NUFORC Sighting 37552

Occurred: 1978-07-01 21:30 Local - Approximate
Reported: 2004-06-13 08:30 Pacific
Duration: 5 minutes
No of observers: 2

Location: Toledo (near), OH, USA

Shape: Light
Characteristics: Aircraft nearby

I was listening to Peter's interview with George Noory on June 4th. I thought I would mention this. My companion at the time also saw this as you'll read below, but he has refrained from speaking about it. But this is my story.

I was flying right seat in a Cessna 172 from Flint "Bishop" MI going to Toledo "Express" Ohio. I was flying with another broadcast engineer as we were returning from work in Lapeer, MI.

Note the map attached to an E-mail I'm going to send. Our flight path is in blue heading south. The dots on Monroe County show where we deviated from our path, almost landing at Lambertville "Suburban" MI. The red is the path of the objects.

It was dusk and we heading South around Milan, MI, just talking about a directional antenna that we were working on. I turned to the left to speak to my companion, "Tom", and saw (5) white lights in the distance. I made mention to Tom, and he saw them too, about 315 degrees from our direction of travel (South).

We watched them for about 30 seconds, and could tell that their travel was to the west. We called the control tower for Toledo Express and asked if he had travel ((traffic??)) in the area. Toledo said no. Another 30 seconds later we called again, and Toledo responded by saying, "sir, we have no traffic and nothing on radar".

By this time they were about 340 degrees and growing larger, which to me indicated that were closing on the object.

Just then another pilot who was in Fulton County (Ohio) came on the radio and said, "I see those lights too. I'm heading toward Metcalf (SE of Toledo), and they are 10-O'Clock to me." Toledo Express then came back on the air and said, "Gentlemen, we don't have any traffic in the area." Tom and looked at each other, and he said, "let's chase it." I suggested that it would not be wise not knowing what it was, or if it was military, and deviated from our flight plan to waste some time and put some distance between each other. See the dots.

After we landed we talked about it, but felt that any pursuit of the story could lead to jeopardy of our pilots license.

The five lights were in a formation, and it was a clear night and at it's closest I could see clouds between the objects which appeared to be about 2,000 higher than we were. We were around 5,000 feet. At our closest they were probably between 4 to 6 miles off our right wing. The formation was not in any pattern that would resemble lights on an aircraft.



NUFORC Note:

Date is approximate, although the pilot should be able to reconstruct the exact time and date from his flight logs. The witness elects to remain totally anonymous, so we are unable to communicate with him. We would like to invite the party who submitted the report to confirm the date with the pilot, and report back to us. PD


Posted 2004-06-18

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