Forum Flashbacks: Oct. 3-9
MARYVILLE DAILY FORUM, OCT. 6, 1999
25 YEARS AGO: Northwest Readers – In their yearly trips to Eugene Field Elementary School, Northwest Missouri State University Bearcat football players take up books instead of footballs and read to third-grade students. More than 10 players showed up at the school Friday for this year’s visit. No. 39, Jeff LeBlanc, reads to (from left to right) Spencer Twaddle, Drew Christian and Tanner Walter.
50 years ago
Maryville Daily Forum, Oct. 5, 1974
Original editor’s note: Mrs. Patti Easterla wrote the following story for submission to a magazine but she is letting the Daily Forum publish it first. An amateur astronomer, Mrs. Easterla sighted UFO’s through her telescope last year along with many other local residents.
…The first call came into the Maryville public safety department on Oct. 18, 1973, at 2 a.m. Public safety officers Basil Owens and Lloyd Smith answered the call. …
Resting in the sky east of Maryville above the plant in which they worked was an oval-shaped object which alternated red, green and white lights.
As Owens and Smith watched, the object began to move eastward. The two public safety officers returned to their patrol car and pursued the object. About five miles out of Maryville, Owens flicked on his radio to speak and found nothing but static. …
This was not to be Owens’ last encounter with the strange object because exactly two nights later, Oct. 20, he and Sgt. Bill Wright sighted a flashing object to the southeast of Maryville. Two officers contacted Chief Clifford Dotson who, along with officer Mike Wilson, drove where Wright and Owens were waiting. The two cars, with Dotson in the lead, followed the object, which was moving westward.
Chief Dotson, now deceased, described the pursuit: “The object appeared to come to a lower altitude as we pursued it. It seemed to be in close range of the patrol car. At 60 miles per hour we gained on it so I dropped back to 50 m.p.h. to follow it — and it was scary.”
“Owens and Wright were behind me within a quarter-mile range and we were talking car to car. We began to experience a crackling-like static and then suddenly lost all contact for about three or four minutes.” …
“We thought there might possibly be a dead spot. We did go back the next day to the same area. We had perfect contact.” …
The object flashed blue, white, green and red. “The action,” Dotson reported, “appeared to be something like a top. It had the capabilities of rising in altitude and coming down immediately.”
The two cars followed the object to Ravenwood, nine miles from Maryville. There the object began to rise in altitude. It ceased to blink and became a greenish-blue light surrounded by a halo. …
His voice dropped and when he continued, the sincerity with which he spoke was obvious. “I must be honest with you. I am a non-believer — or was. This was the only thing that actually … it didn’t upset me … but it really did put me to thinking because it was so much brighter than the moon and its speed when it finally moved out was so incredible.”
The four officers were not the only people to see the globe burning in the sky that night. Sheriffs at Worth County, Harrison County and Gentry County also viewed the strange object.
The scene was to become even stranger for as the men watched, a second object approached from the southwest. It was agreed by all who had watched that the object, smaller than the first object, was a dark, unblinking red and a horizontal teardrop in shape.
“When it got to where it appeared to be in front of us,” Dotson recounted, “it veered off to the object that was stationary. When it came into the immediate area of the big one, it disappeared like the flash of an eye.”
“I thought the little one went into the big one,” was Sgt. Wright’s accounting. “It either went into it or behind it and disappeared. About 15-20 minutes later I heard somebody say ‘There the object is again,’ and I looked up and it was coming out from the big object again. It went right directly in front of the moon and headed north.”
The men watched the large object for a total of 45 minutes to an hour from the time they arrived in Ravenwood until the object disappeared. Wright commented on the globe’s disappearance: “All of a sudden it looked like the whole thing turned white — like a great big white bulb. Then it started fading out and pretty soon it just vanished.” …
Public safety officer Gary McMahon, the official photographer for the department, was called at home by the dispatcher and told that another UFO had been sighted. “As I went out of the house, I grabbed my camera off the piano.”
A more qualified man could not have grabbed that camera. McMahon, 34 years old and a lifetime resident of Maryville, spent four years in the Air Force. As an Air Force photographer, he did reconnaissance and high altitude photography, took crash scene photographs and worked with infrared and flare photography.
On this particular night, two miles east of Maryville, he sighted the large oval object beneath the moon. McMahon leaned out of the car window and shot three pictures with his Kalimar 2R200, single lens reflex camera, using high speed ektachrome film.
“A photographer always wonders how the picture will come out. When I got the slides back and flashed them on the wall, WOW!” In all three pictures the large greenish-blue object appears exactly as described to me by the officers of the Maryville public safety department.
The last sighting of UFO’s by the department occurred at about 8 p.m. one early November evening. The calm of the Maryville office was broken by the entrance of three hysterical Northwest State University coeds, obviously under great duress.
“One was crying, and one was hollering,” Sgt. Wright remembers. “They said they had crested a hill at Midway, about 16 miles south of Maryville on U.S. 71, and right there in front of them was a big ball of fire. They thought it was going to run into them. They stopped until this thing passed over them. Then they got scared, they turned around and came back to Maryville.”
Sgt. Wright and officer Bob Seipel left immediately for the location. Finding nothing at Midway, the two men searched the area. Finally they gave up and turned back toward Maryville.
Five miles out of Maryville, Officer Seipel glanced back.
“My God, what’s that red light!” he exclaimed, at the same time hitting the floorboard on his knees.
“I thought it was a trooper light or something,” Wright said. “I pulled to the side of the road and looked back and here this big red light as. I thought it was right on top of us.”
The object was oval in shape. As the two men watched, it moved straight up and hovered above them. “It sat there for 10 or 15 minutes,” Wright said, “and all this time I was trying to contact Maryville on my walkie-talkie. Normally we can call easily from this distance but on this night I couldn’t raise anyone. All I had was static.”
When finally it began to move, the object began to change colors just as the objects in the two previous sightings had done. …
During the time of Wright and Seipel’s sighting, Officer McMahon, in a patrol car in Maryville, was attempting to contact Wright. “I could hear a rattling but I couldn’t get him. But Herb (another patrolman located two miles north of Maryville) could talk to me just fine.”
As McMahon watched the sky, he sighted the multi-colored, blinking object moving north toward him. “It got about a mile south of Maryville,” he related, “it made a right angle turn, and when it got just below the moon, there were three flashes from what looked like a strobe light, and a green flare dropped out the bottom.”
By this time McMahon and Wright were talking on the radio and seeing the same thing. “Two white things came out of the bottom,” recounted McMahon. “The big thing took off west as fast as it could go. One of the white things went southwest and the other went east. They crossed paths. That’s when I went home.”
Asked later how he felt about what he’d seen, McMahon laughed, ran his hand over his head and said, “I didn’t know what to say. As I told Herb Childers that night, I’m going to go home and get underneath the bed.”
Wright, who had seen two of the three sightings, had this to say: “The first time didn’t shake me up, although I did wonder what in the world type of machine could do this. But the second time, when I saw the red light and I couldn’t get anyone on the walkie-talkie, a point of frantic came over me. I didn’t know whether that thing was going to come down and … and get Bob or not. It wasn’t going to get me because I was driving and I was going to get the hell out of there! That was frightening to both Bob and me.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: The 50-year flashback is courtesy of the Missouri Digital Newspaper Project from the State Historical Society of Missouri, accessible at shsmo.newspapers.com.
