Damon, Texas: The Brazoria County Deputies' Sighting

Friday night, September 3, 1965. Brazoria County, Texas. Chief Deputy Billy Edwin McCoy, 38, and Patrol Deputy Robert "Bob" Goode, 50, had worked security at the Sweeny Bulldogs' home football game. Afterwards they patrolled Texas State Highway 36, heading south out of Damon toward West Columbia. Goode was driving. McCoy rode beside him.

Earlier that day a baby alligator had bitten Goode on his left index finger. It seemed like a small detail at the time. It would come up again.

Around 11 p.m. a purple light appeared on the horizon to the southwest, some 5 to 6 miles away. A smaller blue light emerged from it, moved to the right and stopped. "Both lights had apparently risen simultaneously slightly above the horizon level," McCoy recalled. Then the lights swooped toward them. They covered the distance in 1 to 2 seconds and stopped practically overhead. NICAP placed the object 150 feet off the highway and 100 feet in the air.

Now they could see it. In McCoy's statement it "appeared to be triangular shaped with a bright purple light on the left end and the smaller, less bright, blue light on the right end." It was dark gray, "about 200 feet wide and 40 to 50 feet thick in the middle, tapering off toward both ends." There was no noise. No trail. The purple light lit the grass below and the inside of the patrol car. "That thing was right on top us," McCoy said.

The moon was out. The object cast a shadow on the grass beneath it. Goode felt strong heat on his left arm, through his shirt-sleeve. For 10 to 15 seconds it hovered. Then Goode drove, reaching speeds of up to 110 miles per hour.

Behind them, the object shot back the way it had come. It went straight up and disappeared at 25 to 30 degrees above the horizon. Later that night the deputies went back. The purple light was on the horizon again. Again the blue light emerged, with a strange two-step motion, and floated upward. Again they fled. By the next day Goode's alligator bite was nearly healed, with almost no scarring.

The deputies reported the sighting to Ellington AFB. On September 8, 1965, Maj. Laurence Leach Jr. interviewed both men, and McCoy wrote his statement. "There is no doubt in my mind that they definitely saw some unusual object or phenomenon," Leach reported. He described them as "intelligent, mature, level-headed persons capable of sound judgment and reasoning." Project Blue Book classified the case as Unknown. NICAP also questioned the deputies, and the case appeared in its 1969 report UFOs: A New Look, co-edited by Donald Keyhoe.

No one has ever alleged a hoax, and no conventional explanation has been published. Some details are still debated, though. Commenters on The Big Study blog argued that the moon that night was only first-quarter and low in the sky, which does not match McCoy's memory of an almost full moon. The blog's author read "triangular" as a head-on silhouette, "a flying flattened pyramid," and speculated that near-UV or infrared light could explain the heat and the healed bite. Later stories about Men in Black have no contemporary record in the Blue Book, NICAP or APRO files.

That same night, police in Exeter, New Hampshire, reported their own low, silent object with pulsing lights. The Brazoria County Historical Museum holds a 1985 taped interview with McCoy. In 2015 KHOU in Houston returned to the story. McCoy's son Kevin, who was eight in 1965, said his father "never questioned himself, he never said maybe. I never heard him say anything other than absolutely we saw something."