UFO

Dad’s Out-of-this-World Encounter

My father was a police officer at the time, in a small coal-town in Southeastern Kentucky; this occurred in the fall of 1971. He was working the evening shift, patrolling half the town. Another patrolman, Officer Riley was tasked with patrol of the other half.

The shift was half-finished, around 7:30 pm, when Riley called out over the radio requesting a personal meet, at a local restaurant,that bordered their respective patrol areas. The request in itself was not unusual. This happened often, when information that needed to be passed on but not broadcast over the open airwaves in the days before cellphone proliferation.

At the meet, even before Officer Riley spoke a word, my father knew there was something not right with him; he appear very anxious and visibly shaken. He went on to tell what he had just seen. He said, he there was a “large-light” making erratic movements in the skies over the edge of town. With the way it moved, he was certain it was not any conventional aircraft. My father didn’t know what to make of what he was being told. He thought perhaps Officer Riley was in need of sleep, or perhaps he was being setup for a joke. He told Riley to go find a quiet place, and get some rest, but Riley insisted that was being completely serious, and that there was something strange happening. He wanted them to both to return to the place he had witnessed it. So they headed out, Riley leading the way.

The place in later years would be the site of the city high school, but at that time it was little more than a graveled-road leading past fields, sporadically broken with stands of trees. As they made their way up the road, they kept in contact, car-to-car, over the radio. Half-way up to what was a dead-end, my father saw “the light” appear above the tree-line, at the top of the hill ahead of them. It appeared to grow larger, as it was coming toward them head-on. My father yelled over the radio, “It’s going to hit you!” It swooped just over their cars, so low it nearly took the lights off Riley’s cruiser. It then flew behind one of the tree-line breaks that separated the fields, and appeared to land.

The light from it could be seen through the trees and shining upward into the sky. They turned their cars and headed back down the road to gain a clear view. It was indeed “on the ground”, in a field about a hundred feet or so from the road. They exited their vehicles, and began a slow approach.
It was a disc shaped, about forty-foot wide, twenty-five-foot high through its center. The entire object was luminous, admitting mostly white-light with irregular swirls of various other colors (red, blue, and yellow) moving over its surface. There were no apparent, doors or windows, and no “landing-gear”.

They were within thirty-feet of it, when it rose slowly from the ground, completely silent, paused at about fifty-feet in the air for a moment, then “Whoosh” it streaked up and out of sight in a flash.

Afterward, while discussing what they had just witnessed, dispatch broke over their radios calling for them to respond. They were informed that they had both been “radio-silent” for over an hour. Dispatch had not received any of their car-to-car communication from the time they had begun their excursion. It was mutually decided not to make an official report about the events that had transpired.