National UFO Sighting Report

Volume 1, Issue 1 - January 1995

Dedicated to the collection and distribution of objective UFO information.

Welcome to the first issue of the National UFO Reporting Center Newsletter!

I would like to begin by expressing my gratitude to all of our subscribers on two scores. First, the Center is grateful to the many individuals who have provided support through their subscriptions to our Newsletter, the purchase of our information packets and video tape, and through their contributions. To no less a degree, we are grateful to those individuals who have reported their sightings to the Center, without whose efforts we would not be able to perform our services at all...

Second, we are indebted to you all for your patience in awaiting the first issue of the Newsletter! When I officially announced the beginning of the Newsletter on February 19 of this year during a national radio show, I thought I would be able to generate the first issue within 1-2 months, in addition to being able to carry out the daily responsibilities/duties of running the Center and its UFO Hotline. When I got down to the "nuts and bolts" of obtaining all the necessary computer gear, securing assistance with both the hardware and software, and performing the myriad other tasks demanded of our small cadre of inveterate volunteers, the task of generating a first-class newsletter became much more daunting than I had anticipated!

In any event, through the efforts of many dedicated and helpful individuals, including all of our subscribers, the task is underway, and the first monthly issue is in your hands. Other subsequent issues should follow in fairly rapid succession, perhaps on a weekly basis, until we have caught up to date.

What will the Newsletter be, and what subjects will it address?

The principal objective of the Newsletter will be to provide its readers with summary information regarding the UFO sightings reported to the Center during each calendar month. Since it sometimes takes several weeks for a sighting to be reported to the Center's Hotline and for us to corroborate it to at least a minimal degree, each issue of the Newsletter should be in the mail not later than 2-3 weeks following the end of the month.

What can the readers do to help our efforts?

Thanks largely to the extensive and excellent public relations work performed over the last two decades by Mr. Robert J. Gribble, the founder of the National UFO Reporting Center, our facility has been built into one of the most well known and widely accepted "clearinghouses" for UFO-related information. However, despite the Center's wide reputation, there still are some areas of the country in which people, wishing to report their UFO sightings, often have to make several calls before they learn of us. Hence, everyone who knows about our existence and our mission can help spread the word so that a broader community will know about us. Obviously, we can distribute only the data we receive, so if we are to extend our coverage of UFO sightings, we will benefit from wider public awareness of our facility.

What does the future hold for the Center?

Due to the many forms of new technology that have emerged in the recent past, the future of the Center's services and activities is exciting. Our objective, simply stated, will be to provide the American people with a facility where they will be able to report their sightings, and where they will be taken seriously by a staff of experienced professionals familiar with the UFO phenomenon.

To an equal degree, it will be the objective of the Center to continue its long-standing policy of making its information available, at a reasonable cost, to anyone who wishes it. This latter point may be the principal difference between the National UFO Reporting Center, and other UFO organizations which collect UFO case data.

In addition to the objectives outlined above, the Center is exploring several other projects, which will serve to help spread the word about UFO's. One of the projects we are very excited about is the development of a wide-area UFO detection system, which will permit the tracking of UFO's in the Earth's atmosphere. The tracking system capitalizes on the fact that UFO's are often reported to leave glowing "tails" behind themselves when they streak through the atmosphere. Whereas UFO's appear to have conscious control over whether they appear on radar, they seem unable to "conceal" their "tails," which can be detected using reflected radio waves. We will keep our readers advised as to how this project progresses.

In conclusion, we thank you for your support of the Center, and we hope you enjoy the newsletter and other services we provide. If you have suggestions, comments, or any other constructive criticism, please feel free to communicate with us. Since we prefer to reserve the Hotline for incoming UFO sighting reports, it would be helpful to us if you communicate in writing, or over the Internet. Our email address is ufocntr@nwlink.com. If your call is urgent, we will accept it briefly over the Hotline, but please understand that we may have to truncate it if we have to take an incoming UFO report.

We look forward to serving you in this most fascinating field of UFO research!

FEATURED CASE DESCRIPTIONS

McMinnville, TN (January 7, 1995)

Many of the subscribers to the newsletter already have received the informational packet we have been sending out during recent months, which contains the eight-page fax message from the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency (TEMA) regarding the peculiar and dramatic UFO sighting, flash, and explosion that occurred over McMinnville, TN, at 7:30 p.m. (local) on Saturday night, January 7, 1995. The seemingly incredible aspect of this case is that over four months after the incident, the case is still unresolved, and members of the press - both print and electronic - apparently have not covered the story at all!

For those of our readers who may not have read the original fax the Center received from TEMA shortly after the incident, a brief summary is as follows: In the vicinity of Shellsford and Irving College, TN, both on the outskirts of McMinnville in Warren County, TN, many citizens reported to the local "911" emergency switchboard that they had witnessed strange lights - red, green, and blue - below the thin overcast, which descended slowly and almost vertically to earth. The red light visible was the largest, with at least two smaller green lights above it. They were reported by many witnesses to be like "roman candles" (a type of 4th of July firework). Some of the witnesses who called the Warren Co. "911" switchboard described the objects as "huge," and although different witnesses described the lights slightly differently from one another, they all agreed that multiple, brightly lighted, bizarre-looking objects were descending slowly toward the ground. Some reported that one or both of the two green "clusters" of lights "exploded into fragments." Then, after the colored lights descended low enough to disappear from all observers' line of sight, an intense white flash occurred which was bright enough to be blinding. At least one person stated that he had heard the explosion concommitant to the flash.

The fax then goes on to state that at least one individual who had seen the flash from the explosion rushed to the local airport and took off in a private aircraft in attempt to assess from the air the damage he assumed would have been caused by an explosion of that magnitude. Remarkably, he observed nothing noteworthy - no fires, or other damage - and returned to the airport after several minutes of searching the area.

Current status of the case? All information received by the Center has been forwarded to the TN State Director of the Mutual UFO Network and to other parties in the state. During my last conversation with the MUFON director, she stated her intention to pursue the incident on all fronts. One of the aspects of the case she will investigate is the reports we have had from more than one source that "federal agents" were in the McMinville area within hours of the explosion, reportedly attempting to prevail on local officials to say nothing about the incident! One of our sources on this matter we consider to be extremely reliable.

In any event, please "stay tuned," because if and when we receive more facts about this case, we will be sure to share them with you.

La Crosse, WA (December 29, 1994)

Even though this sighting did not occur during January 1995, I want to cover it here because it is so interesting and well reported. At approximately 2145 hours on Thursday night, December 29, 1994, a mother (with her six children) was driving north on the Zaring Cut-Off Road in southeastern Washington State, just 5 miles north of the Snake River. Several of her children suddenly started shouting, and called the mother's attention to three extraordinarily bright lights above a recently harvested (?) wheat field off to the right (east) side of the road. At first they thought the lights were the landing lights of an airliner at low altitude, perhaps making a forced landing in the field, and flying directly toward them. Then one of the older children suggested the lights were (the headlights on) a "semi" (an 18-wheel truck), but they almost immediately realized that description didn't "fit," either.

Suddenly, the family began to see the objects that were attached to the three lights, and they were awed by the vision! They saw three coal black, delta-shaped craft, with articulating structures on their noses, from which the blinding lights were radiating. They appeared to be scanning the ground ahead of them. The objects, apparently locked in tight, unwavering formation, slowly drifted across the road (and car) at very low speed, slowly turned left (south) and proceeded south parallel to the road the family was on.

The mother submitted an excellent 3-page report, together with a drawing of one of the crafts she reportedly witnessed that night. In addition, she submitted a detailed drawing of the area and the approximate flight path of the objects.

Drawing of La Crosse, Washington ship provided by witness

The mother reported that the objects were right above their car, they gave off a barely perceptible humming sound ("...like an electric refrigerator..."), and they were close enough that a "person with a good throwing arm could have hit them with a rock." When I talked with her on January 01, 1995, (Our first call of the year), she was still seemingly upset by the experience. She volunteered that she was frightened to either drive, or even go outside, after dark, which is not uncommon among people who have had recent UFO experiences.

(Note: Ships of quite similar shape have been reported to the Center from all over the country. In the upcoming February newsletter we will discuss similar cases reported from Denmark, WI, and Capitola, CA.)

McKinleyville, CA (January 15, 1995)

As if the torrential rains over California during early 1995 were not enough, the residents there experienced a number of intriguing UFO sightings, as well. Perhaps the most dramatic was a sighting report we took from a man in McKinleyville, CA, located on the Pacific Coast just south of the Oregon border. He reported that at about 0230 hrs. on Sunday morning, January 15, 1995, he was awakened by barking dogs in his neighborhood, and he went outdoors to smoke a cigarette. As he was smoking, he peered up at the storm clouds overhead, and his attention was immediately drawn to a cluster of perhaps twelve "cobalt blue" objects in a loose formation, which appeared to be flitting between the tops of two adjacent storm cells. After several minutes had elapsed, one of the objects appeared to climb to a higher altitude. After having risen (seemingly) to a considerably higher altitude than the other blue objects, it appeared to hover briefly, at which point it was joined by a cluster of considerably smaller, distinctly green objects, which appeared to streak in from all directions at high altitude. The smaller, green objects suddenly "locked" in formation with the blue object, at which point the formation proceeded to drift west out over the Pacific Ocean. The observer reported that he watched this process of assembly take place perhaps a dozen times over the course of approximately 45 minutes, at which point he became tired of the spectacle and went back to bed!

(Note--Over the last nine months, the Center has received a number of calls regarding alleged sightings of formations of large numbers of bizarre objects or lights in the sky. Among the most dramatic was an hour-long telephone report received on October 16, 1994, from southern Michigan, during which up to 50 (!) strange, round, brightly lighted objects were visible in the sky. The telephoned report was tape recorded, and is very dramatic.)

Brief Notes...

1) The call from Rodney, MI, on January 04 (Please see enclosed sighting-report summary) was rather convincing, and was quite similar to the sightings reported in McMinnville, TN, three days later. A mother and daughter reported witnessing up to a dozen, delta-shaped craft hovering near their home, which appeared to be beaming "bluish" shafts of light down to the ground. The mother had called once before (16NO95) from Meceola County regarding a daytime sighting of a huge triangular ship, together with a "boiling cluster of little red things" nearby, along Interstate 31 in central Michigan. The Rodney, MI, police emergency dispatch center had called prior to the woman's call to apprise the Center in Seattle of the incident. Moreover, the incident was further corroborated by a seemingly quite reliable source in Potoski, MI, who, with two other family members, had seen a similar (or same?) object further north in Michigan just prior to the sighting further south near Rodney. The reliability to these reports, for various reasons, looks very good to us at the Center. The data are in the hands of investigators in Michigan.

2) The report from Warm Beach, WA, on January 07, 1995, which was submitted by a party known to this writer, was accompanied several weeks later, by one of the most dramatic and intriguing UFO photographs I have ever witnessed. The color photograph, apparently taken at high speed, shows two parallel, pulsed streaks of light curving across the field of view of the camera and descending into an evergreen forest, which is brightly illuminated. I will try to get permission from the photographer to publish the photo in a future issue of the newsletter.

That's all for this month. The next issue should follow very soon. In the meantime, keep your eyes open, and feel free to share this newsletter with your friends.

Peter B. Davenport, Director

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