christmas; a spectacular Soviet Cosmos programme re-entry had just triggered an epic wave of sightings at almost the same time; and the famous (yet markedly atypical) Cash-Landrum close encounter of the second kind happened the day before this report hit the newspaper.
Sightings of UFOs Reported
By STEWART JENNISON
Messenger-InquirerECHOLS —— It was no fantasy, said sheriff’s deputy Frank Chinn of Ohio County, adding, “and I don’t drink.”
Chin, at first reluctantly, was explaining how he sighted eight brightly coloured, unidentified flying objects in Ohio County Sunday night.
Among the witnesses were another sherrif’s [sic] deputy and a Kentucky State Police trooper.
In addition, the Ohio County Sheriff’s office received several reports of the sightings Monday after getting 14 such calls Sunday night.
Chinn said he was at his home in Echols, about 1/12 miles south of Rockport, when six objects following an identical flight path began travelling slowly out of the southeastern sky, beginning about 5:30 p.m.
The deputy called for verification from State Police, and Trooper Don Beemer said he arrived in time to see one of the objects leaving.
Chinn said he saw two more UFOs later in the evening, at times using a pair of binoculars. Chinn said he and fellow deputy Johnny Cooper also watched one UFO through a telescope set up on a tripod at a Centretown gas station.
Chinn said he saw rotating red, green and yellow lights, which through the telescope resembled lights through the facets of an upside-down diamond.
Chinn, a former Marine, said, “I don’t know any aircraft of ours that could move like that — so slow and no sound. It was definitely not a helicopter.”
Beemer said that by the time he arrived, the object looked like a bright star changing colours. Beemer, a Vietnam veteran, said he couldn’t be sure what it was, but he was sure what it wasn’t:
“It was no airplane and it wasn’t a helicopter. It took forever to move across the sky.”
The Ohio County Sheriff’s radio dispatcher said that she contacted a UFO reporting centre and the Henderson State Police post but that there were no reports of downed aircraft, search parties or off-course weather balloons.
Owensborou, Kentucky Messenter-Inquirer, Tuesday 30 December, 1980
When it comes to UAPs, the massive, low-flying Black Triangle sightings are what really interest me, so any mention of slow moving and silent craft grab my attention. It’s hard to say whether this one fits the pattern or not. I’m less familiar with the ‘changing coloured lights’ reports than with the ‘lights at each tip and in the middle’ triangle variant, but I’ve studied enough, and spoken to enough witnesses, to believe that both were really flying in the 1980s and 1990s, and that they’re probably ‘ours’ rather than alien. Or a fusion of salvaged alien tech with ours, of course.