What happened
Before dawn on 17 April 1966, Portage County deputy Dale Spaur and auxiliary officer Wilbur 'Barney' Neff stopped to check an abandoned car on Route 224 near Ravenna, Ohio. Spaur said a brilliant object about fifty feet across rose from the woods behind them, lit the area and hovered overhead with a hum like an overloaded transformer, a beam shining down from beneath. Told by radio to follow it, they chased it east at up to 100 mph, calling out positions as other officers joined in, including East Palestine patrolman Wayne Huston. The pursuit ran some 80 miles into Pennsylvania. Low on fuel near Conway, they stopped beside local officer Frank Panzanella, who said he had been watching the same bright, half-football-shaped object, and all four watched it shoot straight up and vanish. The chase later inspired a scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the Air Force's answer, Venus, drew protests that reached Congress.
The original account
The probable cause of the sighting by Deputy Sheriff Spaur of Ravenna, Ohio was the passage of a satellite over northeastern Ohio. As the satellite approached the southeast portion of the sky, the satellite disappeared and Deputy Sheriff Dale F. Spaur focused his eyes on the planet Venus. ... It is believed that Deputy Sheriff Spaur was chasing the planet Venus.
Project Blue Book case file, Ravenna-Mantua, Ohio, April 1966 (U.S. Air Force record, public domain; transcribed from scan)
The official explanation
Project Blue Book concluded the officers first saw a satellite, possibly Echo, and then chased the planet Venus, which was rising in the southeast at magnitude minus 3.9, brighter than any star. It added that radar showed no airborne objects in the area during the pursuit. Skeptics note that a brilliant planet low on the horizon appears to pace a moving car and that excitement on the police radio could draw other officers into watching the same light.
The anomalous case
Several officers in different jurisdictions independently described a structured, maneuvering object, and the Conway officer said he watched it alongside Venus and the Moon before it climbed straight up and disappeared. Sheriff Ross Dustman told UPI he had seen Venus many times but never 50 feet above a road moving side to side. Spaur described the object lighting the ground and humming directly overhead, nothing like a planet. Blue Book chief Hector Quintanilla initially handled the case by phone; former congressman Robert Cook wrote to Congressman William Stanton calling the officers men of integrity and urging an on-the-spot investigation, a letter preserved in the Blue Book file. Hynek later reproduced part of Quintanilla's interview in The UFO Experience as an example of Blue Book's dismissive methods.
The strongest argument that this was something genuinely unknown or classified, with each claim attributed to the person who made it.
Documents
- Project Blue Book file: Ravenna-Mantua, Ohio, April 1966 official, archive.org
Sources
- Project Blue Book case file, Ravenna-Mantua, Ohio, 1966 U.S. Air Force via Internet Archive
- Project Blue Book: Ravenna, Mantua, Ohio - April 17, 1966 The Black Vault
- 1966 Portage County UFO chase by policemen Patrick Gross, UFOs at close sight
Witness reports elsewhere
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