On the referenced date, shortly after midnight, a mother of 31 years named Anne, two children, and her mother were driving from the Pittsburgh airport to her home in East Liverpool, Ohio on Route 30 in West Virginia. They were a few miles outside of Chester, West Virginia. Anne was scheduled to have an operation the next day and her mother had flown in from Colorado to help care for Anne's family. The two children were a 9-year-old daughter and an 11-year-old brother of Anne's. Her mother was in the front passenger seat and the children in back. Anne was driving a 1965 Volkswagen equipped with a sunroof.
Suddenly, along the road where the woods cover the hills on both sides, the area around the car was lit up as bright as daylight. The car's engine stalled and stopped in the middle of the road. The headlights stayed on. Anne remembers looking up through the open sunroof, thinking an airplane must have exploded. Instead she saw a bright light source in the sky the color of sunlight. A round or oval shape seemed to be behind the light. They exited the car and stood in the middle of the road looking at the light. Within a minute the light quickly ascended into the sky. A long blue line formed, quickly shrank to a blue point of light like a star, and then disappeared. It reminded her of the way old television screens appeared when they were turned off.
She writes, "Thinking back on it, we didn't feel frightened or threatened in any way. We were more 'curious' than anything else." Anne's mother, on the other hand, may have been afraid because she refuses to this day to talk about the experience. Anne later observed that, "The most amazing thing of all was that there was a complete silence all around us. It was like being in a vacuum ... not even any insect or frog noises in a place that normally would be teeming with noise. There was no motor noise or engine noise...no humming sounds ... absolutely no sound."
They got back in the car, started it up and pulled to the side of the road for a few minutes to see what would happen. Nothing did. They continued the trip home without incident.
When they got home they found that Anne's husband was worried, feeling that they were late. None of those in the car felt that way. For them, they believed there was no missing time. Anne called the Pittsburgh airport and asked if a UFO had been sighted that night on radar. None had.
Much later, after her recovery from the operation, she related the event to her next door neighbor. He became very excited, telling her that exactly the same thing had happened to him while he was in his back yard one night. The object ascended very quickly and he saw the blue line form and then shrink to a blue dot before it disappeared. His experience happened after Anne's, but in the same year.
Anne had knowledge of another interesting event that occurred in Wisconsin that is beyond the scope of MORA's investigative resources.
