The Fyffe, Alabama Triangle Sightings

Fyffe is a small town on Sand Mountain in DeKalb County, northeast Alabama. February 1989. The exact night is still debated. The Anniston Star puts the police sighting on February 10, a Friday, which fits Assistant Police Chief Fred Works's memory of a Friday night. Other accounts give February 11 and 12.

Works was finishing his shift. The dispatcher passed on a woman's report. A light in the sky. It was not moving. Works and Chief Charles "Junior" Garmany drove toward Kelly's Chapel. The light "looked like a streetlight in the distance, but it was out of place." Then it began to move. It went southeast toward Geraldine, drifted southward toward Collinsville and disappeared across the valley. The Geraldine police chief saw an object too. He said it "looked like a blimp to me."

The officers agreed to meet on Sand Mountain for a better view. Then a radio call. A craft was flying "low and fast" over Crossville.

Works and Garmany pulled into a farmer's circular driveway on a hillside. "I saw a craft flying, coming straight at us over the treeline," Works said. "It was apparent that it was going to fly right over us." He asked Garmany to switch off the car engine. "It was deadly silent." The object passed overhead at about 300 mph, on its way toward Guntersville.

Works described a thick, charcoal-colored triangle with rounded corners. The two officers called it metallic and bigger than a jumbo jet, about 2,000 to 3,000 feet wide. Directly overhead, it would have taken a beach ball held at arm's length to block it. One witness saw it hovering at an angle, "from 1 o'clock to 7 o'clock," with bright lights at the top and bottom and a real bright light in the center. The curvature was outlined in green. Garmany put it plainly in 1989. "It was not a helicopter, it was not a plane. Not a sound."

Residents called the Birmingham and Huntsville airports, Marshall Space Flight Center, Maxwell Air Force Base and the National Weather Service. None of them could explain it. Over 100 news organizations converged on Fyffe. On one watch night, more than 4,000 people came. Cloud and light rain. They saw nothing.

Ridicule followed. Local media mocked one resident's "banana-shaped" description, and sellers turned up with banana-shaped earrings. A Jacksonville State University student reporter, Matt Brooks, called the townspeople "a bunch of country hicks." The paper later ran an editorial apology. Works said reporters tried to "put words in my mouth."

No formal military or government investigation is on record. Works himself was hesitant to call it a UFO. He thought it was "probably government [property] or something," perhaps "some kind of new craft that we might know about 10 years in the future." Locals ruled out a prank, since the craft was seen over Geraldine before it reached Fyffe. No hoax confession and no named skeptic's analysis have surfaced.

In 1989 the Alabama State Legislature named Fyffe the "UFO Capital of Alabama." Bill Hicks talked about the sighting on Relentless. In 2004 former mayor Larry Lingerfelt started Fyffe UFO Days, held on the last Saturday of August. In 2021, as the Pentagon released its UAP report, the Anniston Star revisited the case. Garmany had died by then. Works was clear. "We saw a craft. It wasn't just lights, it was a craft, and it was not a fixed winged aircraft."