The Uintah Basin UFO Wave

The Uintah Basin is a high, remote basin in northeastern Utah, between the Uinta Mountains and the Tavaputs Plateau. Its main towns are Roosevelt and Vernal. Its people were mostly rural Latter-day Saint ranchers, farmers and oil workers.

By early 1966, Joseph "Junior" Hicks, a junior-high science teacher in Roosevelt, had become the local UFO authority. In October 1966 he approached Frank B. Salisbury, a plant physiologist and exobiologist, after a talk on Mars. Salisbury began interviewing witnesses in 1968. By his count, 88.75% of the sightings fell between summer 1965 and winter 1968. The peak came in late 1966 and 1967.

On September 26, 1966, Kent Denver and others watched "a red ball of fire dance around on the horizon for about 30 minutes." Verl and Leah Haslem, driving home, saw "a brilliant red object hovering above their house." It left "like a meteor in reverse." Joe Ann Harris met a craft "at least 50 feet in diameter, flat on the bottom with a dome on top." Estel Manwaring saw it too, with "brilliant lights flashing around the rim."

Thyrena Daniels was driving after dark. A huge sphere glowing red, with "bluish to reddish 'flames' spouting out horizontally from each side," stayed 100 to 200 feet away. It went ahead of her car for nearly 30 miles. Vernal to Roosevelt.

Near Pelican Lake, at sunset, Morlin Buchanan and Richard Faucett followed what looked like a "perfectly spherical balloon with a 'string' hanging from below." They drove about 8 miles. The string was a "column of spinning dust." It was "sucked rapidly into the object, which then disappeared with a flash of light."

Late one night, Leland and Jody Mecham and Dee Hullinger and his wife watched an object near the horizon. "Beams of light seemed to be emanating toward the ground." The Hullingers saw it "spin once on its axis and shoot into the sky with high velocity."

Daylight brought its own cases. Curtis, Kevin and Bevin Ercanbrack got within 50 to 100 feet of a "large silver object hovering in the field" before it left. In Roosevelt, the Clyde McDonald children said a Ouija board had predicted an appearance at 8:00 p.m. above Roosevelt Hospital. A "glowing red sphere" showed up as predicted. Their parents and other townspeople saw it.

In 1974 Salisbury published The Utah UFO Display: A Biologist's Report, with a foreword by J. Allen Hynek. In BioScience in 1975 he wrote that the cases had "such a high strangeness index that it seems virtually impossible to think of them as misinterpreted natural phenomena or as secret weapons." He went further. "Having talked with the witnesses, I cannot personally accept the idea that they might have been lying or hallucinating, although I cannot prove that they were not."

In 1978, USDA researchers Philip S. Callahan and R. W. Mankin offered another answer. Insects placed in strong electric fields glowed. They argued the basin's night display was "partially due to mass swarms of spruce budworms," lit up like St. Elmo's fire, and reported "excellent time and spatial correlation" with an infestation.

Hicks kept listening. In 1996 he told the Deseret News he had investigated more than 400 sightings since the early 1950s. "I'd estimate over 10 percent of the population of the Uintah Basin has seen something," he said. A second edition of Salisbury's book followed in 2010. Today the wave is remembered as the ground zero of Skinwalker Ranch, the property between Ballard and Roosevelt.