The Cherry Creek "Terrified Bull" Landing

Summer 1965. Cherry Creek is a small town in Chautauqua County, in the far west of New York State. On Aldrich Road stood the dairy farm of William Butcher. Thursday evening, 19 August. About 8:20 p.m. Harold Butcher, 16, was in the barn running the milking machine, powered by a tractor motor. The radio was tuned to WKBW out of Buffalo, a station that normally came in clearly.

Then the radio filled with static. The tractor motor cut out. A three-year-old bull, tied by its nose to a metal pipe, made a noise Harold later described as "like I have never heard come from an animal before." He looked out the window. The bull was bending the pipe.

Something was coming down. A large elliptical object, metallic-looking, shaped like a football. It was estimated at 50 feet long and 20 feet thick, with vertical seams. A reddish vapor came from around its edges. As it neared the ground it gave off a "beep-beep" sound. It descended slowly and hovered just above tree level.

After a brief hover, it left. "As fast as the snap of my fingers," Harold said. The red vapor shot toward the ground and bounced back toward the object. The noise pitch rose to something approximating a sonic boom. The craft climbed into the low clouds, and where it vanished, the clouds showed a greenish glow.

It was not finished. Harold's brother Robert came out, and the two boys saw it reappear, hovering over a pine grove before climbing again. It returned at 8:45 and 9:00 p.m., the last time with a glowing yellow vapor trail, and finally disappeared to the southwest. Mrs. William Butcher and other children of the household were also named as witnesses.

The next day, the family found traces. Patches of singed grass. Marks measuring 2 by 2 inches. A purple, oily smelling liquid, a sample of which Harold gave to the state police. There had been a strange odour. Harold and his younger sister had upset stomachs. The cows gave only one can of milk that evening, rather than the normal 2 ½ cans.

State police came that evening. Air Force personnel from Niagara Falls later inspected the site. NICAP member Jeffrey Gow found foot-tall grass "bent over in long curved sweeps." At Lockport Air Force Station, Sgt G. A. Reggie of the 763rd Radar Squadron logged a brief FPS-6 return near the upper limit, far from Cherry Creek.

Project Blue Book classified it as Unidentified. Don Berliner listed it among Blue Book unknowns. NICAP filed it under electromagnetic effects, animal reaction, medical, trace and radar. APRO and the Center for UFO Studies also hold files.

No hoax claim has ever been made, and no conventional explanation has been offered. Locally, the family was believed. Those reporting the sighting "seemed convincing… too rustic to be able to create a hoax of this sort." People remembered how shaken up the boy was, and that he was not alone. Questions remain. No analysis of the purple liquid has been published. Distance estimates range from about 450 feet to a quarter of a mile. The radar log only partly overlaps the sighting.

John G. Fuller covered the case in Incident at Exeter, J. Allen Hynek in The Hynek UFO Report, and Kevin Randle in Levelland, among cases of engine failure. Donald Keyhoe and Gordon Lore titled their chapter "Bull Bends Pipe." In 2017, The Post-Journal called it "probably the most famous" UFO story in Chautauqua County. Decades later, Harold Butcher retold it on camera.