LIMA, Ohio — Sometime in the mid-2000s, as he always did, Michael Krick looked up.
The craft he saw this time was a smooth capsule the size of a Volkswagen, “real bright white,” looking “like a pill you just swallow.” He’d just finished reading the meter behind the former Buckland Elementary School in Auglaize County when he spotted it, just 90 feet up and cruising so slowly it “should have fallen right out of the sky.” It had no wings and, of course, didn’t make a sound. Mr. Krick, trained by years of sightings while on the job for American Electric Power, tracked the pill as it crossed the road, descended below the treetops and then like lighting bolted away and vanished.
Had he really once disbelieved in unidentified flying objects? Since his first sighting at the age of 33, Mr. Krick has seen more than 100 of them — disks, spheres, cigars. The first time he saw the black triangle, it dropped so close to his Lima house’s rooftop that he could see the five evenly-spaced “walls” running down its massive underbelly as it silently passed over. That was the only time a UFO ever scared him.
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A few weeks ago, Mr. Krick grabbed his black album of UFO photographs and walked into New Creation Evangelical Lutheran Church in Elida. There was Bob Prater, still waiting for his first encounter; Terry Rohrbacher, clutching a blue book of photos she'd taken of a shape-shifting something above her house last October; and Rod McGuire, whose nephew, a former colonel at Dayton’s Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, had told of stories “that'll make your hairs stand up.”
The Lima Area UFO Research Associates, known as LAURA, meets on the third Wednesday of every month. Today, the usual freewheeling discussions of local sightings would be grounded in something a little sturdier: The Pentagon's release of its long-awaited UFO report on June 25, which investigated 144 unexplained sightings by military pilots between November 2004 and May 2021. It was prompted in part by a recent rash of high-profile UFO sightings involving U.S. Navy ships. The most consequential factor, though, was the public disclosure of what's become known as the "Nimitz encounter.”
“I think that's the best [sighting] right there, in recent history we've had," said Thomas Wertman, Ohio state director for the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), the world’s largest civilian UFO investigative agency. The 2004 sighting, that’s the “big one.”
The First Kind
David Fravor never wanted UFO prophethood. Up until those fateful five minutes on Nov. 14, 2004, he’d never tried to identify UFOs, and he’d certainly never identified with them. No, he identified with his father, a Toledo fireman who flew down three flights of stairs in a warehouse explosion and then used his remaining shoulder to drive his stick shift home; Tony Packo’s, whose pickles his wife Sherrie shipped out to his carrier while he was in the Navy; and the Detroit Lions, a dangerous loyalty in the den of New England Patriots that is his current home of New Hampshire.
Perhaps, in retrospect, he should have heeded the divinations of his mother-in-law Sue Nowaczyk, who religiously purchased the National Enquirer from the grocery store and then wouldn’t stop inquiring about whether he had seen a UFO the moment he became a pilot. Every time, he rolled his eyes. "No."
By 2004, he commanded a 300-member Navy squadron on the USS Nimitz with 3,600 flight hours under his wing. During a training exercise off the California coast, radar operators redirected him and three others to a spot with mysterious activity. Commander Fravor looked down and saw what could not be: a 10-foot wide, 40-foot long object making erratic lateral movements 50 feet above a larger, cross-shaped disturbance in the water. The craft had no windows, no wings and no exhaust. It was smooth, oblong and all-white — like a pill you just swallow.
As soon as Commander Fravor maneuvered his F/A-18F Super Hornet to within 3,000 feet of it, the object accelerated to “well above” hypersonic speed and instantly vanished, on a day so clear he had 50 miles of visibility.
Commander Fravor didn't go public with his story until 2017, when Luis Elizondo, a former Pentagon official, encouraged him to disclose it to the New York Times. He watched, stunned, as the physics-defying “Tic-Tac” instantly became the stuff of legend.
“That changed the UFO landscape,” he said. “It took the stigma away. People in Washington were taking it seriously.”
In light of this paradigm shift, he felt “a little let down” by the Pentagon’s “vanilla” report on UFOs (or unidentified aerial phenomena, to use the Pentagon’s preferred, non-stigmatized term). It said nothing for or against extraterrestrials, and couldn’t explain 143 of the 144 sightings investigated. It’s a good “step one” for the government, but what’s needed now is funded research, better data collection, and transparency on historical mysteries— from what really crashed in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947 to the unresolved 701 cases of Project Blue Book, the Air Force’s retired investigation of UFO reports.
Bruce Maccabee, a leading ufologist and former Navy optical physicist living in Lima, is of two minds. On the one hand, the report is historic because it moves the public conversation from phase one ufology, “establishing there’s a real phenomenon,” to phase 2, “what does it mean?”
On the other hand, the report is historically amnesiac. Everything it noted about UFOs — that they’re probably “physical objects” given their detection by “radar, infrared [and] electro-optical” sensors, that they can “remain stationary in winds aloft, move against the wind, maneuver abruptly, or move at considerable speed, without discernable means of propulsion” — has been known to 80-year-old ufologists like Mr. Maccabee since they began their studies in the 1960s.
The Second Kind
On March 28, 1966, thousands of calls flooded the switchboards at police agencies, The Blade, and the Toledo Express Airport. They all reported the same thing: A "red glowing light" about 1,800 feet above Point Place. Al Horstman, general manager of the Toledo Helicopter Service, maneuvered a helicopter to within 800 feet of the light and then gave chase as it rapidly climbed to 6,000 feet. He eventually had to quit when the object's ascent didn't.
Afterwards, Mr. Horstman theorized that it was a light bulb encased in a glass container attached to a balloon. In other words, “I think that somebody tried to play a hoax on the community."
The sighting came three days after J. Allen Hynek, an Ohio State University astronomer and Project Blue Book’s sole scientific consultant, infamously dismissed as “swamp gas” the glowing lights that had plagued the Ann Arbor area for two weeks. This declaration was followed by the even more infamous Condon Report, which denied the validity of UFOs and ended Project Blue Book in 1969.
Even as the cultural mainstream rapidly stigmatized UFOs as loony science-fiction, Mr. Hynek grew skeptical of his skepticism. In 1973 he founded the Center for UFO Studies to continue collecting and investigating reports. By 1980, CUFOS had established an office in Lima.
In 2005, CUFOS published Grassroots UFOs, a summary of 1,180 reports collected by Lima native John Timmerman from mall shoppers across the country. Mr. Timmerman, along with Diana Baughman and Tom Bowman, had co-founded the LAURA group a year before.
While these testimonies may not meet the evidential threshold “demanded for high scientific credibility,” Mr. Timmerman wrote in the book’s preface, “they have for me the lingering taste of truth that has kept me curious...as to the yet unknown source of it all.”
The Third Kind
The UFO sightings have never stopped. As of May, the National UFO Reporting Center has received 4,050 reports in Ohio alone dating back to June 1947. MUFON, meanwhile, has investigated 3,089 cases stateside since 2000, and 180 since June 2020.
About 80 percent of UFO sightings, Mr. Wertman said, have perfectly prosaic explanations: Mylar balloons, Chinese lanterns, Starlink satellites, even pyrotechnic-wearing skydivers. Several times has Mr. Wertman had to convince an adamant witness that the object which appeared at the same point in the sky several nights in a row and took a while to cross the horizon was, in fact, Venus.
Consider MUFON case no. 73328. On December 19, 2015, a witness in northwest Ohio’s McComb reported a “large silent triangular craft” with a pulsating red center crawling towards Bowling Green at an altitude of 500 feet. MUFON eventually determined that the object was “a man-made aircraft, probably military.” The field investigator accessed the usual arsenal of tools: Flight-tracking software, astronomical simulations, photo metadata. Case no. 73328, like most, was extra-ordinary and closed within 90 days.
The goal, ultimately, is to identify the 20 or so percent of cases that defy easy explanation — like the one time Mr. Wertman witnessed the fabled black triangle himself, back in 2000, football stadium-sized and razor-edged, silently flying opposite the wind less than 5000 feet above the turnpike south of Cleveland. But such sightings are rare.
“The best way to describe it, is that a lot of times we're getting lights in the sky,” said Mr. Wertman. “It's not like somebody is seeing craft landing in their backyard.”
The Fourth Kind
At night, Jan Maccabee likes to sit on the backyard deck of her house in Lima with her camera. When you live on a "secondary version of Skinwalker Ranch,” near a woods haunted by Predator-like and six-armed creatures, you should always be on standby.
One summer night last year, a bright light suddenly shone down from 1500 feet overhead, its source a dark triangular shape hovering above a nearby tree. A small luminescent entity floated down, its wings glowing green with a tinge of blue. Mrs. Maccabee’s eyes popped — the entity was only visible on her phone camera.
She watched, transfixed, as the fairy-alien hesitated at the edge of the patio’s stairs before, after some coaxing, scuttling onto and up her leg. The “fuzzy,” ticklish sensation, like “insect legs,” gave way to a “rush of loving peace” that she’d never felt before in her life. The fairy-alien then fluttered back to the tree, where it "blew up" to a height of 14 feet with a 12-foot wingspan. Then just as quickly the “magnificent” figure shrunk to a red dot, “zipped up” into the light and vanished.
Mr. Maccabee can’t explain what he and his wife saw. He’s always favored the extraterrestrial hypothesis for UFOs, because at least the idea of interstellar travel has a vague scientific plausibility — but he can’t say there wasn’t a fairy on the porch.
The line distinguishing UFOs from the paranormal, Mr. Wertman noted, has always been a foggy one: “If you saw mysterious glowing orbs inside a house, you'd think they're from the spirit world. But if you saw them outside, you'd think they're UFOs.”
Brian Graupner, who moved in with the Maccabees last month, doesn’t know what “they” are — extraterrestrial, interdimensional or even extratemporal — but he’s personally known them for decades, ever since three of the thousands visited his bedroom. He’s seen their crafts so regularly that he’s named them, and is from those chosen to receive their telepathic messages. The most important one: “Evil has to go before they can come down.” They’re guardians, guiding us, and they’re “not going to let us destroy this planet.”
The Human Kind
The first thing that Commander Fravor did, once he found out that National Enquirer had written about the Tic Tac sighting, was buy an issue (“The article was terrible”) and drop it off at his mother-in-law’s house.
“Here,” he told her. “I made the big time.”
He has, but between the reverence of UFO believers and the arrogance of “internet debunkers,” he’s “kind of over it,” except for one silver lining: “I think I'm famous enough to sign a [Packo’s] hot dog bun.”
Commander Fravor’s relationship with what he warily terms the “UFO community” is ambivalent. He’s convinced the UFO phenomenon is serious and demands explanation, but also wants nothing to do with crop circles and little green men (or little green fairies). Yet as Ms. Maccabee’s story shows, for many people paranormal and even spiritual encounters represent an essential dimension of the UFO experience. This ufological divide is an old one, and the re-mainstreaming of flying saucers will likely deepen it.
But perhaps Commander Fravor's cautious brand of belief is more current. A Pew Research Center survey in June found that 51 percent of Americans believe military-reported UFOs evidence extraterrestrial life and 76 percent of adults under 30 believe in ETs period. Yet the ufologists active today are mostly the few left from Mr. Maccabee’s generation, like Jacques Vallee. As observed by Rudi Lindner, a former astronomy professor at the University of Michigan, people now can “accept life elsewhere, can accept UFOs, but they can't accept really weird stories” of the sort common in 20th-century UFO lore.
LAURA, meanwhile, is struggling to attract members under the age of 50. Tom Bowman, its last living founder, passed away in 2020, and his specter hung heavy over the July 21 meeting. The members agreed to honor him with a silent auction in August as well as watch the 1951 classic The Day the Earth Stood Still, his favorite film.
“The older people, they're going to be gone, and then the club is going to be gone,” said Mr. Krick. “I've seen churches die out that way.”
Maybe the young today believe in yet care less about UFOs, Mr. Lindner speculated, because they live under light-polluted skies. Lima, “that's a part of Ohio where you have clear skies and an unobstructed horizon," so you have a hotbed of astronomy and ufology too.
He might be right. After two hours of spirited discussion, Mr. Prater dismissed LAURA’s meeting with the club’s first and only commandment: “Keep looking up.”
First Published August 1, 2021, 11:44 a.m.
