Classic Mysteries April 2018

Classic Mysteries—Alternate Perceptions Magazine, April 2018

A Stinking Saucer Story?

by: Brent Raynes

At about 8:20 p.m., October 2, 1966, in Cincinnati, Ohio, a 49-year-old housewife was on the phone with a friend when she noticed a foul chemical odor. She immediately became dizzy and hit with nausea. Excusing herself she hung up and went upstairs to her bedroom. She had the “feeling of being watched.” Peering out her bedroom window she saw a brightly colored oval-shaped object with what appeared to be portholes, hovering in a wooded area close to the ground several hundred feet away. She woke up her husband, who had already gone to bed, and though initially skeptical he soon changed his mind. He claimed later that he saw a craft approximately 75 feet in diameter, with red, green and white lights rotating around it's rim. At first it was moving away from the house, but then hovered for an estimated 10 minutes some 100 feet in the air. The object then wobbled and changed position, at which point the wife realized it had come close to their married daughter's house about a mile away. “I was feeling quite sick when I called to alert (her),” she told noted Ohio ufologist Leonard H. Stringfield. “The odor seemed stronger and I was so dizzy I had to sit down.”

The daughter and her husband looked out their upstairs window and observed the object an estimated 200 yards away. Both agreed that it was large, had a metallic surface, and had a row of yellowish lights. The husband called the neighbor, a Naval Reserve officer, who rushed over with a pair of high-powered binoculars. The neighbor, no stranger to celestial navigation, was also puzzled by what he was seeing and with the binoculars could see a disc-shaped object with square windows that produced a yellow glow.

As they watched, the lights on the UFO got brighter. The object wobbled and began to slowly move horizontally. The dogs in the area around this time began barking. The husband and neighbor rushed outside at this point when a pet cat, with hair standing straight up, squaeled and leaped onto the screen door, getting badly hung up in the door's mesh. “I had to almost declaw the cat to free it,” the husband admitted. Soon the UFO took off to the south and was lost from sight. The husband and neighbor had left in an automobile to try and get a closer look.

While home alone, before the husband and neighbor left, the wife ventured outside too and saw the disc eject a “red ball” appearing light that made erratic maneuvers, eventually making a silent pass over the house, a mere 75-100 feet overhead. It could be seen, at that point, as oval-shaped, with a smooth underside that resembled aluminum foil. “I couldn't believe its actual size, but it was bigger than my cottage and yard combined,” she later recalled. Although she was initially quite frightened, as the object passed overhead she noted, “I suddenly felt no fear. It was the eeriest feeling I've ever had.” She had also noticed a very “disagreeble” smell that she compared to “bad garbage.”

Meanwhile, back at the mother and father's house where it all began, the mother called the Greater Cincinnati Airport and was told “something unidentified passed over Cincinnati.” She also called the police and was told that she was the 45th person to call in a report.

The strong chemical odor had come to fill every room of the house. The mother had a difficult time slipping off to sleep after the sighting. Suddenly the room was illuminated by a brilliant white light. She sat up in bed, too shocked to scream. There were no shadows. Every nock and cranny was lit up. Then the light went out and then before her was a globe of light, at the foot of her bed. It was about the same intensity. It looked to be the size of a 21-inch TV screen, yet inside of it were five strange beings with hairless heads and oval eyes “sunken like skulls' eyes.” “All the heads were the same,” she claimed. “Instead of noses there were slits, and they had no mouths – and there were no necks, bodies or arms.” Several times she received like a telepathic message in her head. “We have made contact.” At this point, she screamed, and her husband and younger daughter still living at home, found her in a hysterical condition.

The next day, the mother consulted a doctor who treated her for a nervous disorder. She began suffering nightmares and was then referred to a psychiatrist, and for two years she was under special medical care, which included shock treatment. (Source: Situation Red: The UFO Siege, by Leonard H. Stringfield, A Fawcett Crest Book, New York, 1977; Paperback. ISBN: 0-449-23654-4.