The Portage County UFO Chase

Spring 1966. Weeks earlier, the Air Force had been publicly ridiculed over its explanations for a wave of sightings in Michigan. Then came a chase in Ohio. This time most of the witnesses wore badges.

Sunday, 17 April 1966. About 5:00 a.m. Deputy Dale Spaur and Wilbur "Barney" Neff stopped on State Route 224 in Portage County to check what looked like an abandoned car. Behind them, something rose from the woods. "As it came over the trees, I looked at Barney and he was still watching the car.. and he didn't say nothing and the thing kept getting brighter."

It lit up both men and the whole area. It was "very bright; it'd make your eyes water," and it made "a hum...like a transformer being loaded or an overloaded transformer." Spaur put it at about 40 feet wide and 18 feet high. Then it moved: "it came straight south, just one motion, buddy, just a smooth glide."

They radioed in and were told to follow it. The patrol car raced east along Route 224 at over 100 mph, the object 300 to 500 feet above, moving from side to side. At times, the officers said, it "actually stopped and waited for them to catch up to it." In East Palestine, Officer H. Wayne Huston joined the pursuit.

Near Conway, Pennsylvania, the patrol car stopped. So did the object. Conway officer Frank Panzanella saw it: "The object was the shape of half a football, was very bright and about 25 to 35 feet in diameter." Around 6:10 a.m. it left. Spaur: "it went PSSSSSHHEW, straight up; it didn't play no games; it went straight up." Panzanella watched it climb "until it got as small as a ballpoint pen."

Project Blue Book's Maj. Hector Quintanilla called Spaur. According to Patrick Gross, the call began: "tell me about this mirage you saw." On 22 April Quintanilla told Sheriff Ross Dustman the deputies had seen an Echo satellite, then chased Venus. The finding: "astronomical phenomenon." In Mantua, Chief Gerald Buchert had photographed the object. The Air Force reportedly told him not to release it. It has never been published.

NICAP investigator William B. Weitzel rebutted the Air Force point by point in a letter to Congressman J. William Stanton. Stanton pressed the Air Force, saying it had suffered "a great loss of prestige." Quintanilla interviewed Spaur and Neff in Ravenna but refused to change the finding, although they said they had seen Venus separately. J. Allen Hynek pushed for withdrawal. The Air Force replied that "the original evaluation should stand."

In October 1966, the Daily Kent Stater reported a claim by Kent State students that they had launched a balloon. Spaur doubted it. The object moved smoothly and deliberately, he said. It did not flutter like a balloon. Critics of the Venus explanation point to a low, humming object that lit the ground, stopped, and climbed straight up.

By October 1966 Spaur was divorced, out of police work and living in a hotel in Solon. "I have become a freak...I'm so damn lonely," he said. He died on 4 April 1983. Neff's wife remembered him after the chase: "He was real white, almost in a state of shock."

In 1977, the police chase in Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind was reportedly modelled on this case. The Air Force verdict still stands. So do the officers' accounts.