by Paul Burrell
Co-investigated by Delbert Anderson
On the nights of October 24 and November 4, 1995, multiple small, flashing red lights were witnessed "dancing" for nearly five hours above a corn field five and a half miles south of the rural southeastern Ohio town of 
Logan
by up to nine people, including three deputy sheriffs. I, Paul Burrell of MORA, and Delbert Anderson of the Roundtown UFO Society, met with the two main witnesses in this case on November 5. These two witnesses live across Route 93 from the corn field. One is a male, one is a female. Both wish to remain anonymous; therefore, I will call the male witness "Mark" and the female "Cindy." Delbert and I interviewed the witnesses separately and found that their stories definitely match.
I became aware of this case when I saw a report October 25 on WBNS-TV, Channel 10 in Columbus. Marcy Fleisher was the reporter. The two main witnesses were interviewed on camera and the location was shown, but there were no photos or videos taken of the lights during that first sighting. Her report stated that the FAA, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, and the Ohio National Guard were contacted and all said there were no aircraft in the area at that time. The radio log of the Sheriff Department was shown on TV and it mentions Mark's report and other radio traffic regarding the UFOs. The Sheriff Department had no comment other than that they had received several calls about UFOs the night before. I contacted Marcy Fleisher and she put me in touch with the two main witnesses.
I interviewed Mark on October 26 when he contacted me after receiving my number from Marcy Fleisher. He began by describing how he had gone out to walk his dog at 7:45 p.m. on Tuesday, October 24. It was a cloudless night, and he noticed 10 to 20 
red lights
about the size of stars in the corn field across the two-lane highway (Route 93) from their house. The lights were viewed from 15 degrees up to 30 degrees off the horizon. They were hovering and moving erratically, brightening and dimming, sometimes with a short "white funnel, or a fan, below." He said they made no noise and moved "left to right, or horizontal; they would raise, they would lower." Sometimes they would execute maneuvers of "a type . . . no plane could possibly do." When asked how far away the lights were, he said it was difficult to tell because they were widespread, but he guessed that some were as close as 100 to 200 yards on a horizontal plane and that they flew no more than one-quarter to one-half mile up. None of the lights touched the ground. He said, "They were certainly close enough that if they had been something that we would understand, I'd have been able to hear them." Shortly after noticing the lights, he alerted his girlfriend, Cindy, and her teenage daughter to what was going on outside.
Everyone observed the lights blinking on and off, and Mark said, "There were times we would be watching one and have another one appear next to it." An apparent attempt at interaction by one of the lights occurred when it left the group and briefly followed a southbound car along the 
road
. The speed limit on this road is 55 m.p.h. Mark recalled: "There was a car coming in the distance from town direction and I'd been watching one over the corn field, and it actually went to the left and hovered above this car and then followed it down the road above it. It stopped short of the house by 100 or 150 yards and hovered and let the car pass." It was at this point, around 8:20 p.m., that Mark decided to call the sheriff. He said they treated his call seriously and a cruiser with two deputies arrived about 20 minutes later.
When the deputies arrived, they said they didn't know what the lights were, either. While they stood in the driveway with the witnesses watching the lights, one light left the group, flew silently across the road, and went behind the house. The deputies also were witnesses to a wheezing sound which came from the corn field. One deputy thought it was one of the many deer that occupy the area, but Mark, who is an avid deer hunter, disagreed. He said, "I've heard hundreds upon hundreds of deer snort and grunt, and this was not a deer making this noise." The deputies stayed for about 15 minutes, then filed their report and left.
After the deputies left, Mark went into the house and called his father to tell him what was going on. At about 9:00, while he was still on the phone, he heard a loud noise outside. He ran outside and saw a white "LifeFlight-like," low-flying helicopter coming from the south. It made one pass over the house and left. About five minutes later, two small propeller planes arrived in the area flying slowly and at low altitude. They made a grid-like pattern, as if they were surveying the area below. This continued until past midnight. The lights remained in the field the entire time. At one point, to the witnesses' amazement, a light again left the group in the field; this time it went up to one of the planes and followed it for a short period.
Around 10 p.m., a second police cruiser arrived and the deputy viewed the lights and the planes for a short time, and told the witnesses he would check at the station and see if there were any military planes in the area. He had been in another county and had heard about the sighting on the police radio and wanted to see the enigma for himself. The lights remained in the area, blinking on and off, appearing and disappearing in different numbers, and the planes continued their grid-like search pattern. Both witnesses had to get up early for work the next day and went to bed shortly after midnight.
In my interview with Cindy, she said at about 7:45 p.m. on October 24th, Mark came into the house and wanted her to see what he was seeing in the sky. She and her daughter went out onto the porch and saw 
red lights
"flashing and blinking in various areas of the sky." Sometimes there were only two or three, but at times she counted at least ten at once. She said, "They would move up and down, they would go back and forth."
She also witnessed one of the lights leave the group in the field and follow a car south on Route 93. The light followed the car for a short distance and around a bend in the road just past the witnesses' home, and then shot up the side of a hill next to the road and just beyond their yard. This spooked a group of deer down off of the hill. The deer would normally cross over the road into the corn field, but this time went another direction instead.
At this point, about 8:20 p.m., Mark decided to call the Hocking County Sheriff Department. Both witnesses watched the lights for another 15 to 20 minutes until a cruiser arrived with two deputies in it. The deputies observed the lights also and didn't know what they were. While the deputies were with the witnesses in the front yard, they heard a wheezing sound coming from the north end of the cornfield. Cindy described the sound as being like "a cow that had a really bad cold" or "a person that had a really bad case of asthma and they're trying to catch their breath." One deputy thought it was a deer, but she said she had heard deer before and it didn't sound like a deer to her. The sound went on for about five minutes. The deputies stayed for about 15 minutes. A short time later, two family friends came over to view the lights with them. When Cindy asked her friends what they thought the lights were, they said they had no idea.
Cindy said the lights would create a half-moon formation over the field at times. She said they never touched the ground and never came low enough to tell what they really were. She described them as ball-like and said they made no sound. At times she would stare into an area where there were no stars and then all of a sudden a red light would appear.
When I asked Cindy if anyone had gone out into the field while the lights were there, she said no, they were afraid to. I personally went out into the 
corn field
and looked for anything out of the ordinary, but found nothing.
When asked if she had had any other sightings, Cindy said that in 1976 she and her aunt observed a UFO for 30 minutes not far from her aunt's house in Logan. The craft was oval-shaped, hovering low to the ground, and it made no sound. It had red, white and blue lights that rotated counterclockwise around the edge. While they were viewing it, the craft disappeared.
Cindy also gave an account of some family friends who were hunting in the area when one of them saw a light he could not explain. It terrified him so much he ran back to the truck and locked himself in. When the other hunters arrived, they couldn't get him to unlock the doors and they had to pry one of the windows down.
In my conversation with Delbert Anderson following our independent interviews with the witnesses, it was revealed that, shortly after the initial sighting on October 24, Mark alone observed an anomalous object with a row of 
square, red sequentially blinking lights.
. It passed silently over the area once and left. I wasn't able to get any specifics from Mark regarding the object's shape and speed, but it appears the object was of some size and at the same altitude as the small red lights. I have included Mark's sketch of the row of square lights.
On November 4, the lights returned. The witnesses were watching Saturday Night Live with the same family friends who had been there the night of October 24, when someone noticed the lights outside. When Delbert and I interviewed them the next day, we were pleasantly surprised to find out that Mark and Cindy had taken a three-minute video of the lights with a camera they had borrowed after their previous sighting. The lights were not as numerous nor as active as they had been during the previous sighting, and were viewed for only 30 minutes. The video includes five flashing red lights, varying in intensity and rate of strobing. One interesting part of the video includes a formation of three dimmer lights which, in slow-motion video, blink on and off at different rates and then blink on and off in unison. This sighting lasted from 11:30 p.m. to 12 midnight, and was witnessed by two family friends as well. The video will be analyzed by MUFON.
While driving to bowling in Mt. Sterling, Ohio at 9:30, the head custodian at the school where I work saw two unusually bright, stationary white lights about one-quarter of a mile high and 20-30 yards apart. He was unsure of the distance between him and the objects, but he was about two miles north of Mt. Sterling at the time, traveling south on Route 62. He believes the lights were near the town of Mt. Sterling on I-71 South. He was so intrigued, he slowed his car and viewed the objects for two to three minutes before he had to turn off of Route 62. He continued to observe the objects in his rear-view mirror for a short time. He reports that he had never seen anything that bright in the sky before.
This sighting was 45 miles northwest of the Logan sighting. I know this person well, and he is not the type who would make up a story. He said he did hear the report about the Logan sighting the next day.
In regard to the wheezing sounds heard by the witnesses, Whitley Strieber, in his new book, Breakthrough, describes hearing a similar sound during an encounter with the visitors. I emailed Mr. Strieber about this sighting, and he responded: "I have heard this, too! It's close to the sound of a deer, but not the same. I could see the beings doing it--short, dark figures. Sneezy is real???"
In the weeks following these two sightings, I found a posting on the FocusUFO Internet newsgroup:
Subject: Whoosh in the night - 10/24/95 near WPAFB [Wright-Patterson AFB].
Time: approx. 8 PM.
Description: Unusual sounding aircraft takeoff out of WPAFB escorted by 2 F-16s (planeforms allegedly seen in the night sky). Flight path of the trio after takeoff was east. The incident allegedly generated 80 police reports as reported on local TV station. Sound was of rushing air through a tube. Three minutes behind the party a large helicopter was heard to pass over." I don't know if this is related to the Logan sighting, but both occurred at roughly the same time. It is interesting to note that Curtis Peebles describes on page 259 of his book, Dark Eagles: A History of Top Secret U.S. Aircraft Programs, a similar account which attributes the sound to the Aurora aircraft. Based on information I have received from my UFO newsgroups, it seems light-type UFO activity was high nationwide during this time.
I found this report from J.S. Kinsley on the Internet in late November:
On Monday 20 November 1995, at approximately [8:30 to 8:45 p.m.], there was a strange bright red light moving slowly from the northeast to the southwest here in Canton, Ohio. I noticed it while on my way home from work. I spotted it when I got to the top of the hill on a road that was just reopened that day. It was in the southeast sky about 35-40 degrees off the horizon. The object was a very bright red light. There was no blinking. It was moving very slowly to the southwest.
In closing, I believe this case is significant. The lights' apparent attempts to interact with both a car and an airplane; the strange wheezing heard; an anomalous object; the number of credible witnesses, including police officers; and other odd events in Ohio on that same day make this case intriguing from several different investigative standpoints.