by William E. Jones and Irena Scott

Initial Report

Terri and Tim Brannan live about a mile south of the Fort Hill State Memorial in the far eastern portion of Ohio’s Highland County. On two mornings in late December 1995 or early January 1996 they had two UFO sightings. The exact dates are uncertain, but they are sure that both days were weekdays since they were getting their son ready for school on each occasion. Their home overlooks the Fort Hill State Memorial which is about 3/4 of a mile to the northeast. The memorial is a heavily wooded park land that encompasses a large hill. On the first morning Terri happened to be looking out a window and saw a bright white light coming from the east. The light appeared to her as the size of a quarter held at arms length. It stopped over the hill and then descended behind it. It was approximately 6:30 AM and just beginning to get light. The sighting lasted for about ten seconds. Nothing further was seen.

Two days later at about 7:00 AM both Terri and Tim both saw a light which looked like the previous one rise up from behind the hill, stop, then proceed eastward for a moment before it just disappeared. They have no idea if these sighting were connected to the experience which followed, but they wonder.

On Friday, February 2, 1996 Terri and her sister Sandy Rickett had driven up into Ross County north of Bainbridge to pick up Sandy’s new puppy, a golden retriever. It was dark, between 7:30 and 7:45 PM. Sandy was driving and Terri was holding Sandy’s young son in the front passenger seat. They were southbound on Benner Hill Road and had just gone around a curve in the road near where the road ends at Route 41. In the sky low and to the west was a large triangular shaped object with a red light on each of the three corners. On the right rear corner of the triangle was also a white ball which was very close to the red light. Sandy got out of the car to watch, holding the young child. The white light dropped with the sound of a dropping bomb often heard in World War II movies. Before the light got to the ground it went out and the sound stopped. Terri was yelling at Sandy to get into the car, which she did. She had been out of the car about a minute. They drove a short distance to the stop sign at Route 41.

At this point an eighteen wheel semi-truck was coming north on 41. It turned onto Benner Hill Road, slowed, and passed them. Terri was looking to the left past Sandy’s head when she saw two lights which looked like the headlights of a large older car. She saw no form behind the lights but reasonably assumed that it was a car. Sandy remembers Terri saying, "Here comes a car." They were also still watching the object through the windshield of the car. A second light was dropped from the same location on the triangle. It too went out before it hit the ground. The odd thing, both women point out, is that the car never got to them. It didn’t pass by them northward up Route 41 nor did it turn on Benner Hill road and go past them as the truck did. They have no idea what happened to the "car" in those few moments since their attention was back on the triangle.

At some point during their second brief stop, Terri had exited the car a second time to watch the triangle. Moments after the "car" disappeared, they noticed that the object seemed to turn toward them and the front red light separated into two distinct red lights and gave them the impression that the object split into two pieces. It also seemed to move toward them. Sandy yelled at Terri to get back into the car, which she did. Like before, she was outside the car for about a minute. They quickly turned left and sped on into Bainbridge, less than two miles to the south. The sighting lasted perhaps three minutes. Neither the baby or the puppy seemed to react to what had happened.

As they got near Bainbridge, Sandy stopped the car after they crossed the railroad tracks and changed places with Terri; Terri was now driving. They stopped for gas at Hirn’s Corner on the corner of Routes 41 and 50 in Bainbridge. Hirn’s Corner is a Marathon gas station that also sells food, bait, tackle, and hunting supplies. The women told the men there about their experience after gassing up and before heading on home. They said they were scared and excited. This part of the story was confirmed by both Charles Hirn and Dave Roberts when we stopped there during our investigation. Both remembered that two women and a child stopped to get gas and told the story related above.

Terri and Sandy left the gas station and drove south out of Ross County and into Pike County toward Sandy’s home in Highland County west of Sinking Springs. The trip normally takes twenty to twenty-five minutes. They drove south on Route 41 and then west on 124. While on 124, still approximately two miles from Sandy’s home, they saw two bright lights to the southwest. The lights were white, appeared to be the size of a dime held at arms length, and orbited around one another in a counter clockwise direction. Sandy described the lights as being "like headlights in the sky." They didn’t stop and soon lost track of them.

Terri and Sandy drove to Hizer Road and turned south about a mile and then turned right onto Sinking Springs Road heading west north west towards the driveway of Sandy’s home which is just up the road. As they got to the driveway and began to turn right, Sandy briefly saw an object up in the sky to the west that she finds hard to describe. Because Terri was now driving, she didn’t see this object. Sandy has the impression that her first view of the object was its bottom. It was oval in shape with two "somethings" that she calls "nuggets" near both ends of the object. The shapes were like poorly drawn multi-pointed stars. At the center of the oval was a protrusion that appeared to point outward in a pyramid effect, like the effect one gets if he or she hangs a sheet on a clothes line and then pushes outward at the sheet’s center. The object was blue-gray in color. Her next quick view of the object appeared to be toward its side; given that this all happened in just a few seconds, it must have turned or changed shape.

The object, still blue-gray, was bowl shaped with a pointed protrusion at the center of the bowl’s bottom. White lights were seen all along the rounded portion of the bowl. There were four large bright blue diamond shaped "windows" on the side, one at each end and two in the center, one directly on the top of the other and touching. The blue appeared fluorescent in color and glowed. She described the color as "warm." Sandy yelled out, "We’re being invaded," and then lost sight of this object.

They drove up a long curving mud driveway to Sandy’s house and got out of the car, quite shaken. However, their experience was not yet over. As they got out of their car they looked up. The sky was full of "many" small red lights everywhere they looked. The lights were the size of the red lights seen on airplanes at a distance. However, there were too many lights for them to have been on airplanes and they didn’t move as airplanes do. They bounced around. The lights flashed and flickered. The women didn’t count them, saying there were too many. The red lights would change to balls of white light, which would then go out. These lights were about the size of a quarter held at arms length. The women weren’t sure if the red lights changed into the white lights or if the red lights went out just before the white lights appeared below them. The lights all didn’t change at the same time; the change appeared to be random all over the sky. It was quite a spectacle. They ran into the house where their husbands were playing guitars and talking. Excitedly, they told them to get outside. It was bitter cold that night and a brisk wind was blowing. The men could only stay outside for a few minutes, not having put their coats on. They both saw the same display. Before they were forced inside by the cold, all four, and a friend, saw yet another display to the east. A white light about the same size as the others came on up in the sky at about a 45 degree angle and then went out. A second light appeared a few degrees to the south and then went out. Then a third came on a few degrees further south and it too went out. All of this occurred in just a few seconds. Because of the cold, the experience was over for these people as they went inside although the red and white lights were still in view. When they looked outside later everything appeared to be back to normal. The light show was over.

But was the experience over? On Monday, February 5th at 1:30 AM Sandy looked out of her kitchen window to the west. There in the sky only a few degrees above the distant tree line was a line of large red balls. This line extended across about 40 degrees of sky. There were many of these lights; Sandy didn’t count them. Suddenly three white balls of light appeared just below this line all touching each other in the form of a triangle. This triangle then moved toward the house. As it went over and out of sight from the window, Sandy heard a distinct humming sound.

Sandy wonders if these experiences are really over. Normally she has a good memory, but she said that it seems as if she is forgetting what has happened more and more as time passes. She is also scared to be alone at night. All of this is not normal for her.

As our first day’s investigation on February 10 drew to a close, we stopped at the gasoline station and general store in Bainbridge known as Hirn’s Corner. As noted above, Sandy and Terri had stopped there to get gas after their initial February 2 sighting. Two workers at the store confirmed that "two women and a child" had stopped in to get gas that night and told about seeing the strange object north of town, thus confirming a small part of the story. As we talked to these two people we learned that other sightings of strange aerial lights and objects had occurred in and around Bainbridge over at least the past two years. A local teacher had stopped by the station one night and reported seeing something triangular shaped in the sky that dropped lights, reminiscent of Terri and Sandy’s initial sighting. This object was reported to have had a neon colored tube-like light running from its forward point to the rear. The workers did not know the name of the teacher, so no follow up is possible.

The store’s owner, Dave Roberts, dropped by as we were talking to his employees and he told us of a sighting that he had about two years previously. Mr. Robert’s lives across the road from the store on top of a hill. He was looking to the south out of his living room window one night and saw three white lights in the sky moving slowly westward. These lights formed a triangle. When the lights got nearer to him the three lights changed into approximately twenty. It moved out of his vision in a couple of minutes, and he did not go outside to see if he could see where it went to. A few days later he was talking to his ex-wife who lives nearby. She had apparently seen the same lights when she was returning from work. Her description of the lights was the same as his, Mr. Roberts said.

Follow Up

Terri later told Sandy that she had seen both objects from her place.

©1996 Mid-Ohio Research Associates, Inc.