The Wytheville UFO Wave

In 1987, Danny B. Gordon was news director at WYVE, a radio station in Wytheville, Virginia. On October 7, during a routine news check, Sheriff Wayne Pike had something for him. Officers near Fort Chiswell had seen a bright red and green light in the night sky. With their military training, Pike said, they "couldn't have been easily fooled." Accounts differ on how many officers there were. None has ever been named.

On October 17, WYVE held a special call-in night. Callers described an egg shape. They described "red, green and white, sort of flashing lights."

October 21. Gordon and his friend Roger Hall saw it themselves. "Very large, dome-shaped," Gordon said. "No wings, had what appeared to be a strobe putting out multi-colored lights." A separate red ball approached and "docked with the craft." Hall put it "probably less than a 1,000 feet away." At the back he saw "three huge, looked like picture windows." Gordon's photographs that night showed nothing usable. The next night, only vague streaks of light.

Late November or early December. About 200 people at a shopping centre watched "four different aircraft flying in formation, that made no sound." This time Gordon caught four frames. Four definite shapes. Across them the lights seemed to change. A teardrop. A round ball. A flying saucer-like disc. An egg.

Residents kept calling. Patricia Aker reported 10 sightings of something with "no noise." Mary Jane Williamson saw "just a big semi-circle of white light… absolutely huge" over her house. Paul Dellinger, a Roanoke Times reporter in the same building as WYVE, saw one too. By December, more than 1,500 reports had come in.

Gordon first suspected experimental aircraft from Langley Air Force Base. The military denied it and suggested aerial refueling. Gordon says he contacted the Pentagon. An air force general told him refueling never happens "under 13,000 feet." The objects were thought to be around 5,000 feet. Most were described as silent and hovering.

Some reports did have ordinary answers. In Smyth County, a UFO said to have blasted a tree with a heat ray was a fire set to smoke out a squirrel. It built up inside the trunk "until it literally blew up." Still, no hoax finding was ever made against the wave as a whole.

Then the story turned personal. Gordon says a warning call came the night before the October 23 press conference. His home was broken into. Nothing was taken. Two men in suits posed as newspaper reporters, and the paper had no record of them. The mall negatives went missing. A caller claiming to be a retired military intelligence officer threatened his children. His wife and daughter moved out. He suffered a stress-related heart attack. These are Gordon's own accounts, unverified, and later writers tied them to the men in black.

In 1988 Gordon and Dellinger published *Don't Look Up! The Real Story Behind the Virginia UFO Sightings*. Unsolved Mysteries featured the wave in a two-hour special aired February 19, 1992. Religious-studies scholar David Halperin later read the case as a story of perception, memory and how communities respond.

Since 2022, Wytheville has held a UFO Fest, and Gordon speaks there. His warning stands. "Don't look up. Because once you look up and you tell somebody what you saw, your life is changed forever."