At dusk around 8:30 p.m., on April 24, 1996, Cathy was out in the back yard of her rural northwestern Pike County home collecting clothes off the line with her four-year-old daughter and her small dog. Her husband, Bob, was in the shower. Suddenly, she felt the hair on the back of her head go up as if something were watching her. She looked up to the east and saw "an Army green or dark gray, boomerang-shaped" object, which appeared to be two or three times the size of the B-2 stealth bomber, which she had seen several times on television, above the tree line behind her house about an eighth of a mile away. She said it seemed about 200 to 300 feet in altitude.
The object had one white light and a row of three red lights on the left wing and it made a low humming sound "like an electric motor humming in the sky", as it slowly moved along. The object had rounded edges and the surface was totally smooth. It moved slowly across the sky, stopped, moved back, and then pivoted counterclockwise around its right wing.
Her husband came out of the house as it was leaving the area. He said it appeared to be as large as a football field. When asked if there had been any strange reactions from animals in the area, Cathy replied that her dog, which normally stays by her side, shied away, tucked its tail between it legs, and ran back to the house. The sighting lasted about a minute.
Cathy contacted Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and asked the spokesman if they knew what was going on. She said that she seemed to get "a run around." They said they knew nothing about the object. While not connected to the sighting, Cathy said that military aircraft are often in their area, apparently conducting training exercises.
In the early morning hours of May 4, 1996, the boomerang returned. Cathy was up sometime between 3 to 4 a.m. to get a drink of water when she happened to look up through one of their roof sky lights. She saw something and heard the same humming sound. She proceeded to look out the window and saw the object above their house. She decided not to wake her husband, watched the object for a short time, and then went back to bed.
Cathy and her husband noted that from time to time they see a red light above the tree line behind their house, which they first assumed was on a radio or water tower. They’ve since hiked the area several times and have seen no towers of any kind, nor any other indication of a possible source of the red light.
They also noted that they hear or feel ground hums or vibrations every month or so which they cannot account for. It lasts for about 15 or 20 minutes, usually in the evening. Cathy pointed out that there is a General Electric jet engine test facility about 20 miles away, so this could be the source of the sounds.
Cathy stated that her neighbors have also seen UFOs. In April of 1993 or 1994, the wife saw something land in the area some distance behind their home. The woman "would just shake" when she told them about the event two or three days later, and apparently didn’t want to talk any further about it. Recently, in the spring of 1996, the neighbor’s husband said he saw a big light in the sky just hover over the area; he didn’t provide much detail to them.
Cathy went on to say that her first husband’s father, a Lt. Col. Charles Harris Cooke, told them that he had worked for Project Blue Book, and was one of the pilots who chased UFOs during the well known incidents over Washington, DC in July, 1952. He would talk to the family about the case from time to time, but it would upset him and he was more disturbed by the fact that the government didn’t brief the pilots regarding UFOs. The pilots thought they were going after Russian planes invading US airspace. Cathy said he told her, "When they (the other pilots) got there (over the DC area), it wasn’t what they were told it was." She recalls her father in law was the second pilot behind the lead pilot. He described the objects as silver. She states that on the day of his funeral in 1973 in Cooperstown, New York, seven years after he had retired from the Air Force, people who identified themselves as being from the CIA taped off his house for four hours and didn’t let anyone in. They ended up taking many of his files, much of it concerning UFOs, that he kept in a locked cabinet.
Jim is 44 years old and has a younger brother, Jack, who lives nearby on the same rural county road and about a mile or so away from the Johnsons'. Jim states that about a week before the Johnsons' April 24th sighting, he was driving home from Chillicothe, going south on Route 772. At approximately 11 p.m., not far from Harris Station Road, he saw lights in the trees on a knoll to his left. The lights were red, amber, and white or bright yellow. He drove down the road for a short distance and it appeared the lights were sitting just above some high power lines. The lights were in a semi-circurlar pattern and were silhouetted against the hill. The lights were no more than 60 feet in the air and about 150 feet away. No sound was associated with the lights. Although he didn’t see any more of the lights, he had the impression that they were going around something. This episode lasted about 45 seconds. When he got home not too far away, all of the dogs in the area were barking.
On May 14th, Paul Burrell received a call from Jim at 10:40 p.m. He reported that two jet aircraft appeared in the sky over his house. He observed there were two globes of lights near the aircraft. Jim took a video of these lights and it appears they may be flares of some sort. Jim his brother, and the Johnsons, who Jim had called to come over to his house, all observed this activity.
Some years before, in September 1993, while driving home one night from the local community college, Jim observed what appeared to be a large airplane in the distance. The "plane" had four fuzzy, ruby red points of light where the fuselage and wings would be (in a cross pattern). He decided it wasn’t a plane after he realized he could see the stars through what should have been the fuselage. He soon lost track of this object.
Upon his arrival home, he informed his then 14-year-old son of what he had seen. He went back outside and walked down the road a bit. The lights came over the hill from the direction in which he had last seen them. They floated down into a field about 500 feet from Jim’s house. At that distance, the lights appeared to be "basketball-sized, but they were farther away, so they were probably bigger." By this time, the lights were changing their positions somewhat. It looked like they were going to land, but they didn’t. He said the lights did not cast any light, "they just were light." Then, a couple of jet aircraft flew over and the red light which was highest in the air shot off at a high rate of speed, got "way out front" of the lead jet, and curved off in a wide circle.
Jim said it was as if the lights were dancing or playing in the field, moving "like a ballet." This lasted for about an hour. Jim went inside to make a phone call to alert his brother, who was living in Chillicothe at the time, and when he came back out, he looked straight up and saw over 100 different colored blue, red and orange lights, "just like something out of Close Encounters." The aircraft continued to circle the area.
Jim said that after the lights left the area he saw several quick flashes, the way a camera would flash, way up in the sky. These flashes were witnessed by his brother and other family members who had come out from town to witness what was occurring. This case is, in some ways, similar to the October, 1995 Logan, Ohio case reported elsewhere on this site.
A couple of months later, Jim was driving to his wife’s house - they were separated - and saw some red lights off in the distance. When he arrived at her house, he saw a large triangular craft with a large circular white light in the center and smaller yellow or amber lights at the points of the triangle moving slowly overhead. Surrounding the white light was a triangular pattern of three red lights.
We probably have not heard the last from the three county area reported on in the last two reports. Something is going on down there.
©1996 Mid-Ohio Research Associates, Inc.