The Great UFO Wave:
October, 1973

Police Tell UFO Sighters: Give It A Rest

Wednesday, October 17, 1973
The Cincinnati Enquirer

By Ira Brock of The Enquirer Staff

Persons young and old believeable and unbelievable, kept on seeing strange things in the skies Tuesday night.

Cincinnati Police Sgt. Raymond Davis of Station X said he wished those people would find something else to do.

"We're getting more calls than we can handle from people who're 'just seeing things' instead of UFOs (unidentified flying objects)" said the sergeant.

One such call in the present hysteria of UFOs told Cincinnati police one of the mystery machines of the sky had landed on railroad tracks near the 2500 block of Beekman Street.

Police couldn't locate it. Neither could a resident of Beekman, who said, somewhat disgustedly, that he "never heard of anything as silly as that."

Cincinnati police weren't the only law enforcement agencies receiving telephone reports of UFOs.

Kenton County officers got a call that a UFO was seen "down around the river near the airport" and those police took it for granted the report wasn't to be taken literally.

Kenton County police also were informed that a UFO was acting above Wright Road.

Campbell County police received no UFO reports and astral phenomenon apparently was no problem there.

But down state in Munfordville, not too far from Mammoth Cave, city officials asked their civil defense director to get together with the military about the area's abundance of UFOs.

The unexplained goings on (they're unexplained because nobody has explained them) were reported in parts of Indiana and practically every section of Greater Cincinnati.

It was reported at Connersville, Ind., that 50 persons at a factory saw a UFO land behind the plant at a government restricted facility, stay there a half hour and then take off.

The author of that report was a man who identified himself as Don Worley, a spotter for Aero Phenomenon Research Organization of Tucson, Ariz., who said he missed the show.

Seeing what they took to be UFOs were many, many persons in Westwood, Finneytown, Mt. Lookout, Springdale, Hyde Park, Sayler Park and Maineville in Warren County, plus other viewpoints.

Dave Rockman, 17, 11711 Cascade Rd., Springdale, said his UFO was kind of oval, but kind of flat on top and bottom.

"It zipped back and forth, east to west, very rapidly," Dave said, "pausing at each end of its zip, and then disappeared."

A grandmother of Hyde Park said she saw her UFO over the Oakley area, and it moved leisurely, was oval shaped, elongated and thin, "standing on end."

She added it had a group of "maybe 50 red lights, like tail-lights, in no identifiable pattern."

Dan Lorey, a science teacher at Summit Country Day School, unintentionally made a UFO believer out of one of his eighth grade students, Frank Prudent, 13, 2919 Dunaway Ave., Westwood.

The teacher "has his students working on astronomy and Tuesday he advised them to get outside after dark and study the stars.

"I began the 'assignment' almost as soon as it got dar," Frank said. "I saw this flat thing with white lights all around. It stayed still for 10 minutes, moved from south to north, stopped and backed up, stayed 10 more minutes and went away.

He said he hoped his science teacher would grade him "a" when he tells the class about it today.