Will A New Year Bring New Visitors?

By Lori Goat

The recent sighting of an Unidentified Flying Object over a lake in Oklahoma City has put UFOs back on the public radar again. Pottawatomie County has had its share of strange lights in the sky.

On New Year’s Eve 2006 at 7:45 p.m., a retired Air Force operator and former AWACS crew member reported witnessing a bright light maneuvering unlike any known aircraft 2,000 feet above Tecumseh for about 40 seconds.

Did aliens from another planet drop in to Tecumseh skies to help ring in a New Year?

There are several other county connections to UFOs. Eyewitness reports of these peculiar lights in the sky are kept in the database of The National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC).

The center, founded in 1974 by a famous UFO investigator Robert J. Gribble, keeps tabs on nationwide UFO sightings. Law enforcement agencies, flight service stations, military facilities, 911 emergency dispatch centers, and organizations such the National Weather Service and NASA direct calls they receive about possible UFO’s to the Center.

According to NUFORC’s files, there have been 404 unexplained sightings of UFOs in Oklahoma since 1947, six of them in Shawnee and Tecumseh.

The most recent was on January 7, 2007, at 10:30 p.m., when a bright object with red lights flashed erratically across the Shawnee night for about a minute and a half.

One of the most thoroughly documented sightings of UFOs in the county happened on May 10, 1998.

The Oklahoma Highway Patrol (OHP) reported that patrolmen in three police cars cruising the Shawnee area saw diamond-shaped formations in the sky for 45 minutes that changed colors from red to white. Highway Patrol headquarters received so many calls on the lights that its teletype was jammed.

OHP’s official report stated the sightings came from Purcell north through Norman to Chandler and back through Meeker and Shawnee. It also stated, “Oklahoma Highway Patrol units 26, 30, and 40 have also made visual sightings. Tinker Air Force Base (TAFB) has had from 7 to 12 of them on radar, at this time, and they advise that they are flying at approximately 22,000 feet.”

Although the sighting didn’t happen in Pottawatomie County, an August 1965 UFO event in Oklahoma captured nationwide headlines.

The OHP reported that TAFB had tracked four UFOs simultaneously and that they had descended very rapidly, from 22,000 feet to 4,000 feet in seconds. Project Blue Book (one of a series of UFO studies conducted by the Air Force from 1952 to 1969) determined TAFB had mistaken Jupiter or the stars Rigel or Betelgeuse for UFOs.

Robert Riser, director of the Oklahoma Science and Art Foundation Planetarium publicly rebuked Blue Book’s findings.

“This is as far from the truth as you can get. These stars and planets are on the opposite side of the earth from Oklahoma City at this time of year. The Air Force must have had its star finding chart upside down during August,” he said.

There is no doubt that unidentified flying objects exist and have been reported throughout history. Flying “saucers” have been depicted in ancient cave drawings.

Are these objects from outer space or from an alien source? No one has a proven, definitive answer, but Gordon Cooper, the late astronaut from the county, had an “unshakable” belief of the validity of UFOs and extraterrestrials.

Cooper was the pilot of the Mercury “Faith 7” spacecraft and the Gemini 5 mission. Yet, it wasn’t in space that he had his brush with aliens. It was at a military base in Germany and at Edwards Air Force Base in California.

According to interviews with Cooper, while he was in Germany, unknown crafts were spotted over an air base. Thinking the objects could be Russian MIG-15s that regularly flew over the base, Sabre jets were scrambled to intercept.

Upon closer inspection, Cooper said the crafts were metallic silver and saucer-shaped, flying above 45,000 feet, the maximum ceiling for any known jet at that time.

While stationed at Edwards Air Force Base in 1957, Cooper had his second experience with a UFO. He was one of the test pilots in charge of the installation of a precision landing system. As his crew was filming the installation, they noticed a saucer fly overhead, hover, extend three legs as a landing gear, and land on a dry lakebed.

As Cooper’s camera crew got within 20 or 30 yards of the smooth, silver, about 30 foot in diameter saucer, it ascended and flew away.

According to Cooper, the film of the saucer was developed and sent to Washington. It was never mentioned again, and when Cooper inquired about it at a later date, he was told it couldn’t be found.

Cooper believed so strongly in UFOs, he addressed a United Nations panel discussion on UFOs and ETs before his death.

An excerpt from Cooper’s speech:

“I believe that these extraterrestrial vehicles and their crews are visiting this planet from other planets which obviously are a little more technically advanced than we are here on Earth. I feel that we need to have a top level, coordinated program to scientifically collect and analyze data from all over the earth concerning any type of encounter, and to determine how best to interface with these visitors in a friendly fashion.”

Cooper wasn’t the only astronaut who believed in UFOs and ETs. Dr. Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut, has publicly stated that “We all know UFOs are real. All we need to ask is, where do they come from?”

So look to the stars as this new year begins. Who knows what may come next?