The 1973 US UFO Wave

The 1973 wave arrived suddenly and spread fast. Through October, reports came in from Ohio, Missouri, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and beyond, and the subject returned to the front pages of mainstream papers that had largely left it alone since the Condon Report closed Project Blue Book in 1969. The archive records the wave as a single connected event under case file CASE-185, with sightings tracked across multiple states and coverage carried in the period's newsletters.

What set 1973 apart was the weight of its witnesses. The wave did not rest on anonymous lights in the distance. It produced two close-encounter cases that have been argued over ever since, and it drew testimony from people whose word the public was inclined to trust: an Army Reserve flight crew, city and county police officers, and a state trooper. The mundane settings, a fishing spot, a highway at night, a patrol-car radio, are part of why the cases held.

In a cluster of small Alabama and Georgia towns, the people reporting the lights were the people normally called to explain them. The National Enquirer of 4 November 1973 gathered several of these accounts onto a single page under the headline "Mysterious Wave of UFOs Reported in Mass Sighting." Georgia State Trooper Sam Taylor, a Vietnam flying veteran, described an oblong object with a gentle white glow over Manchester, Georgia, and said plainly that it was "certainly no airplane, helicopter or natural phenomenon." In Carrville, Alabama, Patrolman Billy Clayton and auxiliary policeman James Smith watched an object together, joined by patrolmen Steve Segrest and Wayne Sexton from neighbouring Tallassee and Sergeant Mid Giles of Notasulga. In Auburn, policeman Al Baker pointed photographers to where he had seen a light streak across the sky.

The archive holds the underlying sighting records for this cluster, including reports filed from Falkville, Carrville, Tallassee and Notasulga. The value of these accounts is not that police make infallible observers; it is that they are trained, sober, on-record witnesses who had nothing to gain and a reputation to lose by filing a UFO report under their own names. That is the same quality that runs through the wave's landmark cases.

The wave's best-known incident came from the Gulf Coast. On 11 October, Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker reported being taken aboard a craft by robotic beings while fishing on the Pascagoula River in Mississippi, an account that survived a secretly recorded conversation between the two men while they believed they were alone. The Pascagoula abduction remains one of the most examined close-encounter cases in the record.

A week later, on the night of 18 October, an Army Reserve UH-1H Huey flying from Columbus to Cleveland reported a near-collision with an object that bathed the cabin in green light over Mansfield, Ohio. The crew of four, with ground witnesses below, made the Coyne helicopter encounter one of the wave's strongest multiple-witness cases. In California, officers of the Los Angeles Police Department reported chasing a light across the night sky, recorded in the archive as the LAPD officers UFO chase. In Missouri, the James G. Richards encounter at Columbia adds a close-range sighting to the same season.

The 4 November 1973 National Enquirer page carried two UFO stories side by side: the Deep South police accounts, and a second report, "Flying Saucer Ran Our Car Off the Road in 100-mph Chase," in which two military policemen near Hunter Army Airfield in Georgia described an object that dived at their vehicle. The tabloid framing is part of the record too: in 1973 the supermarket press, not the science pages, was where a serving officer's UFO report was most likely to appear.