The Fishersville Landing: Horace Burns on Route 250

Monday, December 21, 1964. The winter solstice. Around 5 p.m. in the Shenandoah Valley, the light was going.

Horace Burns, a gunsmith from Harrisonburg, was driving east on US Route 250. He had left Staunton behind and was heading toward Fishersville, in Augusta County, Virginia.

Then it appeared. An enormous object came from the north and descended slowly in a gradual slant. Burns described a huge cone, like an upside down spinning top. He put it at about 125 feet in diameter and 80 to 90 feet high. It looked metallic. A bluish glow shone underneath.

It narrowly missed the power lines and crossed the highway about 200 feet ahead of his car. His engine cut out. The car drifted to a stop. The object came down gently in a field to his right. Burns saw no doors, no windows, no landing gear, no occupants.

For 60 to 90 seconds it sat there. Then it rose straight up several hundred feet, made a sound like rushing air, and shot off to the northeast, vanishing from sight.

Nine days later, Ernest G. Gehman came to the field with a Geiger counter. He was a professor at Eastern Mennonite College, head of its UFO Investigators Club and a NICAP member. He reported over 60,000 counts per minute. The Center for UFO Studies records that day's reading as 16 to 18 milliR/hr, taken with Harry M. Cook.

On January 12, 1965, Project Blue Book sent T/Sgt David N. Moody and S/Sgt Harold T. Jones from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Moody's survey meter found no significant radiation. Gehman objected. He said Moody readjusted the meter whenever the needle started to rise.

Moody questioned Burns several times. The story never changed. Blue Book director Maj. Hector Quintanilla phoned Burns himself and later wrote that he sensed no hoax or trick. The report noted that Burns "exhibited no indications of suffering from mental disorders." Still, the verdict read: "No evidence to support the occurrence of a UFO landing." Blue Book argued that an object that large could not have landed there without anyone else seeing it.

Others were watching the sky. At about 4:50 p.m. that same day, 14-year-old Kenneth Norton Jr. saw a cigar-shaped object from his bedroom window in Staunton. Nearly 50 sightings followed between December 1964 and May 1965. On January 19, 1965, at Brand's Flats off the same highway, William Blackburn reported a landing and three beings about 3 feet tall. Not every story held. Three boys later admitted their small green man was a hoax.

The case is filed under Harrisonburg, where Burns lived. NICAP lists it among its electromagnetic effects cases. The Center for UFO Studies uses it to illustrate the close encounter of the second kind, suggesting the falling readings possibly indicated a radionuclide with a 3 to 4 day half-life. Jacques Vallée catalogued it in Passport to Magonia. In 2023, WHSV revisited it in the special When UFO's Invaded the Valley. The radiation question was never settled. Neither was the question of what Burns saw.